Lydia Loveless was born and raised on a farm an hour east of Columbus, Ohio, but she sings as if she’d been bred hundreds of miles south. Her twang usually arrives snapping off the end of a line, as a kiss-off or a heartbreak, sassy or vulnerable, depending on the mood. It’s what I always hear first, before the words, before the story itself. Somehow every note that Loveless sings sounds like it’s in a minor key. When I caught her and her band at The House in DeKalb a few years back, the desperate sincerity in her voice plugged up my throat tight for most of the night. Richard Hell says, “Lydia is the only singer/songwriter the power of whose music and voice consistently makes me cry.” I’m with Mr. Meyers here. I’m glad there wasn’t much close harmony that night. That would’ve put me over the edge.
Her band looked as if they’d been rounded up from a bar down the street, their beat-up gear as if it were collectively 150 years old. Jay Gasper played pedal steel and a very cool, bright-sounding 12-string, the make of which I couldn’t determine. Todd May got sounds out of his guitar that mocked weeping and howling, back-to-back. Bass player Ben Lamb (Loveless’s then-husband) alternated between electric and stand-up, and Loveless moved between those ranges herself, as her band politely excused themselves from the stage near the end of the show and she picked up an acoustic and sang solo, beautifully, heart-breakingly, for a few numbers. She wore heeled strap-sandals, denim shorteralls, and a lace T-shirt— “I’m all about class,” she drawled. She drained a 40 oz. New Belgium Fat Tire over the course of the show and sang her songs with sobbing catches and with her eyes tightly shut, opening them occasionally to reorient herself in the landscape of loss and lust that she creates.
Loveless once tweeted: “I like my coffee like I like my men, troubled and Middle Aged.” (I once tweeted at her during the baseball playoffs that a couple mustached-and-bearded Cleveland Indians players looked like I imagined the men she sings about look like. She was bemused.) She’s funny. Her Instagram account—she’s tagged it “Singer/songwriter/ wannabe comedian” is a blend of life-on-the-road, in-the-studio, self-promotion, and chill-at-home posts; she lets her followers into her kitchen, or her bathroom or bedroom, viewing her lounging around, makeup free, glasses on, a dirty counter or unmade bed in the background, her mild exasperation at her cat having killed an intruding lizard dovetailing with stacks of self-help books and evidence of overdrinking. Her friends and family members and everyone’s texts are fair game.
She’s honest, and available, and so is her voice. A verse in her song “European” summarizes the paradox she chases in song:
I just want to right what’s been feeling so wrong
Well, if you don’t love me, I can hide my feelings
But I just want to get what I haven’t had in so long
She sings about idealized romance bruised by clumsy hands; she sings about drinking, and fucking, and mornings waking up in dubious beds. She sometimes sings about her own career (“Paid”) and about singing. (And singers. Cue up “Steve Earle.”)
I’m wondering how much of a story a voice, alone, can tell. Loveless’s quivers at its top range, and she uses this effectively, capturing a kind of vulnerability or falling-apartness that her songs, the quieter or more reflective ones especially, narrate. She does as much with that voice as she does with the tales she spins and the images she presents, often sounding like she’s about to burst into tears, and be really pissed off at herself when she does. She can sing with a hard edge and soften outward in the same line via a sudden insight or swoop of an octave, shaking with indignation and then defenselessness; her voice at its most casual sounds untutored, and so conversational, a barroom- or basement-voice that’s authentic and powerful in its confident looseness. I wish Lydia all kinds of fame and success, but she’ll always sound to me like a woman who feels most comfortable in a dimly lit dive bar, where hard won truths and the voice strong enough to sing them are that much more intimate.
• • •
“I like to sing. I don’t know how to sing, and I sing completely out of tune; but I sing all the same—occasionally, very quietly, when I am alone. I know that I sing out of tune because others have told me so; my voice must be like the yowling of a cat. But I am not—in myself—aware of this and singing gives me real pleasure. If he hears me, he mimics me; he says that my singing is something quite separate from music, something invented by me.”
