Dave
Carter and Tracy Grammer
Tanglewood
Tree
Signature Sounds
Released March 14
www.signature-sounds.com
www.daveandtracy.com.
Carter &
Grammer will be teaching a songwriting seminar at Lewis
& Clark College this fall.
Compared to some Portland folkies, Dave Carter and Tracy
Grammer are hard to catch up with. They don't have a weekly
gig at the LaurelThirst or Mad Hatter--and you sure as hell
won't catch them busking Hawthorne Boulevard.
Maybe this haunting duo seem elusive because they run with
pretty fast company--Lyle Lovett, Michelle Shocked, Robert
Earl Keen, John Gorka and Ellis Paul, for example.
Carter and Grammer have at least one thing in common with
all these heavyweights: the Kerrville New Folk Award. The
Portland pair landed the honor, the folk world's equivalent
of college football's Heisman Trophy, in 1998 for their
album When I Go. That disc just finished a hell of
a run, landing in the national Folk DJ Poll's top 10 for
the second year in a row, making heavy rotation on Philly's
World Café, one of the country's top folk
radio shows, and the pages of Sing Out!, the grand
daddy of folk magazines.
Not bad for a credit card-funded disc recorded in the kitchen
of Grammer's Southeast Portland fourplex. Now, Carter and
Grammer's favorite label, Northampton's Signature Sounds,
releases Tanglewood Tree, a sophomore effort that
keeps their big train rolling.
Talking with the two in that very kitchen, you get the
feeling that they're two halves of the same whole, with
yin-yang balance and healthy friction. They're opposites,
but that may be why the match works so well. Grammer's Ivory
Girl softness and supreme musicality and Carter's Oklahoman,
mile-a-minute mystic rambling and wily humor make a partnership
as natural as the duo's music.
"When we recorded When I Go," says Carter, the duo's
songwriter, "we thought it would be a CD we sold from the
stage. Then we started entering songwriting contests and
won, like, everything we entered."
Carter's naturally pessimistic. He swore each new competition
would be the duo's last if they didn't win. Grammer's positive
verve kept them going. After a year spent logging thousands
of miles on tour, the two have hit folk gold.
Carter's craggy vulnerability gives his songwriting poignancy
and wizened innocence, part of an attempt to reconcile his
explosive upbringing--his mom was a fire-and-brimstone evangelist,
his dad a mathematician jaded by science.
At a time when cloying personal narrative is the pop-songwriting
norm, it's refreshing to hear someone dig deep into the
untilled soil of modern moral crisis. Not since Bill Morrissey
in the early '80s has anyone opened the doors for such a
voyeuristic peek at everyday America; not since Lovett has
anyone done so with such humor and grace.
Grammer fleshes out tunes with intuitive accompaniment
and a spookily instinctive feel for Carter's melodies and
lyrics, her violin haunting his ballads like wind in sagebrush.
Reflecting on the new disc, Carter says, "It's very Buddhist.
Every song's about penetrating illusion." Tanglewood
Tree is a scale weighing Grand Ole Opry sensibilities
against Dylanesque poetry. The lyrics distill '60s idealism,
'90s realism and the timelessness of a vision quest. It's
as if Alan Watts and Loretta Lynn gave birth to Black Elk
while vacationing in the Ozarks.
The disc's title track sends love tumbling through the
starkness of a desolate western landscape. "I don't write
love songs," says Carter. "It's more about the aesthetic
of the love song, where can I take it now. It would be easy
to be one of those 'shock of the new' people and say love
sucks. I wanted to offer a mature look."
It's classic Carter, turning the orb to let the light catch
every glint of his subject's surface. With lovers lying
in tall grass contrasted with "the rumor of rain in the
late afternoon" there's as much an air of foreboding as
there is the tickle of a fresh breeze. Where there's spring,
there's autumn around the bend. The two weave their voices
at song's end, Grammer pleading her fresh optimism to Carter's
skeptical love-weary warrior.
Grammer sings lead on four cuts on the disc, a departure
from When I Go, on which she just sang harmony. Her
voice wears well and offers a striking diversity to Carter's
earthiness.
At times joyously hokey and philosophically weighty, Tanglewood
Tree weaves an intricate web between the down-home and
the academic. Like the five-petaled orange blossom rising
above the rattlesnake on the disc's cover, there's beauty
and bite to this music, a Zen balancing act that sparks
and sputters with life.
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 8,
2000
|
