Linda Thompson
Proxy Music
STORY SOUND
When is a voice singing out not a voice singing out? When are the most nuanced lyrical elements of highly literate and intellectualized passion and rage silenced, yet still strong? When you’re a wounded, but never downed, wordy warrior like Linda Thompson, who lost her literal singing voice to the dire drudgery of spasmodic dysphonia, but pushed her cutting, incendiary, detail-oriented brand of writing—honed on post-folk classics with her then-husband Richard Thompson, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, as well as her 1985 solo debut, One Clear Moment—to new heights and humors on Proxy Music.
Starting with the piss-take that is its album cover (the pin-up glamor of Roxy Music’s record sleeves, done now with a scantily clad, 76-year-old Thompson), the London-born songwriter finds her proxies in a close-knit klatch of family and friends to verbally take the weight of her want, woe, and comic temperament. Her daughter Kami and son Teddy, latter-day folk goddess Eliza McCarthy, the children of her late friend and fellow folkie Kate McGarrigle (Rufus and Martha Wainwright), and more bring Thompson’s words to life in their own way without letting you forget that they’re serving a master’s voice. Listen to the catty “Darling This Will Never Do” ballad as sung by Rufus Wainwright. It certainly allows the vocalist to wrap his wriggly, bassoon-like voice around cool, cabaret-jazz chords—but its Thompson-written lyrics are equally elastic in meaning and twice as erudite as Wainwright’s usual fare.
Bop-operatic vocalist Martha Wainwright, too, benefits from Thompson’s piquant lyricism on the piano-driven “Or Nothing at All,” where the cold chill of love is better left to “a hundred men in their white coats / Who’d check you with their stethoscopes.” The true meta-beta story behind “John Grant,” sung by The Czars’ vocalist of the same name about a woman shoved aside in love by the titular Grant, must be hilarious if Proxy Music’s rendition is half as great. Though unbound and funny in a way she wasn’t allowed to be when recording with her husband (an ugly rock relationship that makes the mythology of Fleetwood Mac limp in comparison), Thompson’s lyrics are best served chilling and icy.
The likely autobiographical waltz of “The Solitary Traveller,” as sung by Kami Thompson, finds a so-called mean woman who’s lost her voice and her husband. Yet rather than feeling wronged, the Thompson lasses are enthralling with potential. “I’m alone now, you’d think I’d be sad / No voice, no son, no man to be had / You’re wrong as can be, boys; I’m solvent and free, boys / All my troubles are gone.” Though Linda Thompson’s fans would give their teeth to hear her voice ring out in song once more, by the end of Proxy Music, you’ll imagine that her rich and supple baritone was front-and-center as each singer breathes deep on each hard and humorous syllable.
