Matraca Berg: Dreaming in Fields, Falling & Chasing The Angels

            I shouldn’t be writing this. It’s not right.

            You see, I first met Matraca Berg -- as Delbert McClinton wrote – in a warehouse in West L.A. She was, at 26, a wildly accomplished songwriter with several #1s, including her first written at 18 with no less than the legendary Bobby Braddock. She was on the verge of her debut record, and they’d called me to write the bio., to capture the story, the music and weave it into some kind of narrative essence.

            She was tall, thin, pretty. Giant eyes, brown hair tumbling down around a heart-shaped face – and when she looked, you knew she knew. Everything. She understood. It made her a powerful voice for young women self-reliant beyond their years, banging into real life and realizing the bruises that come with learning the hard way. Romantic in spire of knowing, willing to keep wading into the rivers of real life, she held a light on so many of the unseen: the late middle-aged beautician of “Alice in the Looking Glass,” the lost girlhood of “Appalachian Rain,” as well as the liquid desire of “I Got It Bad.”

            That was 20 years and several labels ago. A lot has happened. Life has deepened – to the good and the bad. Triumphs for certain – the first woman to write 5 #1s in a year, becoming a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame – as the tragedies deepend, too. Not that she talks about them, but they permeate many of the songs she writes.

          And I know. Of course I do… I’ve been there for all of it.

          See. Matraca Berg said to me in that parking lot that day all those years ago, as I was ruing moving to Nashville, knowing how cliquish it is and how not like the typical girl I am, “I’ll be your friend.” She meant it.

            I arrived July 3, my good silverware heavy in my carry-on bag – about the only possession I had of any real value – and the exhaustion all over me. Confronted with a sea of bad Christmas tree perms on the rush of women coming at me in the airport, I broke down crying in the arms of the man from Tennessee Car & Van Rental.

            July 4^th, I was at her Aunt Sudie’s house for chicken and too much family. An only child, I wasn’t used to the tangle of loud talk, big laughter and people pecking at each other, It didn’t matter, they took to me like they take to everyone.

            Since then, we’ve been through everything. Bad lovers, a husband who I’d written about since I was 19, illness, broken engagements, career success, bolstering each other and taking up against those who would detract when the friend wasn’t there.

            Matraca scored 5 #1s in a single year, won the CMA’s Song of the Year for “Strawberry Wine” and made her network tv debut on the “CMA Awards” with the aching ballad of recognizing the harshest part of old age  “Back When We Were Beautiful” that same night from the album Sunday Morning To Saturday Night. By the end of the year, that album wou;d be on TIME, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, People, The Tennessean and The Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Albums of the Year in ANY genre – and her label would be out of business.

            The best of times, the worst of times.

            An almost recluse, she’d had enough chasing the fame. She went home. Sunk into the complicated dynamics of extended family. Wrote more songs. Didn’t look back. Her ego didn’t need it; her soul couldn’t take the bruising.

            But, damn, she was still so good. Still a paper cut on your heart kind of wincing compositional proposition. As the best writing is, or should be. And so she remained. Even as she stayed out of view, hidden and thinking about what the Nashville she was raised in – one where the creatives only came out after dark, studiously avoiding the suits, Kristofferson had just risen from the janitorial ranks and Red Lane, Sonny Throckmorton, even  Mel Tillis who were regulars around her mother’s house – meant.

            See, Matraca Berg wasn’t raised like other kids. She was being dragged to recording sessions up and down Music Row by a single mom who knew her daughter had “game.” She was drafted for Neil Young’s snaggle-tooth hippie country Old Ways tour – along with Hargus “Pig” Robbins and Anthony Crawford , back-up singing with Mother Earth’s Tracy Nelson at Live Aid. She knows the difference, and she knows what’s gone.

            Which is why there’s The Dreeaming Fields, an elegy for too many ways of life. The title track is about her grandfather’s dairy farm – the scene of the virginity losing summerscape “Strawberry Wine” -- being parceled off for pre-fab houses, the family farm no longer a part of the America we live in, while “Racing The Angels” is a living person’s pining for one who has passed, palpable and passionate in the heartbreak and sustaining ardor and “Clouds” is the reality of knowing what’s coming, the tears and good-byes, yet willing the end even with the inevitable pain that’s comes with it.

            Matraca Berg has never been afraid of the pain. She recognizes the common currency among women is just thatL courage to move through it, to maintain dignity in the roughest places and the strength to withstand anything. On The Dreaming Fields opener, “If I Had Wings,” the long-suffering battered protagonist hits her limit: “Everyone knew one day it’d be him or me…” as she confesses, “My mother said call the preacher, I just said ‘Call the law…’,”

            These are hard scrabble women. They – like Berg – know no other way.

            It is not an easy life, but it is their’s, and they live it fully. On “You & Tequila,” the song’s heroine honors the hold that one certain someone has over her – “You & tequila make me crazy, run like poison through my veins/ One is one too many, one more is never enough…” – and buckles to the craving, knowing how bad the morning after’s gonna feel.

