The
covers album is time-honored stopgap, and Susan Tedeschi's Hope
& Desire CD from last
year fits the mold perfectly. The blues belter/guitarist signed with
the Verve Forecast label in 2004 when she was pregnant with her
second child, Sophia, and her own material wasn't yet ready to
record. It had been several years since she'd put out new songs -
Wait for Me
came out in 2002 - and the label wanted some product.
"They were sort of in a hurry to get one together," Tedeschi said in an interview last week with the River Cities' Reader. So the label gathered Tedeschi and producer Joe Henry to pick some songs.
The
surprise is that Tedeschi's album isn't merely good for a covers
record; she has seized the songs and given them her own soul. There's
less reverence on the CD than a fiery passion, and only a curmudgeon
would dare call Hope & Desire
crass. From the Rolling Stones' "You Got the Silver" to the the
Dylan obscurity "Lord Protect My Child" to R&B classics such
as "Evidence," Tedeschi lives in these songs, exquisitely
balancing her phrasing with emotion. On Jerry Merrick's "Follow"
(which Richie Havens made famous), she sounds like she's singing
directly to the listener, as if her eyes are locked on yours.
"Susan Tedeschi's blessing and curse is that she sings remarkably like Bonnie Raitt, which makes this Berklee School of Music graduate both extraordinary but unfortunately still a student," Rolling Stone wrote in reviewing Hope & Desire. But the review singled out the Merrick track, raving, "Tedeschi wails with such conviction, force, and nuance that she nearly eclipses her teachers."
That was among the hardest songs to record, Tedeschi said: "It's a very simple song, but the complexity of the phrasing and the breathing and the emotion in it" made it a challenge. "It's almost more like a poem."
The CD came together quickly - just a few weeks between song selection and recording, which might sound particularly daunting considering that Tedeschi was only familiar with a handful of the album's 12 tunes beforehand. "I love Dylan," Tedeschi said of "Lord Protect My Child," "but I'd never heard that song."
The Stones track, in fact, was suggested in the studio and recorded an hour later. Tedeschi said that learning vocal parts is easy for her; "it's the guitar work that takes me a long time." And on Hope & Desire, she was only singing, with the guitar parts handled by Doyle Bramhall II and husband Derek Trucks.
It's hard to believe such a forceful singing voice shares the same body as Tedeschi's diminutive speaking voice. She's modest, as when she says her set on Friday at the River Roots Live festival will probably only be sprinkled with ballads. "I like to do a lot of upbeat stuff," she said, "so people, you know, aren't bored."
Boredom seems unlikely with Tedeschi performing. She's certainly not bored. Her sparse catalog - she has released just three albums of original material, including 1998's gold Just Won't Burn - speaks to both her investment in her music and her busy home life.
While many performers need fresh material to keep road life fresh, Tedeschi said she has no problem touring behind a record for several years. "I'm one of those bands that will tour an album for two years, because ... I love the material that I do," she said.
And her family keeps her busy. Her husband fronts his own eponymous band and also tours with Eric Clapton and the Allman Brothers Band. Trucks' and Tedeschi's bands will be sharing the bill for a northeastern tour this fall - the first time they've managed to match up their personal and professional lives for any extended period of time. "We're usually working around the Allman Brothers', or Eric Clapton's, schedule," Tedeschi said. "We really don't have a huge amount of say with those things.
"When we come home it's kind of like a hurricane. Our two buses come and drop off all this stuff."
Their two children often dictate the songwriting schedule. Many songs, she said, have been lost to the duties of motherhood. "And some of my new ideas, it's almost like children's songs," she said. "If I didn't have kids, I'd be writing more consistently. Because I have songs in my head every day."
Tedeschi hopes to finish a batch of songs over the remainder of the year and plans to head into the studio the first quarter of 2007.
She said that her covers record taught her a lot about songwriting. "It's given me a nice insight into some of the simplicity of the chords," she said, "yet some of the complexity of choosing how some of them go together."
The soul and R&B treatments have also forced her out of her blues comfort zone, and she thinks that the exercise might improve her songwriting. Yet with typical modesty, she caught herself making that promise and backtracked.
"Yeah, it'll probably ... be ... hopefully a little better."
For more information on Susan Tedeschi, visit (http://www.susantedeschi.com).
To listen to the River Cities' Reader interview with Tedeschi, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