This is Natalia Ginzburg in “He and I,” an essay from Le piccole virtù (The Little Virtues) published in Italy in 1962. (Dick Davis translated the book into English in 1985.) In the piece, Ginzburg moves back-and-forth between her husband and herself, blithely drawing minor and sometimes profound distinctions between the two of them. The end result is a dimensional portrait of a long-term relationship; that is, it gets complicated. Any attempt by a lover to explore boundaries between herself and another is usually revealing and, when writing about her own singing, Ginzburg—though modest, deferring, and reserved—reveals herself as a passionate fan.
“When I was a child,” she continues, “I used to yowl tunes I had made up. It was a long wailing kind of melody that brought tears to my eyes.” Etymologists say that we put the name to that noise sometime in the twelfth century; the noun “yowl” was recorded starting in the middle of the fifteenth century. Interestingly the word derives distantly, as if in a fading echo, from the Old Norse yla, related to the idea of jubilance, “to let out whoops.” Ginzburg’s singing may be an embarrassment to herself, and a public embarrassment to anyone unfortunate to be within earshot of her, but it’s really a kind of jubilation, a triumph of sorts. Look: she brings herself to tears.
Though she allows herself pleasure, she twists herself in knots trying to undo her love for her own voice, to diminish the interior life that it sings. “It doesn’t matter to me that I don’t understand painting or the figurative arts, but it hurts me that I don’t love music,” she writes. “But there is nothing I can do about it, and I will never understand or love music.” For Ginzburg, the intellect trumps the wail, emotional authenticity—even pure enjoyment—no kind of argument for itself. “If I occasionally hear a piece of music that I like I don’t know how to remember it; and how can I love something I can’t remember?” I’ll offer my own rhetorical question here: what’s more important, the knowledge or the song, the context or the tears?
If you were distractedly listening to Loveless’s most recent album Real, released in 2016, and heard her sing the lines, “How can love like this exist? It gets more perfect with every kiss,” and worried that she’d hired songwriters lately fired by American Idol runner-ups, fear not. The next lines—
Now I’m walking away
I guess I don’t understand
Why someone like you would be cruel
I don’t know what the truth is but
You give me every reason to fall out of
everlasting arms
—remind you that this is very much a Loveless song, where romance is often undercut by a turn toward confusion, ruefulness, or liberation that always feels honest. On the album, recorded in Columbus, co-producer Joe Viers smoothed the group’s sound a bit; gone is the cowpunk, bar-band noise of the earlier records, replaced with studio finesse and laid-back pop grooves, but Loveless’s yearning twang is intact and is as affecting and powerful as ever. As before, Loveless is singing about boys and sex and love, about the ideal and the bitterly real, and the cynical humor to be found in it all. “I know just what you do / I know just how it feels when you make it seem real,” she sings in the title track.
That show a few years back is one of the best I’ve seen in years. Happily, onstage Loveless and the musicians behind her play with raw edges and humorous abandon; her songs benefit from that kind of loose-limbed, barreling sound. Several cuts on Real suffer from studio claustrophobia and, though Loveless maintains a sure grip on her subjects, a bit of a sonic identity crisis. On the strongest songs—“Longer,” “Heaven,” “Out On Love,” the title track Loveless’s voice cuts through the gray studio weather to add pulse and personality. No knock against her band, but she’s especially effective solo and acoustic, as in “Clumps,” where she gives the impression of having rushed to the studio with the song, anxious to track its emotional interior before she’d had much time to flesh out a band arrangement or talk herself into fancier chord changes or distracting instrumental textures. She’s singing but somehow talking to us at the same time. Often, especially in intimate settings in the studio or onstage, Loveless sounds like a girl wise enough to be singing about a grown woman’s problems, and a woman who feels youthful and alive still to the energy of a reckless, often childish world, finding strength she might’ve surrendered when she was younger and stupider. These are things that are best left unadorned, I guess. Loveless’s guitar and her melancholy voice—in a bedroom, kitchen, car, or in a bar—is all she really needs.
