Daughter, Joe

"I stay here when things get bad."

 

I was standing about 30 feet or so away from Lydia Loveless in the small, crowded upstairs concert space above MilkBoy. It was a weird concert because you could sense, no matter where you were in the room, that Lydia Loveless was not particularly happy to be there. Not ungrateful, just internally miserable. At the time I kinda chalked it up to maybe a combination of having to play a claustrophobic concert venue and maybe a couple too many drinks. I'm listening to her follow-up album four years later, and now I'm thinking that it's Occam's razor—Lydia Loveless was not in a very good place emotionally, not then, and maybe not for a long time afterward. MilkBoy had nothing to do with it.

"I carry around my pain, I live with all the mistakes I've made."

 

On one hand, this is a classic "Oh God I'm Turning 30" album, filled with sentiments of a regret-filled 20s. Does anyone feel accomplished at 29? On the other hand, Loveless seems to have gone through some "growing pains" during that time that many of us can't understand. She got divorced... from her bassist. That's a double-whammy of a shit-where-you-ate mistake. She left her label because of some bad blood. She moved away from her chosen home—okay, that one I get, even though maybe that's both of us being a little over-dramatic.

 

"I want to be a symphony but I’m just a singer."

 

This is a sad album. At least in that regard, it tracks as a country album (queue up Troll Kelly Clarkson's "Born to Die"). Loveless' certified country twang is still present throughout, which is appreciated. But those are probably the only two reasons why anyone would apply the "country" genre tag to this album. Like, close enough to country that she'd feel at home on the second floor of a Nashville tourist honky-tonk, but far enough away from country that she thinks Morgan Wallen is a law firm. I bring this up, not because theorizing and categorizing music genres intrigues me (it doesn't), but only because I know that I personally would be turned off if I was presented with a straight-up country album, so if you're like that too, then know that this ain't it.

"Let me grab onto your wings and fly out of this world."

This is a sad album. It's sad because it is an album that presents problems and offers no solutions. It is a helpless album for a helpless world. I feel a oneness with Lydia Loveless in this regard. Again, that's not to say that I can specifically empathize with everything that is going on her in life. I just understand in a general sense the need to lay bare one's emotional and behavioral faults, to be embarrassed about a particular fuck up and to deal with it in a perverse sense by telling as many people as you can about it, and to try to find truth in discomforting self-deprecation. That's all here on Daughter. Some people might equate this truth-bearing to having a large ego, but I get it. I know that this is the only way to feel sane sometimes. If you continually and verbosely explain your faults, making it seem like you yourself are the crazy one, then you may find that the world around you seems peaceful and sane in comparison. Or—if humanity seems sometimes like it's already six feet under, then occasionally the best thing to do is to dig yourself a twelve-foot hole.

"I was the one who wanted more, now I'm just sitting at home."

This is absolutely one of those albums for which I started writing a 3-puke review and then managed to convince myself it's better than that. So take the grade with a grain of salt, I guess.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5