Poetry and music make such happy bedfellows that it is not surprising when singers want to transform their favourite poems into songs
Artists like Mike Scott and Eddie Reader have even dedicated whole albums to a single poet; W.B. Yeats and Robbie Burns respectively.
Texan country singer Maura Kennedy set herself a similar challenge albeit with a less famous scribe. For her second solo album, all the words for the 15 tracks are written by a relatively obscure Californian poet, B.D. Love.
For this process she was determined to let the rhythm and phrasing of Love's poetry and prose influence the melodies. She says that, as a result, this has improved her own song writing.
B.D. Love's chief topics are love, nature and human rights. With a day job as a college teacher, he is inspired by beautiful women, the natural splendour of the Los Angeles River landscape and "the issues facing a diverse parade of immigrant students".
Kennedy's musical homages are part rootsy pop, part mainstream country with I Cried To Dream Again being one of several tracks to sound uncannily like Nanci Griffith, an artist she has worked with in the past.
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The best tracks are those where the poetic aspects are most evident. For example, in the heightened romanticism of Breathe Deeply, Love where the hearts of two lovers are imagined as being "as limitless as cloudless sky".
To get a better understanding of Maura Kennedy's muse, I would have liked to hear a sample of B.D. Love's voice not least because many of the other songs do not strike me as being as poetic.
The Christmas song Beneath The Mistletoe, for instance, is pretty cheesy and She Worked Her Magic On Me is weighed down by lines such as "Before she set me on fire, she said I was her desire" (The latter also sounds a bit weird sung by a heterosexual woman!)
Words on a page do not automatically make for a smooth transition into songs and while Villanelle illustrates this, it is still an album with many merits.
Maura Kennedy's website
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