            Mortality, humanity, kindess, sadness. It is all part of the sum total. On “South of Heaven,” a mother whose son has been sent home covered by a flag sees no point in losing children to battles she can’t understand, for principles that have nothing to do with how she lives or holds her ground. “Father, You have given Your only son,” she sings as the voice of the woman whose truth is all recrimination and seering love for her child, “but you are not the only one…”

            To take a point and skewer it through the listener’s thorax is no small feat. To do it with an essentialism of how we all live is an art. Matraca Berg is a humanist, an everywoman, a seeker and the keeper of people’s secrets. That she keeps them is one thing, that she also recycles them into compelling glimpses of life – the quavering places, moments of doubts,  total surrender – is why she is, inspite of her hiding, so important.

            Not that it’s always dire. “Fall Again” is the fault=line of desire and desolation. You hear how brittle the love has become, and how much she needs to set it ablaze – not to burn it to the ground, but to rekindle what was there. The urgency is one of not losing something so vital, and it comes through in torrents of unquenchable desire.

            Indeed, even the piquant “Your Husband’s Cheating On Us” – a sketch of the other woman’s visit to the long-suffering wife – is a portrait of turnabout in the realm of betrayal. The irony of the hunter getting quartered by the game is a delicious send-up of the wronged being abetted by the betrayer.

            Who we betray, how we do it, indeed, how often the betrayer is ourselves… She understands. Indeed, the woman whose first album in 14 years takes its seeds from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, from Neil Young’s Harvest, from Emmylou Harris’ Pieces of the Sky recognizes how often in doing the seemingly right thing, we so sell ourselves short.

            The Dreeaming Fields contains “Oh, Cumberland,” a song that was originally recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Emmylou Harris for their Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol 3 – and it is a love song to a place one has left, but can never leave. In a place where the dream is theoretically to be had, there is that nagging sense of loss of self, a genuine feeling of ache for where one comes from, for places that make one feel whole and settled.

            It is not about the reality we’re sold – glossy Hollywood living, which mostly only makes one tired, but the roots of where we come from, rivers that barely move and places we can stop and just be. Exhaustion permeates the chase, comfort anchors where we’re from.

            Where we’re from is the whole point, Who we are at our core is everything.

            In a world hurling itself down the stairs of something so two-dimensional, so devoid of deeper meaning, but ooh the shiny high gloss coating of faux emotion and almost reality, we can forget who we are at our broken places – until the dazzle wears off and we’re even more empty than when we started, another cure-all failing us.

            It’s at those times that an album like The Dreaming Fields matters. It gently, humbly, honorably tells us the truth… wincing for us when it stings and encouraging us softly when we need the help to go on. Sometimes it is in the knowing that we can begin to heal, to climb, to seek.

            To me, those have always been the records that mattered. Why I return to Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates or Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, Julie Miller’s “Broken Things” or Alex Bevan’s Springboard again and again… in the lost hours… looking for equanimity and balance in the flood.

            To have someone who knows, who sees and who tells us it’s okay, and it’s up to us to change the dynamic, but also suggesting that we can: that’s everything. For Matraca Berg, who reached back into a dusty paradigm of resonant steel, guitars that waver, pianos that ripple and sustain and vocals that echo like they’re coming down a holler, it is everything, too.

            She knows the difference, and like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl, she has taken this album and held 11 matches aloft, hoping the flame will contain everything she loves about one of Nashville’s most fertile periods musically – so people will see, will know, will breathe and embrace something that matters so much to her.

            In the end, what she loves is what makes us strongest in our banged up places. All you have to do is listen. That’s how powerful these spare songs are. But don’t listen to me… I’m the girl she befriended straight off the plane, and surely I couldn’t be objective, even with all the years of writing for places like The Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, Trouser Press and CREEM, Musician and Tower Pulse, indeed so many great music magazines too long gone, but absolutely measures of the things in music that makes us more as people.

            Making us more is what music is supposed to do. Listening to this record, I remember that. I wonder about the futility of greatness cutting through the dissonance, and I don’t care. It’s why I’m writing about something I shouldn’t for people who might not be able to embrace passion for small rules that make them feel safe – but miss the hardest tilt of the best stuff of what music is, how songs can hit you and the reasons records like this truly matter.