• • •
Tinuviel Sampson, writing in a press release for the Olympia- and Portland-based record label Kill Rock Stars, in 1993: “I’ve noticed that this is a pattern in my life to how I live. When something is kinda fucked around me, I withdraw and make something and only later (sometimes years later) I realize that it was directly related to inhumanization of art. It’s so constant. It’s why I quit art school. I never fit in cuz I didn’t care about galleries, and I didn’t understand why I didn’t care about galleries and thought that maybe I wasn’t really a painter or artist and then later I realized that galleries were a way of killing art.” Sampson goes on to admit that she hardly ever gets to museums, that they depress her.
I thought that museums were full of dead
art. I thought that they were like graveyards
and all the statues were screaming to be let
outside and see the world and see the people
walk down the street and see the sun and
feel the wind but they were stuck indoors in
temperature climate control environments.
and the paintings wanted to go to dinner
parties and eavesdrop on some gossip and
instead they get a hush hush, look at the
contrast in the tones and the brushstrokes of
pure feeling and how lovely and oh the poor
man was crazy but he sure was talented, too
much absynthe, you know AND YOU’RE
GODDAMNED RIGHT THERE WAS
TOO MUCH ABSINTHE AROUND
AND MAYBE THERE WAS A REASON
AND MAYBE THERE ISN’T ENOUGH
NOW!!!! oh fuck it all cuz it keeps happening
over and over so now i put out records
and haven’t had much time to paint since
august (what with all the other turmoil in
my life) … I find noisemakers more easily,
it’s a more social art and I’m not the best at
being a complete recluse (though I am very
reclusive). Music keeps me less lonely.
• • •
The same year that Sampson composed her lo-fi manifesto, Kill Rock Stars released a three-song seven-inch from the band Bikini Kill, Kathleen Hanna (on vocals), Billy Karren (guitar), Kathi Wilcox (bass), and Tobi Vail (drums). The band had already self-released their debut cassette Revolution Girl Style Now!, a self-titled EP, and a split-album with the U.K. band Huggy Bear when they ducked into a studio in Seattle, with Joan Jett recording, and swiftly cut “New Radio,” “Demirep,” and a new version of “Rebel Girl” (an earlier version had appeared on the Huggy Bear album). Noisemakers making social art: “New Radio” and “Rebel Girl”’s four-on-the-floor drive and unstoppableness are frighteningly exhilarating. A line in each song—“It doesn’t matter cuz this is the new radio” from “New Radio” and “In her kiss I taste the revolution” from “Rebel Girl”—crystalizes Bikini Kill and songwriter Kathleen Hannah’s intense sonic demands: new yell singing and new sex.
“Rebel Girl” is in many ways the band’s signature tune, an anthem for all time, and one of the great rock and roll songs of the post-punk era, paying homage to the past and offering something fiercely new and necessary. Many adjectives have been used to describe Hannah’s screams—from cathartic to gut-churning to sexy to scary; I’ll add hair-raising and otherworldly, clichés all, but what can you do when faced with the untranslatable?—and those screams are, without a doubt, clarion calls. She rises to—surrenders to? Falls victim to?—an astonishing scream in each of those two lines, detonating girlishness, brattiness, adolescence, grown-up frustrations, and sensual bliss in a single, ascending screech. A defining sound not only of riot grrrl but of the late twentieth century.
In addition to recording the tracks, Joan Jett played second guitar on “Rebel Girl,” and the muscular sheen in the sound she discovers in the band only underscores Hannah’s primal shrieks: politeness is gone, gender decorum is meaningless, binaries collapse under the weight of the ear-ringing decibels. Hannah’s the little girl who can’t stop pulling up her dress in “New Radio.” In “Rebel Girl” she’s the one who wants to be that girl’s best friend, to take her home, try on her clothes, kiss the revolution on her lips and in her mouth and tumble down her endless, dark, screaming throat. Hannah’s two-second yowl in the line “I taste the revolution” is as powerful as rock and roll gets, a get the fuck-outta-my-way force impossible to contain or ignore or believe never existed, rounding up in pure sound the rebellion and sexiness and gender-transcending bliss of the best and most important rock and roll. Want, scream, grab, possesses. Melody as squall, or is it the other way around.
