Deana Carter
The Chain

(Vanguard)

First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2007, Volume 14, #10

Written by John Metzger

With her 2005 endeavor The Story of My Life, Deana Carter seized control of her career. Although she didn’t completely redefine herself as an artist, she did make the case quite clearly that she has a lot more to say than the title of her debut Did I Shave My Legs for This? otherwise would suggest. Despite its flaws, The Story of My Life was more personal and revealing than anything she had concocted previously. At first glance, her fifth studio effort The Chain seems designed simply to bide time until her muse strikes again. Filled with cover songs that run the gamut from Roy Orbison’s Crying to Waylon Jennings’ Good Hearted Woman to Neil Young’s Old Man, the outing finds Carter paving a rather difficult path as she tackles material that inseparably is bound to other artists.

None of the cuts featured on The Chain is, perhaps, a more daunting undertaking than Roy Orbison’s Crying. Not surprisingly, Carter’s rendition, like the countless others that have come before it, falls far short of the mark. Carter’s arrangement is polished and smooth, so much so that she seriously diminishes the song’s dramatic tension. Instead of a heartbroken, tormented wail, she turns it into a pristine and pretty blast of overwrought melancholia. Using the tune to open The Chain was an equally unwise move, but fortunately, the collection improves as it progresses.

The key to understanding The Chain comes from knowing Carter’s frame of reference. Her father, who appears throughout the album, is none other than Fred Carter, Jr., a renowned session guitarist who performed on the original rendition of Orbison’s Crying as well as on Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer and Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay. In other words, the songs that Deana Carter chose to cover are those with which she has lived for her entire life. The Chain is, then, a tribute of sorts to her dad as well as to the musicians with whom he frequently collaborated.

Still, the fact remains that, in making The Chain, Carter couldn’t have picked a more difficult slate of songs to tackle, and although she enlisted the help of Shooter Jennings, Jessi Colter, and George Jones, to name a few of her guests, the set sometimes struggles to maintain its momentum. Her duet with Kris Kristofferson on Help Me Make It through the Night, for example, is less desperate than it ought to be, and the way in which she swaps lyrics with Paul Simon’s son Harper on The Boxer feels overly contrived. On the other hand, Love Is Like a Butterfly, on which she is paired with Dolly Parton, flutters along in an ebulliently perky fashion, much as one might expect. Elsewhere, she and John Anderson inject a sense of steamy playfulness into Swingin’, and by slowing down Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again considerably, she shifts its perspective from joyous freedom to claustrophobic weariness. Over the course of the set, Carter dutifully highlights the music that helped to shape her career, and while The Chain undeniably would have benefitted from a grittier outlook, it nonetheless helps to bring the influential moments of her life into perspective.

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Ratings

1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!

Copyright © 2007 The Music Box