Searching for the Queen of Hearts

WOMEN SINGERS have only recently come into their own and Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Grace Slick, and Joni Mitchell led the way in the sixties. Now there's Carole King, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Bonny Raitt, and Maria Muldaur, the "Rock Women" celebrated in Time's cover story last December. Joni Mitchell is still queen though, and for some men she is to rock what Beatrice was to Dante, with a voice like sweet molasses lifting them into a gossamer fantasy world of free-ee lu-huh-huv. According to Time, "She is the rural neophyte waiting in a subway, a free spirit drinking Greek wine in the moonlight, an organic Earth Mother dispensing fresh bread and herb tea, and the reticent feminist who by trial and error has created the male as well as the female ego." The covers on her albums are kind of like that too: flowers and nature scenes adorn them and she's made to appear especially innocent, as if she had to protect the native viewpoint in her songs.

I have to admit a one-time weakness for Mitchell, but I could never feel the same way about Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt or any other lady singer. Maybe I can't appreciate them because I've stopped listening to the radio, but I think it's because their songs all sound alike. I keep telling myself it's on account of the depression--even though the economy looks like it might survive this time--and record companies are only releasing women singers they can plug into a formula that will sell.

At least that seems to be the case with a new popular woman singer. Wendy Waldman. Waldman has been writing songs for a few years now and the wrote two that appeared on the Maria Muldaur debut solo album, which sold over $50,000 copies. She's already put out two albums herself, but Wendy Waldman is her first major record. Her voice sounds like Mitchell's might if you threw a little yeast into it and aged it for a while. Her music is at a crossroads between country, blues and folk rock and her songs adhere to the popular format: two stanzas each followed by a refrain, a musical interlude, and then a final stanza with refrain. There's something about her music though, that goes beyond regularity something that singles her out as a possibly important singer, Right now she has flashes of potential but they're like lightning illuminating the whole horizon, warnings of a big storm to come.

There are hints in Wendy Waldman of a thematic unity, a unifying consciousness that weaves the songs in and out of each other. In "Western Lullaby," the opening cut, she sings "Leave behind your visions dark and dreary... for you know that singin' is believin' "and it's almost as if her album is the dream she's leading you into after she has put you to sleep. There are moments on the album when the songs seem to fit together as nicely as a string of dreams. The slow western drawl promising to take you away "across the wide open sheets of the prairie" leads into a faster country tune, "Racing Boat," that hinges on escape. But this time Waldman is running away from the blues. There's a noticeable difference, though, between the quality of lyrics here and in Mitchell's Blue. Waldman's sense of fantasy seems to be rooted in the commercial drives of L.A. where she grew up. While Mitchell's childhood in Saskatchewan leads her to sing, "I wish I had a river I could skate away on," Waldman resorts to money:

I'm gonna buy me a racing boat

Sail it out on the bay,

And then all my friends can watch me

Go blow my blues away.

It's a different kind of fantasy she's offering, a dream of acquisition and her next song, "Explain It," never goes beyond that same surface of acquiring a cosmopolitan experience; all it says is that it's hare to explain to old friends "About the people and places you're learnin'."

Waldman almost loses the tension here but the next three songs come back strongly and they form the heart of the album. They don't meld in the same way the songs do on the first side of Mitchell's Court and Spark, where the music hardly ever stops, but there's a similar progression of mood in them. In "Wings" a nice slow piano works into a lament for her loss of freedom in her dedication to her music. The images aren't surprising--she's a "rooted tree" and her lover dances in the sky with wings that "shine like rainbows in the air"--but the piece seems to rely on its simplicity. Where Mitchell clutters her pieces with long breathless lines that are more prose than verse. Waldman sticks closely to rhyme scheme and metrics. Here the simplicity help to focus on the piano and its sound gives you a paradoxical sense of the freedom of love while Waldman cries.

Tied to my piano, I shall never be free

Just to dance with a foamy grey sea,

So I watch from my window, where I always shall be,

Let you weave such a spell around me.

"MR. BOATMAN" begins with a beautiful piano lead too, but it immediately comes down to earth, caught in the stasis of a relationship breaking apart. And it's the music again that seems to save her when she asks Mr. Boatman--her muse--to "Take my troubled dreams to the opposite shore and run my achin' heart to my baby once more." It's a desperate song, but the melody is so light that it's almost hypnotic, and that's what Waldman seems to be looking for: because there's just time

To walk the road of hard love

And sing a song of grace;

To take what is given us

Just to fit in the space.

In "Sundown" Waldman finds release in a powerful voice and a wide octave range reminiscent of Laura Nyro's throaty songs. It's almost as if her own voice were going down over the Pacific, getting big and red, sending its rays across the waves and sparking the water itself into a "wintertime sundown fire." But you wish that the sun would help her when she asks it to "carry my spirit just another time 'round" because the album begins to fizzle out at the end to the first side.

Waldman's three most powerful songs aren't packed with lyrics, but they all make you want to hear more. When she does add more lines her music seems to deteriorate. "Spring is Here" demonstrates her abilities on the dulcimer, but the line, "I know that God must be smilin" 'is just too much to hear nine times in a single song; it sounds like a mispronounced Hare Krishna chant. Both "Secret" and "Listen to Your Own Heart" are extended bitches with appropriately annoying bass rhythms that pound the songs into the ground. "Wild Bird" is the only decent cut on the second side.

Still, if Wendy Waldman can find that effervescence that appears to be so strong in some of her songs and if she can add a little more yeast to her voice and to her sentiment then all that's needed is some aging before she can replace the queen who sang of "stroking the star maker machinery behind the popular song."