“Oh, Cumberland”, Matraca Berg

There are songs that take you hostage, quietly and without notice. It always starts out with a hush, something that you almost don't notice - until you realize that you're on eternal repeat and the thought of getting off the tape loop is too painful to consider. For me, black Irish girl that I am, those songs tend to be weepers or slow burns. They're songs that with no fan fair climb under your tissue and move through your veins sereptiously. They become a part of your blood and they flow through you as a languorous life force. Sometimes they're songs of desire one wishes to be greater, but more often they're songs of regret, ache, loss - and they evoke a misery that blankets you in the sweetness that was, a simple thing so fulfilling even bathing in the loss is more satisfying than what may lie ahead. And so Matraca Berg gave me a demo of "Oh Cumberland." It is a benediction for a place and a time where it was barely moving, very humid, utterly fine. It is a song about being out there - and wishing for nothing more than the everlasting return to the place one feels most at home. "Oh Cumberland" rises like heat waves on forgotten blacktop under an August sun at the height of the day. Nothing's rolling because there's no energy to apply - and as those national steel guitar licks shimmer like the illusionary oil slicks that dot limitless ribbon that runs towards an endless horizon, her voice rises yearning and plaintive, keening for a vision that is recognized only too late. Too, there is just enough squeeze box to reflect the exhaling of despair for what is now gone, that place that can not be returned to. And while this is an elegy for a place, it is also an elegy for a state of mind, a state of soul - a moment when things were easier, enough was enough and the molasses-paced, sun-soaked laze of whatever offered a refuge that was never seen as that. Refuge from what? Boredom wasn't a word - and that state of suspended engagement, prolonged nothing wasn't a liability or a cause to be railed again. If knowledge meant needing more, then bolting brought unsettled truths - hungers never considered and now utterly consuming. I don't think it's the raging fires that burn us down. That urgency sets off a whole set of triggers and alarms that will ultimately bring rescue. It is the quiet storms that fail to elicit fear that creep up, that lull us into a paralysis of noncomprehension that bring us to our knees. Until it's too late, until we're swallowed whole, we don't even know how faded our heart has become and how far we've drifted from the shore and the core of basic comfort and desire. Yearning may be the most pungent of feelings - that thing from which we will not drop, but suffer in a way that is as complete a companion as our shadow. Though darkness provides a reprieve from our shadows, where it magnifies that which we miss. Indeed, the dark mocks our losses and elevates the anguish and the fever to a holy vigil that drives us to the breaking of the day, exhausted and more uncertain of our ability to get through. If the words make it clear - "lazy old river, not a lick of ambition/ you get to Kentucky, then you roll on home/ if you were a highway, you wouldn't go nowhere and I wouldn't be lost out here, all alone…" -- it is the melody that creeps into the atomic structure and provokes those emotions we keep in check. Restraint is critical to survival in these modern times, a stiff upper lip, a refusal to feel that which is messy - and most days, most moments, we maintain the strain with a stoicism we no longer recognize or need to acknowledge. It's what makes passion so thrilling - and loss devastating. Quietly coaxing the notes from the melody, "Oh Cumberland" rolls along sleepily, a glowing pillow that proffers comfort, but delivers the twinge that haunts long after the song has ended. The best melodies are like that, evoking and grieving and delivering the things we'd sweep by - and creating moments where the truth can be looked at like an eclipse through smoked glass. Of course there's spare beauty - and then there's that connection of singer and song. For Matraca Berg, an award-winning writer who's captured bittersweet moments like the loss of innocence in "Strawberry Wine" and the painful truth of time's ravages in "Back When We Were Beautiful," a declaraction of freedom from archetypes in "That Kind of Girl" and the need to escape the first hand dealt for a dream and a three card draw in "Wrong Side of Memphis," the opportunities to make those larger unions defy her best-defined role - and that also informs her commitment to this song. Matraca Berg is an artist without an audience - a tragedy and a truth that is all of our loss. For when she inhabits a song, it is more than a cloth to be worn, but a glimmer that makes us all wiser, stronger, deeper. Indeed, it lets us dream without fear of disappointment or reprisals - just a weightlessness that lets us drift without time or worry. Barely breathed, tentatively embraced, when the girl who spent her baby years in Nashville's creative center closes her eyes to ponder the reality and the memory of the river that flowed through her life, it is the bruised wings of an angel that can't quite get home. She is a pious keeper of the visions and the sounds of quiet stillness - "I am a faithful son/ No matter where I run/ I hear you calling me" - just as she knows the truth of where she is now: "Fire in the asphalt/ L. A. freeway/ Santa Ana windstorm, come blow me away/ This rearview mirror could use some adjustment/ Some other reflection, some other place…" There is no other place, however, just the sound in her mind. It doesn't mock, doesn't belittle, doesn't even mean to torture. There is rest for a fevered brow, the promise of innocence lost but never quite gone. If she is sadder, but wiser, she still reaches out and back, refusing to relinquish what was in the name of something ultimately less. On those nights when the lost moments circle one's head like a halo of jewels and promises, it is songs like these that serve as a two lane of deliverance. Suggest what was in a way that settles like skin, covering the nerves and the muscles and fibres, they create a return without the angst that distorts a pure longing. Writing about songs that no one has heard, by the way, is the most frustrating of all. Too literal and that which is suggested is smothered; too obtuse and the eventual point of arrival is lost in the flood. Hopefully somewhere between is where you are now… maybe not thinking of this song that you don't know, but one just like it - one that offers you a moment and a journey to a time and a place where you were so much less and so much more. As I e-mailed Matraca, realizing I'd been taken prisoner and left for the heap of melancholy the song had reduced me to, "god, it's made me cry last night and this morning. Don't know what i'm yearning for exactly, but there must be something… "Begs the question, though: do we shed our tears for what we've lost? or what we've become?"

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