Lilly Hiatt – Walking Proof
New West – 27 March 2020
For her fourth album, produced by former Cage The Elephant guitarist Lincoln Parish, the follow-up to the autobiographically raw Trinity Lane which references the challenges of sobriety, the collapse of her relationship and her mother’s suicide, this finds her feet firmly on the ground and also marks the first time her father, John, has appeared together on one her songs, providing harmonies, albeit not obviously so.
The track in question is Some Kind of Drug, a guitar chug inspired by an occasion when she and her sister volunteered to help Nashville’s homeless, handing out blankets and propane while all around were signs of wealth and privilege, prompting the lines “Veins of this city/So small and pretty/You couldn’t pump her up/With some kind of drug/Her arms are open /Wild-eyed and hoping/Somebody could give her/That kind of love”.
The album opens, however, on a more musically restrained note, the initial spare guitar notes gradually joined by a steady drumbeat and keys, with Rae, a song for her sister where she sings “need you and I always will”, before ramping it up on the swaggery P-Town with an opening salvo of crashing guitars and drums, Hiatt’s drawl detailing those times when things and people never worked out to be as good or as much fun as they were supposed to with its sneered out chorus of “don’t you hate when people say it is what it is?”
A number designed to be heard at full volume, it may be the musically gutsiest track on the album, but there’s plenty of punch and drive throughout, taking a sure strutting path through the choppy roots-pop of Little Believer with its vague echoes of The Bangles at their steeliest or the stabbing notes that provide the slipway to launch Brightest Star. There’s a poppy sensibility too on the jaunty spring of the title track, her warble here, accompanied by Amanda Shires’ fiddle, probably the countriest on the album with even hints of Dolly Parton, while, backed by organ, Never Play Guitar swings in classic roots-rock fashion on a song about the liberating empowerment of playing or listening to rock n roll and of the need to have the space to let her juices flow; and perhaps a note to the neighbours about the writing process necessitating having to give those six strings a workout.
Of the softer numbers, the song Candy Lunch and its chiming guitar go on to stand as a celebration of individuality and idiosyncrasy as, to the undoubted horror of the surgeon general, she sings “I’ve always done my own weird thing/And sometimes that means I want candy for my lunch”. As a reminder to be yourself, it hits the sweet spot. As, on a similar thematic note, does Drawl.
Counting it in, the penultimate cut is the pedal steel streaked, rhythmically scampering Move, which, set in “New York City in the rain, getting high on old cocaine”, is about getting your shit together, facing up to your issues and dealing with things, something Hiatt has clearly accomplished to formidable effect as this confident, assured and hugely accessible album shows. As she puts it, “I throw caution to the wind, and don’t give a damn.”
It ends on a hushed, bluesy, soulful note with sparsely arranged electric guitar and muffled drums on the paradoxically titled Scream, building to a coiled crescendo in a final assertion of self as she declares “I want some place that’s just my home” and how “I ain’t slowing down for nobody”. Hiatt has got a full head of steam and the momentum’s building. Join her in the fast lane.
Photo By David McClister