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Stacey Earle: Simple Gearle
by Diane Wilkes
Village Records, a superb purveyor of Americana, compared Stacey Earle to Nanci Griffith in their flyer (get it--Flyer), which, along with Stacey coming from musical royalty (Steve is her brother), was enough to get me to buy it, voice unheard. Like Steve’s El Corazon, Simple Gearle begins with the sound of a scratchy record--on Sides A and B. This musical conceit is meant, no doubt, to symbolize the raw rootedness of the music, hearkening back to the days of albums. Alas, having replaced hundreds of scratched records with CDs, I don’t have the same yearning for the days of recording yore. Like album use, the intentional scratchiness wears on the listener all too quickly. I applaud the sentiment; I dislike the reality.
I can hear the reasons Stacey Earle has been compared to Nanci--the sweet and pure high-pitched vocals are similar, but Stacey is more raw and a bit earthier. She seems more real, more to the bone. This is not a slam on Nanci--it’s an exceptional accolade for Stacey. Similarly, Earle’s lyrics are not as literary. To continue with this (frankly unfair) comparison, Stacey plays Hemingway to Nanci’s F. Scott Fitzgerald; she is more grounded, more of a "simple gearle."
But it’s unjust to compare Stacey to either the incomparable Nanci Griffith or her brilliant brother Steve. She is not just a "simple gearle," she’s her own gearle, and is really quite unique in her personal, personable songwriting and innocent-but-not-remotely-naive style. She also writes songs with hooks, a time-honored, but sadly ignored tradition, in this day of sensitive gal songwriters who warble into all sorts of unconnected rivulets.
"Waiting," the first song on the CD, mines the same vein as Carly Simon’s "Jesse" (a guilty pleasure for me), but with the perspective of a poet, not a glib songstress who welcomes heartache and liberation with equal abandon. You can feel the ache in every word and every note of "Waiting."
In "Wedding Night," the song title says it all: Stacey sings of the homey and sometimes-funny pre-wedding goings-on, and what that night is going to mean. The great thing here (and in all her songs) is the detail that never gets high-flown or precious: "Woke up early this morning on my day to shine/Daddy drinking coffee, readin’ his paper, trying to pass the time/Mama’s in the kitchen near burnin’ up the telephone lines.../Get the ceremony rolling--I’m ready for my wedding night." This is a song triumphant of the child-woman, neither coy nor trashy. I shudder to think of the subject matter in the hands of a Shania Twain, but when Stacey sings, "After tonight, I’m gonna be on my own, my own," and the words run together in a marriage of their own, I’m just blown away--to me, her words speak volumes in the language of the unsaid.
The way Earle combines gritty strength with disappointment in "Next Door Down," a song allegedly about Nashville’s frequent rejection of her music, makes the word pluck an old-fashioned word that is just too dramatic for the everyday and the profound: "And they were all there/and where is there/Room of people all going somewhere/We’re all going somewhere someday/Said girl you gotta find your own way /Said girl where you gotta go is/From your heart send my soul/Well, you don’t get down/Take a look around/You know you might just go try the next door down... This kind of rejection made Stacey Earle take out a loan and record her album her own damn way, and I, for one, am grateful for Nashville’s short-sightedness.
The desire to quote the lyrics of every song, to prove my point about the consistence of her brilliant simpicity, is strong--but there are time (and copyright) constraints that prevent me, as well as a lack of a lyric sheet to ease my way. That’s my only other complaint about this soft breath of a masterpiece, strong in its gentility, gentle in its strength, but incredibly powerful for all that.
1998 was a great year for music--and when I tallied my top ten, I ranked Simple Gearle third, due to the magnificence of the Springsteen boxed set, Tracks, and Lucinda Williams’ breakthrough Car Wheels... Ironically, of the three, Simple Gearle has proven to be the one I listen to most and from which I still discover previously-obscured gems: a particularly cogent lyric, a well-rasped phrase. This is a great album from an artist I eagerly await hearing more from--though it’s hard to imagine her topping the classic Simple Gearle. It’s like a set of pearls; you can wear/hear it anytime, and it always looks/sounds perfect.
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