With Ruth Theodore’s meticulously constructed melodies and the literate, open-hearted and relatable lyrics, ‘I Am I Am‘ is her finest album to date.
Nothing if not idiosyncratic, Ruth Theodore’s latest release, I Am I Am, her first for Ani Di Franco’s label and a co-production between her, bassist Todd Sickafoose and percussionist Mathias Kunzli, refuses to be easily pigeonholed, flitting between styles with grasshopper agility. It opens in a breezy, jaunty, breathily sung manner with the rhythmically bubbling, brass-daubed Barbed Wire Fence, which, inspired by the thirty miles of barbed wire which runs along the Itchen river on its path from Cheriton to the sea at Southampton, initially seems to be about flora and fauna (“Damson flies on either side racing round the river’s edge there are water holes for water voles among the water cress/A flash of Kingfisher and look a Little Dipper there where the river bends”) but reveals itself as a sort of right to roam protest song.
“Stretches of this river bank are parceled up for rent you get a little wooden fishing hut and a little wooden bench/And after VAT and your license fee you pay a small percent that goes towards the upkeep of the barbed wire fence”, she initially notes. However, “the men that rent from the other men do not give their consent to outsiders and there’s a sign there to remind us at every 100 steps/ It says ‘the penalty incurred will be your personal expense in the event you should ascend the barbed wire fence’”. Thus arousing rightful indignation as she declares, “I am a marching band and I descend from coal miners and pearl divers and I learned from them/If it’s a fishing line or a picket line when there’s something to defend you take no notice of the notice on the barbed wire fence”, taking a political turn in the line about how “the BNP will have us cordon off our neighbours, will have us cordon off our friends”. Just another fence to surmount, along with the catchy chorus of “oh buttercup I’m coming up”.
Full Metal Jacket has another urgent rhythm, but of a more propulsive nature to carry its undercurrent of anger in pursuit of payback (“I have travelled land and sea with this bullet between my teeth to give you back the hell you’ve given me”), yet you can’t but also feel the playfulness of it all even as, riding the piano flurries, she sings “I’ve had a great white eating out the palm of my hand so please!/I’ve turned every stone and every autumn leaf with a full metal jacket between my teeth /I’ve drunk the lizard’s blood of a medicine man hey hey and I’ve held this feeling off for just as long as I can but now here I am!”.
With a steady thudding drumbeat, Captured is a slower, but no less beaming number about being true to who you really are rather than putting on a show (“So put down the camera no moment will be captured/Not every sentence needs a hammer not every protest has a banner/So don’t give me who you’re trying to be when I like the one you’re trying to hide”), about self-awareness (“I’m ruler of all that lies within these layers upon layers of skin/And even when my eyes are closed/I am not in darkness”) and defiance (“Is it still alright just to live and breathe? ‘cause If you believe what you read then every foot step climbs a ladder/every photo needs to flatter”). And, if you don’t know, the line about Romina Ashrafi (“show me where’s the dot on the line when in define of her dignity she stood up to her father for the first time”) refers to the Iranian girl who was murdered by her father after eloping with the man he refused to let her marry.
The notes for this release relate how Theodore was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, and underwent successful chemotherapy treatment that spanned the worst of the pandemic, and beyond. This period of healing may have inspired Brighton Stones which opens to the sound of waves and seagulls, and a folksy, Guthriesque yet also calypso-like strum (“Kneeling on my skin and bones/I’m seeing in the night on the Brighton stones/I beg the sky for my life until there is no more …‘Cause when you’re out there living you don’t know just how much you want to live/It’s only when your body’s giving in do you know how much more you have to give/But all there is is all there is”), the shape-shifting murmuration of starlings serving as a metaphor for life (“you gotta ride it like a whale/Sometimes it is a typhoon sometimes it is a sail/Sometimes it is a love heart sometimes it is a tear/sometimes it is a puff of smoke and then it disappears”) and an acceptance that “if anything’s for certain it’s that nothing ever is”.
Arranged for classical piano (a dash of Beethoven), violin and double bass, Watercolour has her in Piaf chanteuse mood for a musing on mortality with painterly metaphors (“Life sits here getting shorter as my paintbrush sits in water the ancient sunken shipwreck of some used to be explorer/And lifeless is the water in which the paintbrush steeps in its snow globe of a jam jar in to which each colour leaks/ In to a watercolour sky on a watercolour night/I cry watercolour tears from my watercolour eye”).
Her voice swooping over a folksy strum and a township groove, People People is another earworm with a conversational narrative about bumping into old friends and feeling “the urgency like a push on a beat to be who she wants me to be”. It’s about playing catch up (“We were still waiting in the council queue when I asked her “So what’s new with you?”/she said “I’m still doing the radio show but I’m down on my luck if you really wanna know/I had a boyfriend half Jamaican /he was deported /all very hush hush/He was born here worked as a labourer /received a letter… something about Windrush/Now I have a boyfriend in Jamaica and his baby in my arms”), reminiscing (“Remember when Emma climbed the roof top to stop the diggers? and those policemen chased her all night around the chimneys in a cherry picker? And we cheered her on from the rigging handcuffed and singing”) and a celebration of solidarity in its “We are The People people” singalong chorus.
Slower with again classical piano and guitar undertones in the opening, the part-spoken masterpiece that is Here Comes Your Song is about defiance in the face of the odds and, in its title line chorus, the power of music to bring you through (“this song radiates like it was infrared and automatically plays itself inside of your actual head whenever you’re alone and feeling blue… it’s instructed to wrap itself around you”) and raise you up when self-doubt threatens (“that old mistrust holds strong/Sitting right there on your shoulder waiting to say ‘I told you she’d go wrong’”). The tempo switches to a mid-way scurry, then ebbing before it builds back up to the violin-laced finale and the inspirational lyrical climax of “in disbelief you raise your head a fraction from the curb to watch it offer you the love you’d told yourself you didn’t deserve/And maybe that’s when you’ll remember me lying here next to you wishing I could just shake you and shake you and break through that shatter proof glass you keep me behind/go back in time and give those mother fuckers a piece of my mind/But I know I can’t and I know you won’t …and you ask it ‘who are you? what planet are you from?’ And it says ‘Oh you know me Alison/Come on/I’m your song!’”.
Still riding the switchback, the five-minute Thompson love song (“I awoke in the night to find that I need you on side/That I need you more than I realised, more than I care to admit sometimes”) blossoms from the acoustic waltzing intro into another township vibe with marimba, bass and cello that rises to a jubilant “can you hear me now” crescendo, the album coming to a close with the organ, trombone and piano 70s-flavoured soul Hold On Me, a love song about an unresolved relationship (“I thought I’d be free the day you emptied your arms of me but you see I’m starting to suppose that you never let me go”) as she was still having chemotherapy in the middle of a pandemic and trying to figure out how she felt (“It looks like you’ve always been right always right about me/That I don’t want to be saved…‘cause I’m in love with the waves”) but then “if I am a wave well then you must be my shore”.
With Ruth Theodore’s meticulously constructed melodies and literate, open-hearted and relatable lyrics, I Am I Am is her finest album to date and a sure inclusion on the year-end best-of lists.
I Am I Am is released on 3rd May 2024 via Righteous Babe Records
Bandcamp: https://ruththeodore.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-i-am-4