What if Billie Jean wasn’t just a baby-trapping hussy? What if Eleanor Rigby really wasn’t arsed about being on her own? What if somebody came up with an album that pulled the rug up from under everything you thought about some of the most notorious females immortalised in song? What would that sound like?
Well I just listened to it, and it sounds like one the most refreshing and interesting albums of the year.
Esme Patterson’s Woman to Woman is an exercise in filling in the blanks and reading between the lines; Patterson came up with the idea when learning to play Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Loretta’, getting angry over how one sided the whole affair was. The album gives you an insight into the minds of women like Loretta, Lola and Caroline. Through giving herself such a tight framework within which to explore, Patterson has created an album as musically diverse as the influences from which she draws, and lyrics sassier than a double-click-head-roll from a Jerry Springer guest.
Keeping the country roots going throughout, with some utterly exceptional slide-guitar playing, Patterson’s album is kooky, drawing upon psychedelic influences on tracks like ‘The Glow’ and bossanova styles on ‘Oh Let’s Dance’. The result is a soulful and fresh aural experience.
Lyrically, it is every other musician’s Everest to top this year. It takes a hell of a writer to take on Dolly Parton, but in her response to ‘Jolene’, titled ‘Never Chase A Man’ (a song with more balls than Wimbledon), Patterson not only holds a mirror up to Dolly’s now obviously creepy boyfriend, she tells her to go sort herself out too – very bold. The writing changes the way you think about these soulful, artistic male songwriters pining for lost lovers and crying over broken hearts. When Esme answers back they suddenly become…well, pretty weird and whiney. “Won’t you try keep those thoughts of me and party dress out of your head” is one of my favourite quips which she shoots from the hip as Elvis Costello’s Alison on ‘Valentine’; such an off the cuff delivery, it would literally reduce the sap to tears.
The track that encompasses everything that this album is about is ‘What Do You Call A Woman?’, her response to Michael Jackson’s uber hit ‘Billie Jean’. Over the top of a stripped back and angrily strummed electric guitar, Patterson asks Jackson very simply: “If you make love, ain’t she you lover?”. And, suddenly, one of the greatest characters from one of the greatest pop songs gains a new sense of agency, and Jackson looks like a philandering prick.
Listening to this album is a breath of fresh air in storytelling through song. It opens your eyes to a boundlessness of telling a story from both sides in an intelligent manner. The fact that it sounds good too is the icing on the cake. An absolute must listen.
Woman To Woman is out tomorrow (2nd February) via Extra Mile Recordings. Get your hands, and ears, on it here.
Kate Tittley
@LeTitts
Kate Tittley
Latest posts by Kate Tittley (see all)
- ALBUM: PAWS ‘No Grace’ - June 28, 2016
- LIVE: The Fall – o2 Ritz, Manchester 19.04.16 - April 21, 2016
- ALBUM: The Coral ‘Distance Inbetween’ - March 3, 2016
