Letitia VanSant – Gut It To The Studs
Self Released – 27 August 2018
A former social and environmental advocate, it’s not surprising that themes and images of change figure heavily in the songs of Baltimore-based folk singer Letitia VanSant. Indeed, Gut It To The Studs starts off considering the big one, the gospel-influenced gently loping Where I’m Bound opening with a line about Letitia VanSant’s mother dying and, built around double bass, fiddle and hand percussion, proceeding to contemplate her advice about the path ahead, making changes in your life and putting faith in “the compass in your heart.”
She turns to construction imagery for the slow swaying title track, a number about breaking things down to rebuild with the things that really matter that references both boat refugees and novelist and environmental activist Wendell Berry. A simple acoustic strum carries Gonna Sit By My Fire, a tonal complement to her soft, breathy vocals as she sings about offering comfort in times of darkness even when she cannot “walk that lonesome valley for you” rather than passing by on the other side of the road.
The theme of renewal and waking from a fog resurfaces on the moodily atmospheric Taking Back The Reigns with its washes of electric guitar and VanSant’s wordless backing vocals, acknowledging there is a fear in every man’s soul but by naming the beast we can take control of it.
Again featuring Alex Lacquement on upright bass and with harmonies from Laura Wortman, Sweetbay Magnolia is a soft, wistful waltz, VanSant’s soothing, lullabying voice the aural equivalent of the flower’s redolence. It’s not the only number to draw on nature imagery to talk of becoming self-aware and spiritual awakening. Featuring subtle piano, Bluebird serves as an environmentalist message about (“One day I woke and it was gone”), a cautionary note echoed on Wild Heart Roam with Charlie Rose on bluesy resonator guitar, as, to a slow, ominous rhythm, she reminds “You can’t shut a door once it’s open.” Likewise, the simply strummed, gospel-shaded The Field, on which her warble lies somewhere between Nanci Griffith and Victoria Williams, uses a farming metaphor of tilling the soil to a similar, more personal (“My soul is a field where love may grow”) purpose of self-improvement that concludes on a theme of inclusion with “Let me take down the fences that keep others out/Let them come and take what they need.”
There’s one cover here, a version of Buffalo Springfield’s iconic 60s protest number For What It’s Worth, taken at a slower pace and stripped of its guitar riff, its lyrics as resonant with Trump’s America as they were with Nixon’s. The slow shuffle Dandelion also nods to a 60s folk-rock classic with the opening line reference to Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, the lyrics picking up where it left off to talk of faceless identical suburbs and a life that exists only to feed the “asphalt desert of strip mall stores”, but, again using nature as an uplifting, inspirational image of renewal, the “solitary rebel dandelion pushing through the streets” to remind us of our own roots and to “liberate this land.”
It ends on a less positive note with Sundown Town on which, accompanied just by acoustic guitar, she sings of the way so many areas of America – and other countries – have become no go areas for those whose faces don’t fit, but uses the better safe than “sorry with a pistol at your back” response to talk of the social and political apathy that won’t seek to change things but rather hide behind maximum security fences and “watch others fight for freedom from the safety of our cells.”
VanSant may no longer work in social and environmental advocacy, but as this terrific album ably proves, the day job hasn’t changed, it’s just altered its channels.
https://www.letitiavansant.com/