1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 583. Nanci Griffith – The Last Of The True Believers (1986)

 

The Late Sir Terry Wogan used to play Griffith’s version of From A Distance quite often on his show, which she sings in a strangely cutesy and affected-sounding girly voice. I’m not sure why – it's on her next album, not this one, and here her voice is pure and gorgeous. 

Griffith tends towards folk, but this is a lot more country, or country-folk, and felt like a return to the early Seventies. In a nice way, now that we’re not surrounded by endless country-folk and country-rock. It’s a bit of a palate cleanser after all of the thrash metal and hip-hop it seems like there’s been lately. Expect dobros and mandolins fluttering away in the background, expect a bit of fiddle and a dash of pedal steel guitar (but not too much), and expect melodies in a straightforward major scale that go pretty much where you expect, and want, them to go. No strange polyphonic, polytonal, polyrythmic experiments here, nor arty proggy jumps between movements. Each track is nice and safe. 

But I don’t mean that disparagingly. It’s a good safe, a warm comfort blanket. Griffith’s voice is sumptuous, able to swing between delicate and strong but keeping a kind of purity that suits this music well – she's got the lightness of Dolly Parton and the depth of Joan Baez but blended together so that she comes across as neither thin nor strident. 

The songs are largely optimistic as well, mostly about relationships that are starting out, or have endured over life or, in the case of Lookin’ For The Time, about no need for love. The subtitle for this is Workin’ Girl, and it’s not clear if the narrator is a prostitute with no time for anyone who can’t pay, or simply a career-minded woman with material aspirations. Either way, the tone is kept light and jaunty, it’s not a song about repression, the narrator is self-determined whichever her role is. 

It may not cut any new ground, musically, but it is very pleasant.