On her fifth and best full-length album, the Ohio singer-songwriter follows the rangy contours of her electric guitar playing with heartbreak stories and searching questions.
Ambition sharpens Lydia Loveless’s songwriting. When she boasts, “I am on the verge of brilliance,” on “Don’t Bother Mountain,” she follows it with, “or on the verge of death.” On her fifth and best full-length album, Daughter, the Ohio singer-songwriter masters a music that follows the contours of her electric guitar playing: rangy and gnarled. It’s tempting to think of Jason Isbell and Patty Loveless (no relation) as confreres, but the scrappy rock’n’roll of her earlier albums and the absence of self-pity moves her closer to Scarecrow-era John Mellencamp or mid-period Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Falling out of love with jerks, hitting the bottle hoping it doesn’t hit back, Loveless positions herself not as a survivor but a fighter. She expects tough times and no breaks, not even from herself.
Loveless’s instrumental commitment makes the difference on Daughter, urging the material onward with her piano and synth. She also plays bass on a few tracks, filling in for Ben Lamb, whom she divorced around the time she released 2016’s Real. She and guitarist Todd May merge into the kind of unit whose filigrees tickle and surprise. The jangle of “Love Is Not Enough” complements a lyric about accepting romantic devastation; she pulls one way and the cheerful arrangement goes another. Even better is “Wringer,” an exercise in finding delightful rhymes for the title that seems to take a cue from Loveless and May’s call-and-response riffing. Switching to bass, May and drummer George Hondroulis work up a lissome groove for “Never,” home of the bumper sticker manifesto, “I’m not a liberated woman/Just a country bumpkin dilettante.” Had a country singer tackled “Never,” the wink would be seen from here to Appalachia. Loveless, though, rarely kids.
Blessed with a high, seared, unpretty voice that suggests hard living, Loveless inhabits these characters free of the affect that, say, Lucinda Williams leans on for her truth. If Daughter is her best album, then the title track is her best song. With Hondroulis punching each verse, Loveless asks her lover, “If I gave you a daughter, would you open up?” And: “Why can’t I show you another side of me?” They’re trenchant questions, not because she doesn’t know the answer, but because she knows too well and prefers interrogation to admissions.
Connecting self-worth to the health of a relationship, and to success as a mother, is a phenomenon no less grim than when Loretta Lynn described an exhausted Kansas housewife in “One’s on the Way” almost 50 years ago. Perhaps grimmer—songwriting, like therapy, has its limits. Loveless understands. With a sober approach to its less-than-sober characters, Daughter takes life one song at a time. She can’t do more but prepare to accept less.
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