Photo courtesy of Todd Cooper
• • •
Though I’ve lived in Ohio and Illinois for most of my adult life, I was born and raised in suburban Washington, D.C. I’ll always feel like an East Coast guy, and I’m taken with Loveless’s take on the men who grow up in the Midwest. Recently she discussed the origins of her song “Midwestern Guys” with David Anthony at A.V. Club: “I was thinking about it when I was writing that one, the fact that most of my friends are middle-aged men,” she said. “I was laughing at myself and thinking about how those are my girlfriends—older dudes—and how they all sort of have the same story and the same upbringing.”
A few of the guys in my band went to school
together or grew up near each other, and I
love sitting in the van listening to their weird
rural Ohio school stories. Particularly Ben
[Lamb, bassist], there was one story that he
told me that was the trigger for that song.
He had a half-brother who was doing some
drug up in a tree and fell out and died. That
inspired one of the verses, which ended up
getting cut from the song. Maybe it was
too depressing. But I don’t know, just the
boredom of the ’80s and how everyone was
driving around drunk, and the guys always
talk about how at least two times a year
people would drive into a tree. I listen to
their stories and wonder how they survived.
It’s a tribute to all my sensitive guy friends
that are weird.
Wry, yearning, haunted, and packed with narrative detail that ignites moments, “Midwestern Guys” is prime Loveless. Though I wish she’d done more with the chorus than simply repeat the title phrase, the details in the verses add poignancy to that litany. She addresses a man pretty common to her songs, someone to whom she’s maybe attracted but of whom she’s also wary, burned by his type before even as she finds it hard to resist the flame, a guy she studies because he tells her something even though neither he nor she can articulate what that is.
And after it gets dark you want to go
look at the stars,
Aw, you sure know the way to my heart
honey
You wanna make love, not fuck, in
Schiller Park
That’s how romantic you are, yeah.
The next verse gets even more explicit:
And tell me all about ’83
It was a long time ago, you can sure say
that again to me
All the lives lost to Natty Light in a tree
You played Pyromania until she got
down on her knees between your thighs
Oh you Midwestern guys.
It’s hard to know, behind the song’s careful pace and the lilting melody, what the singer makes of this guy: is he still hot, or is he a loser? Easy to mock or hard to fathom, and so more attractive because of it? It’s great stuff, and “Midwestern Guys,” in its humor, sexiness, and longing, is one of Loveless’s finest songs.
“I’d rather be lonely than ashamed,” she sings in “Bilbao,” a song whose prettiness is made complex by lines just like that one, and on “European” she nails the intersection of mind and body, a favorite place to linger for Loveless: “Honey, come on, I thought I was broken, then you turned me on.” At its best, Real confirms that Loveless is one of our finest songwriters, that her wise, honest, and skeptical take on men and women and the lives they enrich and fuck up is always worth hearing, always worth singing about.
• • •
Songs so often begin in mystery. R.E.M.’s “Perfect Circle,” from their 1983 debut album Murmur, arrived when a tour-exhausted Peter Buck watched some kids playing pickup football in a park in Trenton, New Jersey, at dusk. The poignancy and beauty of the scene devastated him; the weary music he wrote with Mike Mills and Bill Berry scored and evoked that sense. Later, Michael Stipe put lyrics to his gently descending melody—to my ear they are, as much of Stipe’s early lyrics were, essentially nonsense, but they don’t distract from the music, which, vibing off the tableau of end-of-day, end-of-innocence, boys-playing Americana that Buck witnessed, puts music to impression, converts sensation, abstractions, even. I’ve long believed that R.E.M.’s early albums, up through Fables of the Reconstruction, before the band adopted more graphically articulated political stances, are some of the best instrumental music of the era. Stipe’s vocals and surreal wordplay are musical instruments, really, no more, no less.
