Cristina Vane – Nowhere Sounds Lovely
Blue Tip – 2 April 2021
Born in Italy of Sicilian-American and a Guatemalan heritage, now based in Nashville by way of Los Angeles, Cristina Vane was reared on pre-war American blues by artists such as Skip James, Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson laced with Appalachian melodies. Feeling the need for a creative spark, Vane set off on a five-month cross-country tour, couch surfing and playing everywhere from small bars to backyards. This debut album is the end product of those experiences and the musical influences picked up along the way.
Produced by drummer Cactus Moser and featuring bassist Dow Tomlin, fiddler Nate Leath, and Tommy Hannum on pedal steel bringing country sounds to her blues-rock background, it opens with the plucked clawhammer banjo notes of Dreamboy a bluesy imagining of her ideal man, a dirty sweet lover who’s “got silver boots, got a shiny dagger got a gun that shoots/And he takes his time just to make his move/but you know when he does, said it go down smooth”.
There’s then a distinct shift of style to the western waltzing of Dreaming of Utah, written in the winter just after moving to Nashville and starting to listen to country and essentially about the healing and comforting nature places can possess and where “a little tough love feels as new as a birth”.
Driving Song is a fairly sparse and moody modal blues with an appropriately complementary electric guitar that is, as the title suggests, about time spent in her car, born from a late-night journey home in LA reflecting on feelings of loneliness, (“I’ll never drive myself to you and tell you how I feel/Cause you won’t hear me anyway”) and not knowing where she was in her life, caught up in a “comedy of horrors, and it just keeps getting worse”, and coming to the realisation that you have to rely on singing your own song.
Written during her first trip to Nashville, the fingerstyle Heaven Bound Station harks to those early delta blues influences while addressing big questions about faith while, keeping a religious thread, Prayer For The Blind with its lively clawhammer banjo and fiddle is firmly in the Appalachian spiritual mould and was inspired by a Nebraskan couple she met while camping in Iowa, the woman recounting how her mother, suffering from dementia, was convinced her husband was cheating on her with a woman with two wooden legs, translating the story into a song about the often complex mother-daughter relationship where “Time passes on old wounds as if they were brand new/Made in your image with all the bad parts too”.
From the mountainsides, it moves to the prairie for the cowboy campfire waltzing Satisfied Soul, part homage to the places she visited along her journey, from the Georgia pines through Montana and Wyoming and the cumulative impact each had on her inner being. And, with that in mind, Travellin’ Blues was sparked by her first experience of actually living on the road and a realisation that there’s a fine line between running free and running from your problems although, that said, played ragtime style, this is actually an upbeat happy tune about how “Sometimes you gotta get lost to get your feet back on the ground”.
She draws on a different strand to the genre for the resonator fuelled Wishing Bone Blues which takes a much darker perspective, written during her time in California and running with “friends in all the wrong places”, addressing themes of addiction and dependency and the need to have more to show for things than just empty spaces.
Prior to that, there’s the ambling JJ Cale lope of What Remains, a sceptical musing on whether love’s worth the pain it brings and the loneliness inside walls you build around yourself to keep others out, paired thematically with the sparse Appalachian hymnal strains of Will I Ever Be Satisfied and the feeling of being adrift (“I’ve forgotten where I come from/ And what I’ve come here to say/My eyes don’t see/Paths of beauty/Only seeing where I’ve strayed”).
It ends with two familiar titles, but not covers. Blueberry Hill is a jaunty 60s folk and blues-infused upbeat ode to the street of the same name in Taos, New Mexico and, finally, there’s the brooding, heavy tread rhythm and throaty guitar of Badlands, inspired by her time in South Dakota’s stark beauty where “People gather like dead birds” and “You can run, you can hide/But out here they’re always watching”.
A stylistically eclectic and beguiling Americana album that speaks of hope, longing connection and wonder, seen through Vane’s lens, the road to “nowhere” may be both daunting and inviting, but it is most assuredly lovely. As the Talking Heads said, come along and take that ride.
Order via: https://cristinavane.bandcamp.com/album/nowhere-sounds-lovely