Claire Holley
Dandelion
YepRoc YEP 2051
By Maranne Ebertowski
 Native Mississippian Claire
Holley tells tales from the "deep deep South" with
locusts still ringing in her ear, or so she explains in "Waving
Goodbye." Waving goodbye to the legends and ghosts of Dixie
is she clearly wanted from a very early age, but things are usually
not that easy:
Locusts ringing in my ear takes me back
To the days when I was a kid
in the deep deep south
You ask me why I take it in
Cause I'm gonna die...
In my mind I'm waving goodbye
In my mind I'm taking a plane outta here
Most of Holley's songs on Dandelion are tormented
"getting outta here" songs. Sometimes she wants to
escape with a complete stranger - sometimes she just wants to
leave. With the delta-bluesy opener "6 Miles To McKenney,"
she sets the tone loud and clear. At a gasoline station at 6
miles from McKenney, a woman in a "rusty old wagon"
and with "hair long and wild" in boots and army green
jeans, distracts her attention from the "chicken under
heating lamps" and sets her in the right me-Thelma-you-Louise
mood to "see us riding in that wagon together/ waving to
the man at the gasoline station/blowing by every sign../6 miles
to McKenney."
Not only Holley wants to get "outta here," other
people do as well. Like the man and the woman who meet at "Henry's"
for the first time and "as the drinks came they found more
and more to say, from the movies, to the kids, to the pictures
on the wall." After the last call Henry sees them walk off
together and"took a drag and wiped down the bar. Then he
counted all the money in the jar."
This moody and folky song, all acoustic guitar, rhodes piano
and "barclappers," leads up to "Sugar," a
loving, melancholy, steel-drenched school reminiscence of a
girl called Sugar Wheeland who stuttered, talked a lot about
her cello playing sister, "never cut out of school on football
days" and probably wanted to get "outta here"
as badly as the singer/songwriter. And some days, when riding
to her old school ground, Holley can still "see her wave
her sleepy hand over at me."
"Waiting For The Whales" to come has the singer
sitting uncomfortably on a boat after she "Had a big old
breakfast ham and eggs/ Now I'm regretting every bit of it/
Cause the boat is rocking good/ Waiting for the whales to come."
It's a pleasantly rocking blues song with a humourous undercurrent:
after all, Holley could have done very nicely without this, thank
you very much, but she's all dressed up with nowhere to go and
"paid my money now/ I'm waiting for the whales to come."
It gets more serious in "Love Never Came," a bitter
child memory where the singer goes back to her old town where
people don't know her anymore and sees an old lover from a distance.
When I was a little child
the preacher told me lies
I can't forgive him now
I won't forgive him now
Cause I was blind and then I could see
But love never came to me, love never came.
Still, she's looking for redemption rather than revenge.
My money and my time
I'd leave them all behind
if you'd ease my worried mind
Please ease my worried mind.
Holley reveals more bittersweet childhood memories in "Playground,"
which strikes me as a Southern rural version of Grandmaster Flash's
"The Edge." Holley's playground is littered with "bottles
in paper bags all around" and on the nearby churchyard she
sees "Rusted out vans, cockeyed cars, hatchbacks with missig
parts" and, then, there are the "kids on the merry-go-round
" who are "still making deliveries / Though the sun
went down an hour ago." She observes all this with "Red
paint splattered on the street/ like blood underneath my feet."
In the next song, "The Singer," we find Holley
on her way home, when suddenly a tune on the radio reminds her
of an old lover:
When children's eyes are fading from a mother's nursery
rhymes
I'm riding in a taxi on a quiet city street
And in the car a memory comes rushing back to me
From a simple little tune the one that reminds me of you.
After a brief and pleasant instrumental interlude, "Tread
Softly," Claire Holley leads us into the really heavy emotional
territory of "Waving Goodbye," a song which in my opinion
should have opened this album. As Holley thought otherwise,
this writer finds herself with a couple of loose ends to tie
up: the closig song "The Deep" and the title song "Dandelion."
Whilst in "Waiting For The Whales To Come," Holley
was bored with the giant mamals, in "The Deep" she
suffers Jonah's fate and gets swallowed by one, which, unfortunately,
doesn't make any sense to me and leaves me with not much more
than a taste of saltwater in my mouth.
So what about "Dandelion," a song with a delightful
South American touch and with "Me and the bees know a good
thing when we see it" as maybe the best line on the album?
The song is colorful and pretty and hopeful, not a bum note
to detect, still or, rather, because of that, it sounds oddly
out of place on an album that is as brooding and dark as Dandelion.
As much as "Waving Goodbye" should have been the opener,
"Dandelion" should have been the closure.
The question that haunts me after listening to this magnificent
acoustic "deep deep southern" album is, why is it called
Dandelion ? Why not Waving Goodbye or Outta
Here ? But, then again, maybe the simple answer is that
Holley and the bees see a good thing when I don't and I'm just
missing the point. Dandelion is a deliciously crafted
album by a fine singer-songwriter who would not surprise me by
turning up some great fiction later in life.
www.Claireholley.com
www.yeproc.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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