Play it as it Lays - Patti Scialfa

I heard Town Called Heartbreak on Letterman tonight. She has an interesting sounding voice. Not sure if I love it yet, but I like it enough to buy this cd. I'll let you know what I think after I listen to it. Here's some snippets from her web site.

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Play It As It Lays -- Patti Scialfa’s third solo album and her first since 2004’s 23rd Street Lullaby -- will rock your soul and offer a brand new destination for inspiration. For Scialfa, inspiration in this case has been found not just down a Memphis road, but also throughout a soulful album. The most rhythmic, sensuous and accomplished recording of Scialfa’s solo career, Play It As It Lays is an intimate musical passion play that borrows its evocative title from a novel by one of her favorite authors, Joan Didion who once wrote, “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” In the end, Play It As It Lays stands as an inspired song cycle focused on grown up love and that daily decision to not walk away from the things that last.

Musically speaking, Play It As It Lays -- produced by Scialfa, longtime friend and collaborator Steve Jordan and Ron Aniello (Guster, Barenaked Ladies) -- artfully travels down some familiar Memphis roads as well as along other trails blazed in our finer Southern musical capitals. This is powerful music made at the crossroads of rock, R&B, folk, blues and gospel. Though very much a contemporary and vital effort, there are powerful echoes here of everything from Dusty in Memphis to The Staples Singers, from Al Green to Laura Nyro, from Sly Stone to Creedence Clearwater Revival -- all music making time on Scialfa’s iPod during the recording of Play It Like It Lays.

“I think the reason I went more into the soul music genre this time around is because women have traditionally allowed more freedom of expression in rhythm and blues,” Scialfa explains. “Those were very adult records. That’s why Aretha was singing ‘You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.’ That’s one reason the blues and soul music are so wonderful. Those women always had a long list of complaints and they could belt them all out in a very beautiful and powerful way. Now that I’m 53, I had to find a way to write inside my skin and have it feel timely to me, so moving more into the R&B direction felt like the right place to go.”

The soulful sound of Play It As It Lays is also a stylistic approach that helps underscore a collection of songs with a naturally feminist and humanistic point of view about the many roles women play-- “mother, brother, sister, lover, wife, a friend, a confidant, or an angel or just a fool in the end,” as Scialfa sings on “Like Any Woman Would.” Like some of Scialfa’s earlier work, Play It As It Lays reflects a love for our finest girl groups of the past, but this is clearly an album by a woman in the present tense. Listen closely and you can hear the sound of a woman -- and likely women everywhere -- calling out “You’ve Got To Work With Me, Baby” as Scialfa does repeatedly on the infectious swamp rocker “Town Called Heartbreak.”

Patti Scialfa on the web