By BRUCE BENNETT
According to country singer Laura Cantrell, opting to ply her trade in New York City rather than in her native Nashville, the home of country music, has worked to her advantage.
Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal
Laura Cantrell at her home in Jackson Heights. She will perform Thursday at Hill Country Barbecue in Midtown.
“Sometimes that little bit of separation from the subject you’re fascinated with gives you an ability to focus on it,” Ms. Cantrell said recently in her Jackson Heights apartment. For close to 11 years she has been focused on recording and performing music that reflects a Country Western curatorial acumen honed over a lifetime of enthusiasm. Her first three full-length albums, beginning with 2000′s “Not the Tremblin’ Kind,” earned her support and praise from the likes of Elvis Costello, They Might Be Giants, and especially the late English tastemaker John Peel, who made her a minor star in Britain when he called “Tremblin’ Kind” his “favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life” on his beloved radio program.
But in the six years since her 2005 release “Humming on the Flowered Vine” (her sole long-playing entry not released via the Brooklyn-based Diesel Only label, which is run by her husband, Jeremy Tepper), Ms. Cantrell has faced seismic shifts in both her personal and professional lives, beginning with the birth of her daughter in 2006. That arrival may initially have seemed like an impediment to her burgeoning music career, but in fact, Ms. Cantrell said, it proved auspicious.
“We’ve sort of been sitting out all the big changes,” she said. “The last wave of selling records in big stores and of artists at a certain tiny level having some presence in big retail is over. We had a great relationship here in New York with Tower Records and Virgin. I went and played in-stores at both of them. We caught the very last gasp of that before it went away. Now they’re gone.”
So it’s appropriate that Ms. Cantrell’s fourth full-length recording, which arrives this week, simultaneously courts history and progress. “Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music” compiles nine covers of songs popularized by the titular 91-year-old legend. It was recorded in Nashville using some of that city’s most ardent young traditionalist musicians. It is also Ms. Cantrell’s first full album that is primarily available in America.
Three years ago, Ms. Cantrell, 43 years old, released a download-only EP that, she said, pointed the way, if not to a clearer future, then at least to a more accountable one. “If you’re a little label then you know the heartbreak of going through a physical distributor,” she said. “Stock sits in a warehouse somewhere and you’re never getting paid cause of the way the returns work. That old model was a difficult way for [small] record companies to exist. The digital way kind of removes all of those issues and allows you to get paid sort of on time. The music business has historically been a great way to lose money so we’ve sort of been more selective about how we’re going to lose money and how we’re going to make it back. Such is the world these days.”
Meanwhile Ms. Cantrell’s creative world has, she said, continued to benefit from her 1989 relocation to New York. “I feel part of a larger roots-music community here in New York that’s not just about country music,” she said. “It’s record collectors, it’s radio people. And we get to see such great music in New York. I’ve seen every little phase of alternative country parade through the clubs of the Lower East Side over the years.”
For Teenage Fanclub drummer Francis MacDonald, whose own Shoeshine Records has released Ms. Cantrell’s Diesel Only recordings in Britain, the artist’s adopted city is as key to her identity as her Nashville roots. “Laura has a profound respect and appreciation for both the history of traditional country music, and of Nashville as a mecca,” Mr. MacDonald said. “But as an adopted New Yorker her artistic self has also been able feed on what a cool, happening, progressive, cosmopolitan city has to offer. Not least of which being the musicians to work with and songwriters to cover.”
Indeed, when Ms. Cantrell takes the stage at Manhattan’s Hill Country Barbecue on Thursday for a release party celebrating “Kitty Wells Dresses,” she will be backed by a local band with credits ranging from Ryan Adams and the Cardinals to Chrissie Hynde of fhe Pretenders, Ronnie Spector and Bruce Springsteen.
“Think of all the southern writers who had to flee the South to get anything done and come here have their new York period,” she said of her geographical separation from Tennessee. “I’ve just had a long, extended New York period.”
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