Confidently marking the beginning of a new musical path, Dori Freeman’s Ten Thousand Roses is a hugely accessible and infectious work, packed with instantly memorable melodies and hooks.
Dori Freeman – Ten Thousand Roses
Blue Hens Music – 10 September 2021
Ten Thousand Roses once again finds Dori Freeman backed by a solid set of musicians, among them her husband drummer Nicholas Falk who also produced the album. This latest album finds the Appalachian songstress in feisty mode, both lyrically and certainly on the reverse guitar intro to the post-break-up opener Get You Off Of My Mind. The opener swiftly settles into an ambling mandolin flecked walking-beat as she sings, “Tried to cleanse my mind of you, but you’re still swimming there/Do you find it comfortable, roaming through my head/Going through the catalogues of things we left unsaid”.
Gender dynamics serve as a platform for the following track; the steady walking rhythm country rock The Storm, written, she says for women who’ve been put through hell by cheating men who didn’t deserve them. She draws on turbulent weather imagery (“Honey don’t you know/That he’s waiting on the flood to pull you under”) to capture such relationships, all wrapped up with a catchy hook chorus. “Now you’re done you don’t need no man”, she sings, striking a note of female empowerment, a theme that flexes its muscle again with the jaunty swagger and tumbling melody line of I Am (“I ain’t a good girl, though everybody thinks I am/I gotta mind that’s dirty as the bottom of a coffee can”), declaring “I hate to do the things I know I should/I’m tired of acting like I give a damn”.
If that and the twangsome guitar accompanied classic sixties-country coloured Logan Ledger duet Walk Away comes off the back of a soured romance, the album’s not all thorns. The banjo-led Almost Home takes an old-school country path for a song about being out on the road away from those you love (“Don’t leave me out of your locket/With you I’m always home”) while Appalachian, a 60s doo-wop styled love letter to her roots (“I’m a Cripple Creek pearl”), singing its people’s praises in defiance of rich city folks’ prejudices (“They’ll try to wither you right down, tear you up from the red ground/If you’re poor then you’re ‘stupid and blind’/But I’d say a calloused hand/Is far better than a callous mind”).
Unrequited love manifests itself on the echoey vocals, tumbling drums, and more 60s shades of I Wanted To (“I wanted to, go home with you/But you wouldn’t let me so I had to call/Some other lover who was off the wall/He kept me company, but that was all”). Here too she runs self-determination up the flagpole by refusing to mope over what wasn’t as she asserts “No I’m not coming back, you’re on your own/You always wanted to be all alone/So take my name and number off your phone/I won’t be dreaming of you”.
Again, hitting the high notes, that defiance spits out on Nobody Nothin’ (“Don’t go trying to please anybody/Unless somebody is pleasing you too”) as she states that love and relationships have to be built on equal standing and not to rush in blinded by the hearts and flowers (“Go on and find you a man if you want to/But a bed will keep you warm in the night/Go on and fall deep in love if you want to/But take care that your head is on right”).
And, as the title track neatly sums it up, if, while he might hold her in a way no one else did, she’s got no reservations in saying, “If you really want me then show me you do/I ain’t about to be waiting around/In twenty-nine years I’ve learned one thing is true/It’s no life at all to be somebody’s clown”, yet another of the album’s reminder that women don’t need a man to validate them. It ends with a cover, echoey walking beat drums and twanged guitar setting the scene for Only You Know, a Gerry Goffin and Phil Spector pop ballad that originally appeared on a 1975 Dion album and is unearthed to good effect here with its line “Only you know what you have been through/There’s better things you’re gonna get into” succinctly chiming with the overall emotional sentiment.
Confidently marking the beginning of a new musical path while still rooted in her formative heritage,Ten Thousand Roses is a hugely accessible and infectious work, packed with instantly memorable melodies and hooks. Five albums in, while the influences may be there in the music and the voice, Freeman has consistently proven that she is her own woman, to be taken on her own terms and those who can’t accept that can take a hike. You won’t hear many doors slamming on the way out.
Ten Thousand Roses is out now.