• • •
On November 8, 1974, singer Connie Francis performed at the Westbury Music Fair, in Long Island, New York. Francis returned to her second-floor room at a Howard Johnson’s Lodge with friends and went to bed around 2:30 in the morning. She was awakened a few hours later by a young man, who raped her at knifepoint. (A New York Times article published the following day reports “The police said they did not know how the man got into the room”; Francis later sued the Howard Johnson motel chain for damages and was awarded over two and a half million dollars. The highly publicized trial, devastating for Francis, is credited with spurring industry-wide reforms in motel room security.) Following the attack, the assailant—who was never found—tied Francis to a chair, bound her hands behind her, pushed her over, and then covered her with two mattresses and pillows, nearly suffocating her.
After more than an hour, during which she quietly sang lyrics to cheerful songs in an effort to calm herself, Francis was able to crawl to the telephone in her room and dial the number of a secretary who was sleeping in the next room. The police were summoned. The experience shattered Francis. After a decade and a half of recording, concerts, television and film work, and international travelling, limiting herself to the occasional performance or guest appearance on television shows, she’d been living in semi-retirement. After the assault she tumbled into years of depression and abuse of prescription drugs. Seven years after the incident, she remarked to UPI reporter Vernon Scott that she still was physically and emotionally unable to move forward with her career. “I suffered from a morbid fear of audiences. Every time I looked into a crowd I saw the face of the man who raped me. And I hated the feeling that when people thought of me it was in terms of the girl who was raped.” She added, “All of my life before the rape, the fun and enjoyment was negated. The rape became an obsession. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
She was speaking to Scott on the occasion of her tentative return to performing. Following nasal surgery (and the subsequent, though temporary, loss of her voice) in 1977, she’d released an album, the gamely titled Who’s Happy Now? —featuring a disco version of her signature song “Where the Boys Are”—and had carefully worked her way back to the stage. “Three-and-ahalf years after the rape I tried to get my career going again,” she related. “I went to England and did an awful live show. I didn’t sound like myself. And I cut a couple of albums. It took me twenty takes per song whereas I used to click them right off. The albums were just fair.” Francis’s world collapsed. “The only thing I’d been sure of all my life was my voice. And now I’d lost that.” She continued, “I was in complete depression. And I had to live with the memory of the trial which became a carnival. It was a terrible ordeal. They asked horrible questions about my marital sex life. It contributed to the breakup of our marriage. My husband—we are friends now—just couldn’t handle all of that invasion of privacy.”
• • •
I was thinking about all of this while driving through rural DeKalb County last summer on the way to a tiny farm stand at the sprawling Lamb of God Farm in Big Rock, Illinois. Amy and I were listening to Lydia Loveless on shuffle, and, after a while, Amy, inspired, suggested that we play some Connie Francis, who neither of us had heard in years. She got up a YouTube playlist, and we listened to the hits, the iconic career-making numbers that have sold in the millions worldwide— “Who’s Sorry Now?” “Where the Boys Are,” “My Happiness,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own,” “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” and the rest—and as Francis’s gorgeous, controlled-yet-sexy, smoothyet–emotionally complex voice filled the car, the decorum in the music quarreled in my head with memories of hearing about her rape when I was young. Sadly—and this is, of course, partly generational—when summoning Francis I recall the trauma first, then the songs. (Just as she feared might happen.) I vaguely associated her with a story I’d replayed many times in my youth, of a female singer who’d been assaulted—I think that there was some drug abuse, also—and who was so debilitated by the attack that she could no longer sing. In the studio, while trying to record, she found herself unable to complete verses, simple phrases even, and the producer was obligated to piece together the songs, surgeon-like, using whatever bits and pieces of singing he was able to get on tape.
