Song of the Day: Lucie Thorne, “Big Decision”

Lucie Thorne is a female folk-rock singer-songwriter who grew up in Tasmania and got her start in Melbourne, Australia. She writes mostly quiet songs, variously autobiographical, introspective and intelligent, emotionally dense and intense, with a few more or less topical or political songs scattered in the mix, and she sings regularly – or at least did in her earlier work – of relationships between women.

All of which inevitably suggests comparisons with Ani DiFranco. Ani must be a sort of bugaboo for female folk-rock musicians who began their career in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the inevitable point of comparison, and a hard act to follow. But in fact, beyond what is there in that bare outline, I see few points of comparison between the two. Thorne’s music just sounds different. That said, there is no escaping the overlap between the following song and Ani’s “You Had Time,” about which I wrote recently…

Lucie Thorne, “Big Decision” – from Botticelli Blue Eyes (2002)

Where Ani’s song opened with her plinking on the piano, Thorne begins by plinking on what I think is a variety of kalimba. In both, the tune is then picked up by the guitar. But the powerful similarities between the two songs come in the lyrics (those for “Big Decision” are below, those for “You Had Time” in my previous post), in the story they tell. In both, the singer has to confront their “you,” their lover, with their “big decision.” And in both, the singers have to acknowledge that they don’t love the other as much or in the same way. And in both, the decision is, as Thorne puts it, “thank you much more than you know / but I’m gonna go.”

Both are tender about it, loving, sad, but still they’re “going to go.”  Though perhaps, just perhaps, we can hear in Thorne’s repeated statement that she’s “gotta go / going to go” someone who knows they ought to go, says they are “going to go,” but can’t quite bring themselves to leave. Not yet. Just one verse more, one moment more with you…

Filed under: Song of the Day, Australia, folk-rock, music

Song of the Day: Ani DiFranco, “You Had Time” (updated)

Ani DiFranco features prominently on a wide range of my playlists—from the one for politics to “faves,”  from love songs to the one for songs that seem to be about me. And of course the playlists for love, for ex-girlfriends and for heartbreak, on all of which appears this song:

Ani DiFranco, “You Had Time” – from Out of Range (1994)

Village Voice described the album as “Pound for pound, the funniest, hurtingest Ani DiFranco outing thus far.” Certainly true at the time, though perhaps no longer. I might pick Up Up Up Up Up Up (1999)—or possibly the earlier Puddle Dive (1993)—as funniest, and Little Plastic Castle (1998) as hurtingest, though there’s plenty of competition for the latter title. But while Out of Range may no longer be the funniest or hurtingest, it remains clearly one of if not the finest and most consistent of all DiFranco’s albums, and my usual choice for introducing anyone to her work.

A common critical take on DiFranco is that she is perhaps too productive for her own good. Her output of an album every year or so means that each album includes a few less successful tracks; if she put albums out a bit less often, the argument goes, she’d be able to pack each album with a stronger selection of tracks. Rolling Stone once described her work as slack, meaning I think her musical craft within each song, but while many might quibble with that, it is true that her album construction, her willingness to edit herself at that level, does seem to many to be… slack.

The common response of Ani’s fans to this critical take is: phooey. They—I—would rather have more albums from her than less, and a second-rate track or somewhat uneven album by Ani is more engaging and interesting than most of the other stuff that’s out there. I think what’s going on here actually—in the disconnect between the critical and fan responses to Ani’s work—is a conflict between different ideas of musical production and consumption, between ideas of what music is and how it should be, how it should work in our culture/society. But that’s a topic I’ll have to defer to another time, another column…

One of the things, though, that makes Out of Range so successful and such a good introduction to Ani’s work is that there’s less filler, fewer minor tracks on it than on any of her other albums. Except perhaps for Little Plastic Castles—which I tend to feel may be her solidest album from a purely musical/critical perspective, but which seems to me… it’s difficult to say—the least Ani of all her albums? Less typical, anyway. Out of Range is very typical of Ani’s work in the 1990s, archetypal even—and so a great place to start with her music, even though she has been moving in different directions in her more recent work.

I suppose, really, that Canon, her two-disc collection of “canonical” tracks—a “greatest hits” for someone who has never had a hit in the conventional sense—is the obvious choice for an introduction to Ani’s work, but I’m a bit old school; I tend to prefer to discover artists and their music in the way that they discovered and created it, album by album, rather than in compilations. Out of Range has a coherence to it that I find appealing in that way. And, of course, the slacker tracks on any album are part of Ani’s work too, and you miss that aspect of the relationship between Ani and her audience with Canon.

Well, so much for the album. What of the song, what of “You Had Time”?

Filed under: Song of the Day, autobiography, folk-rock, heartbreak, love, music, Nick Hornby