Single Girl, Married Girl – Three Generations of Leaving
Head Bitch Music – 19 November 2021
Taking their name from a song by The Carter Family, Single Girl, Married Girl are an LA-based pop/folk/Americana band led by singer/songwriter and banjo player Chelsey Coy and husband, Gary Knight. On ‘Three Generations of Leaving’, they chronicle the tribulations of three women from the same semi-fictional family, the mother, a daughter and her estranged granddaughter, through songs that variously address loss, drug addiction and depression.
It opens with the sparse banjo notes of Walking On Water with its line “Daddy, you left all your children/Waiting on a lie”, written after seeing the Steve Martin and Edie Brickell musical, Bright Star, about a woman being abandoned by her family, sparking the interlinked narratives that form the album.
Turning to a Latin rhythm, So She Runs introduces Susie (“a wanderer/She brings her things along with her/In the weathered satchel she wears upon her back/On the search for something better”), looking for a better life and “running to the grass that’s greener on the other side”. It’s followed by a return to more country pastures with the slow swaying, organ-backed and gradually soaring Wreck Cut Loose that furthers the theme of abandonment (“Could blame it all on you/Yeah, I wish I could blame everything on me/But life doesn’t work that way/One day you love, one day it goes away”).
Inspired by Coy’s own journey and her husband’s feelings of abandonment as a child, the poppier country-rock Looking kicks the tempo up with driving drums and a Partonesque vocal expanding on the story of the granddaughter who “wanted to be the girl who found her way in this big ol’ world alone”, succeeding at becoming a country singer unlike her mother (not seen since she was nine) who “once tried and failed at the age of twenty-nine” and finding validation through her music “to be the girl to feel your love and never be left twice”.
As musically subdued as the title would suggest, the strings adorned A Widow captures that sense of feeling of no longer having value (“Picked up and thrown, I’m nobody’s catch anymore/Won’t dare to wear that velvet dress I adore”) but hoping for rescue (“Love don’t leave me, please retrieve me, I’m on the floor/I can hear your shadow pacing by the door”) and that “this night will surely end/There’s a sun around the bend”.
It’s counterpointed by the measured trotting rhythm, banjo and sparse fiddle of Runaway where “Though I tried and got real close, he wouldn’t let me in…I burned in my heart for so long, that it’s a sin/Then my eyes were laid open, and out went the flame” leaving the narrator to run “through the darkness—a road with no name… alright with not knowing, but free to pretend”.
Backdropped by guest musician Mary Lattimore’s shimmering harp, Scared to Move extends the theme of seeking love, being afraid of being hurt again (“I know you’re scared to love/Feels like you’ve lost before”) but assured by a new lover that “We’ll find our way in time”. The drumbeat snap returns to drive Secret with its lyric about the weight of holding something back and “always biting your tongue/Until you couldn’t taste anymore”, another number that speaks of restlessness and rebellion (“Now you’re one year older/But a wayward girl/And you’re on the run”).
Anchored by upright bass and circular drum patter, Hurt Her So is a moodier number about insecurity (“There was a girl I knew/Who couldn’t handle/The petty things in life/She was so fragile/Upon entering a room/Her feet entangled/Blushing under her rouge”) and wounded by all the comments she tried to brush off. It moves to a conclusion with another banjo dappled number dressed in old school backwoods country clothes, Control, exulting in the exhilaration of letting go (“I know I shouldn’t follow you/Down dusty roads where no one’s been/But it feels nice/To be naïve/On a road without a past” and defying the odds even as living “In constant fear that we won’t last”.
It ends with a very personal number, the honky-tonk waltzing The Flood, Thad DeBrock’s aching pedal steel weeping through song about her husband Gary’s brother and the drug addiction that took his life, telling the story through the voice of his mother “Looking all over town for him/My hope is fading dim/Looking out for a boy who can’t swim/A needle lost in a stack of needles lost at sea/When I find my love at the oceanside how will I be relieved?”, ending with her finding him the following morning, forever asleep.
Tracing a thread of the effects of trauma throughout the album, while ordered as a deliberate sequence, the songs are never fully character-specific, allowing the listener to draw their own interpretations while still sensing the connections that hold them together. It’s an assuredly crafted and highly rewarding listen.
https://www.singlegirlmarriedgirl.com/