Non-Urgent

Go find another fool to love you,
The world is full of girls like me.
Find a fool take care of you,
Now that's a girl I'd like to see.
Who'll be the one, when all is said and done.
'Cause I know you will find another fool.

See if this is not familiar to you. You're in your car, and you've got your 6-CD thingy fully loaded, and on shuffle play. (Or you could be listening to your iPod, same thing, shuffle play, but I don't think it works in quite the same way.) So you get a few tracks of one, then a few tracks of another.

And then a song comes on, usually from a CD you don't hear that much. You've put it in for a change, but it's not something you've ever played to death. And it just sounds so fantastic, so beautiful, and song after song from it, random order, are not only good songs, but performed in a sublime, understated way, beautifully produced, stunning.

Kelly Willis' album Easy is like that for me. It's a largely acoustic affair, but it sounds like it was recorded in a fantastic room with the best microphones and sound engineer in the world. And everything about it is easy, it sounds so relaxed, nothing urgent about it. These songs sound like they were recorded by people who had all the time in the world, with nothing else they'd rather be doing.

Willis is one of those country music redheads who deserves a wider audience, but somehow manages to be too quirky, or something, to get mainstream appeal; and yet too Country for the Guardian don't-really-like-country-music crowd who will adopt the likes of Steve Earle and Gillian Welch, by dint of their worthy-but-dullness (when you see Steve Earle performing on the same stage as Joan Baez at some Radio 2 folkie do on BBC4, you know you've come to a Very Bad Place).

She did 3 albums on MCA, from 1990-93, the last of which was one of those self-titled career relaunch records. It was a good album, with one song, "Get Real" which is one of my all-time favourites:

Get real:
This ain't the way we used to feel;
What we once earned, we have to steal.
Conceal. It ain't real.

Come on,
We've been defending for so long.
I don't know who we're trying to con.
It's gone, so come on

It's a song that builds and builds, with the chorus being only subtly different from the verse, just slightly more intense, so that after the chorus it drops back into the verse like a sigh.

Since then, she's only recorded sporadically, on independent labels (which are probably owned by MCA, who knows, we've all seen the Wilco documento). Easy came out a couple of years ago.

Without being scientific about it, I'd say MCA were responsible for dropping more high-quality redheads than any other label. It's not just that they're evil, they're also stupid. Others in the same category as Willis are Bobbie Cryner, Lari White, and Joy Lynn White.

In fact I listened to both Joy Lynn and Kelly Willis on the way to work this morning, my CD collection being full of people who have been dropped by major labels. See, you might think you're trendy and exclusive, Mr Guardian Reader, but you only like people who have record deals.

I know what the problem with Kelly Willis is. She's got a great voice, but it's different, kind of nasal at times, with a bit of a yelp to it. It can grate a little on her less well produced records, but on Easy they've got it just right. Apart from "Find Another Fool," I think my favourite track is the opener:

If I left you, I wouldn't stay gone so long.
If I left you, I'd worry how you got along.
But you left me,
Alone here in my misery.
That's not somethin' I would do,
If I left you.

It's easy, is Easy, but it's also fresh, and it comes on in the car and it's like you've never heard it before, but you love it immediately. I've had it for quite a while now, and it's growing and growing on me.
There's something Nick Hornby wrote, in that 31 Songs book, which struck a chord with me, and I've been meaning to mention it for a while. Way back in the beginning of this blog, we talked about mystery as relates to music. I've long felt that young people today have it too easy, where discovering stuff is concerned, because in the age of the CD and the innernet, everything has been re-released, and everything is available. You don't have to search for things any more.
But Hornby points out that it doesn't make it easy, it makes it hard, because the problem with music these days is that all the shitbirds who work in marketing and advertising have this stuff available to them, and anything is likely to be picked up for an advert, or a movie, or a programme trail, or one of those "This year's Wimbledon" 5-minute edits, and the stuff is just coming out of the walls at you, banal in its ubiquity. I may be not as expressing it as well as him. But it means that the Velvet Underground, say ("I'm Sticking with You") can be as overexposed as one of those dull logo bands like Coldplay or Stereophonics (I don't know these people's music, but you see their logos everywhere, so I think of them as logo bands).

And the only alternative to all the crap coming out of the walls at you, on one of the millions of television channels or heavily rotated radio playlists, or in shops, is to seek out stuff by people too obscure to be picked up by the marketing guys.

When I was a teenager, I sort of looked up to my older sister and her group of friends, who were mostly male. And they had this thing about music, they were always looking for the heavy stuff, the difficult stuff. They had contempt for the Pink Floyds and the Genesises, they went for Focus and god knows what else. I didn't get it. But they used to call me a Thin Kid, because I liked the Velvets and the Stones, and the Beatles. Thin Kid music. Which I was quite proud of, because, back then, all my peers, as peers were wont to do, were into the stuff that was on the radio at the time, or on Top of the Pops, which I never have been.

But it's not about wearing your obscure tastes like a badge of pride, just because it means you can be snooty about Guardian readers and Stuart Maconie; and it's not about trying to make a career of it, like Andy Kershaw. It's about taking refuge, as Nick Hornby says, in areas of underexposure, about getting away from the Great Wash of noise that is the legacy of the MTV generation.

And it might mean you have mates in bands who aren't widely known, who record their own stuff and sell it at gigs, or it might mean you have impossible yearnings for obscure redheads who don't get to release many records but who make music that is just perfect. But it's a refuge, and it's a statement: you're never going to sit in the NEC, in that great barn, ever again, or the Milton Keynes Bowl, or a big stadium, because you've had enough of it, because it's everywhere and you don't want it to be.