An Opry grand dame and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer are among today’s collaborative artists.
“Superlover”
Allison Russell featuring Annie Lennox
Written by JT Nero and Allison Russell
Kevin John Coyne: What a beautiful pair of vocal performances and what a gorgeous arrangement.
Wow, do I wish they were in service of a better song. I understand the challenges right now to trying to capture the moment and make any kind of appeal for hope and love. Both of those are getting their asses kicked right now and there wasn’t even a moment listening to this where I found a sliver of faith to latch on to that things will get better.
Maybe that’s because what we need right now isn’t to feel hope. It’s to process our grief. C
Jonathan Keefe: Russell’s as empathetic and intuitive a songwriter as we are fortunate enough to have within the broader country universe, and she’s uncommonly gifted at drawing parallels between her lived experience and broader socio-political trends. Lyrically, I don’t know that, “Tears of rage, tears of grief / Palestine to Israel to Tennessee / We need a superlover,” is her most fully-realized conceit, and it opens this collaboration on awkward footing.
The melody and gorgeous harmonies between Russell and Annie Lennox– their vocal tones compliment each other in the most exquisite ways, and Lord do they emote the absolute fire out of this– do a lot of heavy lifting here, at least until some of the more evocative and effective images come to bear.
Still, the “We can be superlovers,” refrain just isn’t landing for me. I don’t question the sincerity or the conviction in Russell’s or Lennox’s performances, but there’s something about this that strikes me as cringe in the way Gen Z often responds to celebrity political activism. This isn’t that indefensible celebrity “Imagine” montage during COVID lockdown or anything so egregious. It just doesn’t quite work, as lovely as it may sound. C
“Who Needs You”
Jeannie Seely, Hannah Dasher, and Tiera Kennedy
Written by Jeannie Seely
JK: What we have here is an absolute banger of a track– seriously, I was not expecting the arrangement on this to go so hard with its honky-tonk– and a trio of delightfully bawdy performances in search of a far better song. It’s to the credit of their commitment to the bit that Seely, Dasher, and Kennedy damn near turn this into something. It’s fully within Seely’s and Dasher’s respective wheelhouses, but it’s a fun surprise to hear Kennedy cut loose the way she does here.
But there’s just not much that they actually cut loose on. The chorus is just four repetitions of the line, “So who needs you,” which simply isn’t enough of a kiss-off to stand on its own, and the verses don’t have much more meat on their bones than that. At its best, this sounds like three old friends shooting the shit about their no-good men, and that can work when there’s at least some kind of a backstory other than Jeannie Seely deserving her flowers. B-
KJC: I liked Jeannie Seely’s solo version from 2017 well enough, but this works so much better as a “Bonfire at Tina’s” style joint.
I’m going to have to give some bonus points for Seely’s freewheeling ad libs and enthusiastic embrace of marijuana.
Seely’s bawdiness is legendary, yet it’s not a side of her that has appeared very often on record. She sounds here like a wise and battle scarred woman swapping stories with the next generation of heartbroken girls and reminding them that you only need one finger to wave goodbye at the louse as he walks out the door.
Honky tonk goodness, from start to finish. Can someone please coax Jeannie C. Riley back into the studio next? B+
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