STILL ASKING, STILL TELLING
Michelle Shocked rises again with three new albums and a renewed path through roots, rights, and dev
Michelle Shocked is a rare bird in this day and age: a left-wing evangelical Christian. Dunno if she'd put it that way, or want me to, but it's clear that the veteran singer-songwriter's dedication to the antiwar movement, human rights, and freedom of expression equals her devotion to the Lord. The Texas-born L.A. resident, who attends an African-American church, speaks freely about being "saved" but doesn't accept the typical Pentecostal notions that homosexuality is wrong and women are inferior beings. At a time when a persistent cultural meme, however false, holds that "liberal" and "Christian" are far apart, her convictions might make both sides uncomfortable in turn. But all she's doing is living her life, her way.
True, this erstwhile runaway, world traveler, and lifelong activist has always done that, but these days her path is free of some obstacles - onerous major-label contract, bad marriage - she'd attempted to negotiate around for years. In some ways, Michelle Shocked is just beginning to see the possibilities - personal, political, and professional - in self-determination.
"I'm sick of people telling me things can't be done, when, in fact, I just need to figure out how to do it my way," says the buoyant, friendly musician during an interview at her pristine, light-filled Craftsman home near Koreatown. On nearby Pico Boulevard, black, Asian, and Latino cultures and faiths intermingle, at times incongruously, which suits her highly observant songwriter's mind just fine.
Having retrieved the rights to her early albums after leaving Mercury Records in the late '90s, she's finished reissuing them - including her 1986 debut, The Texas Campfire Tapes, and the acclaimed 1988 followup, Short Sharp Shocked - on her own imprint, Mighty Sound. This Tuesday, she will unleash not one, not two, but three new recordings: the roots-rockin' Don't Ask Don't Tell; Got No Strings, dreamy-to-gritty Western-swing-ified versions of songs from Disney films; and Mexican Standoff, a blend of blues and Latin styles evoking a rollicking evening at a cozy Austin dive. The set is also sold as Threesome, a $33 "value package" for devoted fans.
"It's all roots-based, tradition-based," she says. "What I set out to do, even early in my process with Mercury, was to define music by its feel rather than by its style. I'm not doing it to be perverse," she adds. "I'm following my own path. And I'm hoping that, by the time I get through this life, I will have invented a new genre called 'Michelle Shocked music,' and people will know what I'm talking about."
Releasing three collections at once is part of that vision. She says she conceived her first series of proper albums - Short Sharp Shocked, Captain Swing, and Arkansas Traveler (Campfire Tapes was a live recording) - as a trilogy "meant to show where I'd come from." This new trilogy shows where she's been. Each exudes a palpable joy, and they all share her versatile, often playful vocalizing - jazz-pop coo, R&B growl, punky yelp - and carefully shaped musical textures: vivid horns, distorted bluesy guitar, swinging strings, artful percussion.
Shocked offered a preview earlier this month at the Mint, where she and her band - trumpeter/percussionist Rich Armstrong, drummer Petur Smith, keyboardist Peter Adams, bassist Lucas Cheadle, and guitarist Josh Grange - played all new songs during the nearly two-hour first of two sets. Fans soaked up the unfamiliar tunes, laughing when she impishly explained that Don't Ask Don't Tell was her "secret divorce album," referring to the split from her husband of 13 years, writer-editor Bart Bull, which was finalized last year. Grinning out from under a black fedora, she added, "The divorce is not a secret, but the fact that it inspired the album is a secret."
The marriage was troubled, she tells me later. Now happily in love with commercial illustrator David Willardson, her creative director, she doesn't sound bitter but still makes it seem like a narrow escape. "The vicious cycle of a codependent alcoholic marriage was one that I was all too prepared and set up to enable," reflects Shocked, who is currently sober. "The enabling was the way that I could've spent the rest of my life, you know? Because enabling makes you feel like a victim, but it also makes you feel like you've got a lot of power and control. So to be given the wisdom to stop drinking" - which she credits to her faith - "allowed me to see the pattern, not just of his dysfunction, but of mine."
The divorce actually energized her beliefs. Shocked had filed for divorce in California, where she says she had a "watertight prenuptial agreement." But her husband went to Louisiana, where she also has a home, and "hired the dirtiest divorce lawyer in the most famous divorce case [in New Orleans]," she says. "All the lawyers I tried to hire were afraid of going up against him." That's when she started praying.
"People always talk about making deals with God," she says. "I don't make deals with him. I found a way of praying that is connected to what's called, in this evangelical tradition, 'the Word.' You read through [the Bible], and you say, 'A-ha! Right here you promised this, so I'm calling on you.'" For her, it worked. "I finally found this gal," Shocked says. "She was like, 'Oh, please. He's won some. I've won some.' And we nailed him."
All this drama isn't obvious on Don't Ask Don't Tell. In fact, the opener, "Early Morning Saturday," is a sensual, jazz-brushed celebration of daybreak lovemaking. The theme soon emerges, however, although masked by humorous metaphor ("Used Car Lot"), storytelling ("Evacuation Route"), and blissful kiss-off ("Hardly Gonna Miss Him") rather than dripping with vitriol like such classic breakup collections as Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear or Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks.
Other new numbers date to the turn of the millennium, when Shocked and collaborator Fiachna O'Braonain wrote 30 songs in 30 days for a New Year's Eve gig in New York City. These are generally looser and more whimsical, like the Rickie Lee Jones-esque juju blues "Don't Ask," about the night the singer "got changed into a rabbit," and the leadoff from Mexican Standoff, "Lonely Planet," sung in Spanish and inspired by a travel guide. "You know more Spanish than you think you do," she said mischievously when introducing the tune at the Mint. "Taco. Burrito. Gracias. But if you need a guidebook to tell you how to propose to your sweetheart, you might wanna take a step back."
She was chatty during the show but didn't talk politics - a switch for someone who regularly performs to support progressive causes and tends to, as she puts it, "helplessly editorialize" on stage. She's rerouted that impulse into a zine titled Jams; the issue she gave me features such articles as Rev. Rich Lang's "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" and Shocked's interview with bluesman Taj Mahal.
Yet she still mixes politics and music. It's in the imagery of "Elaborate Sabotage," a ruined-romance song invoking those long-ago Frenchmen who threw boots into machines to force factory breaks, and in the design of the charming Got No Strings, which incorporates her advocacy for the church-based relief movement Save Africa's Children. Indeed, she couldn't completely separate her faith, life, and work even if she wanted to. They're not just intertwined; each strengthens the others.
"I bought into this idea that I needed to be all things to all people," she says. "And now I've decided I need to be all things for me."Published: 06/16/2005
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