The story scared me, less for the attack than for the result: a powerful voice in pieces on the ground, able to be reassembled but at what cost? Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s cracked dinner plate—his brutally powerful metaphor for his own nervous collapse—the singer was unalterably damaged, could never perform again as she used to. A voice that once embodied personality, sensibility, communion with the outside world and with others, now suppressed. My story may be apocryphal, or I may have revised it over the years in my lurid imagination, beginning with Francis’s assault and creating a general narrative of collapse, a voice, then a scream denied, and then silence.
On October 30, 1981, Francis appeared on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand 30th Anniversary Special lip-syncing to a medley of her hits. Clark was a longtime and close friend of Francis’s, yet the comeback was bittersweet: by that point she’d spent thousands of dollars on doctors, most of whom told her she would never sing again because of the damage incurred during the nasal operation. She felt that her career was over. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said to Scott. “Then eight days ago I was talking to a man I date about the whole ordeal of the rape and operation, and I began to cry. I just broke down and the floodgates opened.” Francis acknowledged that this was the first time she’d wept about the rape, and then, released, she wept also about the trial, the operation, and the murder of her brother George, in May of that year. (George Franconero, Jr., was a former district attorney and government informant who was murdered by Mafia hit men.)
The following day, Francis was walking on a Manhattan street with the same man. She was startled to see that she was singing to herself “What I Did For Love,” from A Chorus Line— surprised because after her operation she hadn’t had the range to even consider attempting such a song. She abruptly stopped walking, and, in the middle of the block, amidst the din of the city, turned to her companion and told him, “I can sing!”
Then I got into my car and turned on the
stereo tape of an album I’d recorded 10
years ago. And I sang along with it. My
voice was as good or better than when I’d
done the recording.
Francis claimed that the improvement wasn’t a gradual thing but was, remarkably, instantaneous. “Magical,” she said. “I swear it was a miracle. All of a sudden my voice was back. I’m not a religious girl, but I believe in God now. I stopped the car and telephoned my father and my manager. I told my manager to book me back in the Westbury Music Fair. And he did…. It’s my way of overcoming the fear of the rape. I know it’s paranoid, but I’ll have two bodyguards with me. And I’ll drive home two hours every night rather than stay in a motel.
“But I’m really happy and elated. I can sing again. And I can work again!” The press releases that Francis’s agent issued at the time ran with this story—it appeared in Billboard and other media outlets—in the hopes that this redemptive account of a voice regained would be the triumphant narrative carrying Francis forward.
• • •
A voice can be both fragile and resilient, and the songs it might sing take many shapes, some full-throated, some in a minor key searching for a way to resolve. The man who assaulted Francis ordered her not to scream for at least half an hour after he left the room, or he’d come back to kill her. Kathleen Hannah didn’t need permission to scream; by the patriarchal generation into which Francis was born, and by her assailant, she was denied Hannah’s roiling outrage. Francis’s father considered her damaged, dismissed her; her attacker vanished along with the opportunity for justice.
Francis pressed on with her career, though the going was rough. In the late 1970s she was diagnosed with manic depression and would ultimately stay in seventeen different hospitals for treatment, a fraught period during which she became suicidal. In 1984 she reemerged in the public eye with her best-selling autobiography Who’s Sorry Now? The remainder of her career has seen Francis record sporadically, score the odd European hit, release archival recordings on her own label, Concetta Records, devote her time to various social causes, and write and publish another memoir. She lives in Florida and has retired from performing. “I no longer do concerts because I just can’t sing as well as I used to,” she said recently. “I would never want to disappoint the fans who have been so good to me throughout my life.”
What is a voice? Is it a sound produced by vocal cords, or is it the way one lives one’s life? Some fans let Francis’s rich mezzo-soprano take them back to their past, dazed with nostalgia for those years, for a more innocent time; others hear in her voice a soundtrack to an era so far away as to feel stiffly unreal. Still others hear survival. By enduring, by living each day in the past and the present, Francis gives voice to other victims of sexual assault, countless other silenced and fearful women who might read her books, watch her interviews, listen to her songs and sturdy performances—urbane, wistful, immaculate, aching in her early years, bruised and hesitant but still strong, and now knowing, in her later years—and hear what it means to be alive.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Kat Smith