The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @JamieLanger for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
The first album I heard by Kelly Willis was 1999’s What I Deserve back in 2014. Lee Ann Womack had released a fantastic album called The Way I’m Livin’, and to me the highlight was “Not Forgotten You.” Turns out that song was written by Bruce Robison, who is married to Kelly Willis, and her version is the most well-known of its covers. Since first hearing that album I’ve become a huge Kelly Willis fan. It took me a few years to listen to her first three albums, of which Bang Bang is the second. These major label country albums seemed to be so rarely-discussed in comparison to her later Americana albums that I assumed that they were the result of her being forced into a mainstream country mold before her songwriting blossomed and she started working with the likes of Gary Louris of the Jayhawks and Chuck Prophet.
And in a sense they were; she says in an interview with John Hiatt on the TV show Sessions at West 54th that she lacked confidence and the ability to finish songs by herself. She also mentions in that interview that she “didn’t know how to communicate with people in the studio.” Despite being a “pet project” for legendary producer and record executive Tony Brown, the albums didn’t sell. Her first album was the only one to even chart at #64; “Baby Take a Piece of My Heart” from Bang Bang was her highest charting single, making it to #51 on the US country charts. Her third album she was released from MCA and she hasn’t been on a major label since.
All of this makes Bang Bang sound like a failure, but it’s not. When I finally got around to listening to it, I was shocked by how good it is. It didn’t sell, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why. I consider myself somewhat of an aficionado of this era of mainstream country music, and this is one of the best examples of it I’ve heard. A lot of that comes down to Willis’s voice. There’s something so pure and powerful about it. I’ve always been impressed with her ability to convey the emotion in a song without becoming overwrought. I think the best example of this is “Sincerely (Too Late to Turn Back Now)." The song was written by Steve Earle and Robert Earl Keen, in what from what I can tell is their only songwriting collaboration. Willis gives a performance on the track that does justice to two of the best songwriters of that period.
Willis has been compared to Dwight Yoakam frequently, and you can hear some of that on this album. You might expect to hear similarities to Yoakam on the two songs co-written by his frequent collaborator Kostas, but for me it’s all about the album opener “I’ll Try Again,” which has a rockabilly feel that she explored more on her first album, Well Travelled Love. Jim Lauderdale co-wrote that song, and his other song on the album, “Not Afraid of the Dark,” is probably the best example on this album of one of my favorite aspects of Willis’s music. That song just feels like a Jim Lauderdale song. Too often the Nashville country music production pipeline turns even good songs into indistinguishable mush; I’ve always appreciated that when Willis sings something by another songwriter she doesn’t run roughshod over it like her voice gives her the power to do, but works within it to make her version distinct.
Her own songs are always highlights of her albums, and that’s true of this one, even though she only has one co-write, “Baby Take a Piece of My Heart.” It’s easy to see why this was the “hit,” and it is probably the song on this album that reminds me most of her later work. Finally, I should mention her version of Joe Ely’s “Settle For Love.” It’s one of my favorite songs, and Kelly Willis does the definitive version on this album, in my opinion. She doesn’t have the same gruffness in her voice that Ely does in his original, but it doesn’t feel lightweight; her more expressive voice gives it more depth.
After Bang Bang, Willis had a small role in the Tim Robbins movie Bob Roberts. Then in 1993 she released Kelly Willis, her last album on MCA, to similarly disappointing sales. Six years later What I Deserve was released on the( at the time) indie label Rykodisk to critical acclaim. It also happened to sell more than any of her major label records, as did her next album, Easy. On these albums Willis shifted to more of an Americana sound, covering people like Nick Drake, Kirsty MacColl and Iggy Pop rather than solely country artists. She also began writing more of her own songs, typically writing or co-writing at least half of the tracks on her albums. It’s wonderful that she was able to find more success with these records on her own terms and they are as good or better than Bang Bang. Still, I can’t help that that album has been overlooked. It’s a lot of fun to hear her tackle some different genres, sounding almost like a guileless Carlene Carter. I don’t expect it to beat Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, but I hope that at least a few people have discovered a pretty great album.
