Rachel Harrington – Hush The Wild Horses
Skinny Dennis Records – 6 September 2019
Hush the Wild Horses is Rachel Harrington‘s first new album in eight years, during which time she took to raising a family, working with rescued horses, looking after her health and caring for her dying grandmother. The Oregon singer-songwriter is back in the saddle with a real thoroughbred with songs both informed by her own life and observations of others.
During that time she also found new love, with a former army officer, something which informs the opening rootsy title track where she sings “You laid down in my bed and you hushed the wild horses, in my head” accompanied by the Grand Ole Opry’s in-house fiddler Eamon McLoughlin. Again featuring Laura Veirs on backing vocals and pedal steel legend Lloyd Maines, the romance gets a second nod in the honky-tonk waltzing Drinking About You where the now sober again Harrington, makes a wry reference to having fallen off the wagon when she resumed touring in 2008.
The other songs, however, are of a far less rosy hue. Featuring a handclap chain-gang rhythm, Danny Barnes’s banjo and gospel-blues holler vocals, Child of God is, much like Tori Amos’s Me and a Gun, a raw confessional of being the victim of sexual abuse (“His hand up my skirt/Could not catch my breath/My knees began to shake/Scared me half to death”) when she was just eight. No less painful, the twangily-sung Save Yourself was written for her meth-addicted homeless baby brother (“Living on the street, without a name/No bad guys to beat, no one to blame/Just an empty plate and burning spoon/As folks walk by in their name-brand shoes”), still, to her, “a messy-haired messed up kid” as, in the devastating final verse she sings “I can’t save you now/I tried everything that I know how/So baby maybe you’ll save yourself/Instead of always trying to save somebody else/Maybe you’ll save yourself someday”.
Tragedy runs in the family. Simply strummed on acoustic guitar, The Barn was written for her mother, the now-demolished building where “she and her high school sweetheart took their shirts off in the dark/She wanted more but he kissed her and said he’d never go that far”, and how he enlisted on the day he turned 18 and went off to serve in Vietnam never to return, recalling her mum’s advice 40 years on that “You should love with all your heart, baby …’Cause no matter what, someday a memory is all that you’ll have left”.
That war is also at the heart of the fingerpicked Mekong Delta, another poignant song about her uncle, a Vietnam vet who came home but left his heart behind “somewhere out there with the dog tags and whiskey/Somewhere out there with the boys and the blood” and eventually committed suicide, sung in both his and his mother’s voice.
There’s yet another war-themed number in Drop Zone, a loping rhythm dose of Elvis-like rockabilly that takes its public domain lyrics from the chanted cadences hollered out by servicemen on training marches.
Another addiction-themed number, the fingerpicked, yearningly sung standout I Meant To Go To Memphis was inspired by a conversation in a bar in which he told her “I meant to go to Memphis, but first I found cocaine”, which now serve as the song’s opening line and which, while not autobiographical clearly also relate to her own struggle with alcohol as she sings “I meant to find myself/But who I was passed on”.
A relatively more upbeat moment, even if it is basically about hanging around waiting to die, co-written with her son, Susanna is about Guy Clark’s wife who died a few short years before he did, as, quiveringly sung in his voice and referencing LA Freeway, the lyrics of love and loss come with the moving lines “I just wish you could be here right beside me/It gets lonesome being out on the road…Susanna don’t you cry babe/It won’t be long til I’m home”.
The album ends as it began on an equine note with the slow waltz If Wishes Were Horses, a song, again inspired by her new love, about shaking off the past and finding new life (“If mysterious forces headed my way from you/I would burst like lightning/I would break like the day”).
There is, however, one other song, the fiddle-backed Get Out While You Can, that waltzingly touches on both addiction and new starts as “headed for the highway/With a soldier by my side… we’re goin down to Graceland/Gonna get me one last ride” on which she bids “goodbye to the ball and chain/Goodbye to the silo grain…Goodbye to the radio…goodbye to the rodeo queen/Goodbye to the music scene/Goodbye to the rock and roll bands/With the sequins and the spurs/Goodbye to the honkytonks”. It sounds like a farewell letter, as she sings “The best songs made have all been played/Ain’t nothing left to say”. This album is clear evidence that neither is the case.
https://www.rachelharrington.net/