In praise of Betty Buckley’s subversively political cabaret album

Betty Buckley may be one of the foremost interpreters of American showtunes, but let her know that’s her niche. Before she was one of the queens of Broadway, she was just a rock-n-roll obsessed teenager from Fort Worth who palled around with a young songwriter name T Bone Burnett. And, like all of us, middle-age did not dampen her appreciation for pop and rock music. She may have made her bones with Webber and Sondheim and Schwartz, but her soul is equally nourished by Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell and Lisa Loeb. And, sure, some Jerome Kern thrown in for good measure.

There are virtually no showtunes on her newest album, Hope, recorded as a live cabaret last fall at Joe’s Pub in New York City. In fact, for a disc from a 71-year-old Texas lady, Hope is amazingly (though subtly) subversive. Even the cover art — graffitied images that implore “resist” and “persist” — conjures a hand-painted protest poster seeking to remind listeners of our part in a broader community.

Betty-Buckley-Album-CoverThe title comes from one of the songs on the album, a new piece by Tony Award-winning theater composer Jason Robert Brown (who uses it as the lead track on his own new album, How We React and How We Recover), that clearly evokes the memory of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton (both of whom used the word “hope” to tremendous political effect) while contrasting that with the frightened current state of national affairs, with a structure and rhyme scheme suggesting Sondheim’s “Being Alive:” In spite of everything ridiculous and sad / though I’m beyond belief depressed, confused and mad /  Well I got dressed / I underestimated how much that would take / I didn’t break / until right now. I sing of hope and don’t know how.

That’s merely the standout track of 15 vocals that, while not all unqualified successes, recreate the intimacy and surprise of a live, small-bore concert of storytelling music. Buckley’s vocal style is sly — at first a reedy, brittle delicacy, it morphs in a moment to a surprisingly strong soprano register. And most of the songs, even the putatively sunnier ones, seem cast in a minor key — a more expressive and melancholy tone.

Buckley may take inspiration from rock, but her artistic temperament is still more jazz-cabaret. You can never not hear her phrasing, her diction, her precision (that works against her on Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky” but serves her well on Lisa Loeb’s “Falling in Love” and JD Souther’s “Prisoner in Disguise.”

I don’t know that the album — the sound, the sentiments, the song choices — is as much about filling the listener with hope as it is advocating for the power of keeping hope. But it does make you believe in being united to other people in wishing for the best. Even in these times, that kind of art makes a difference.

— Arnold Wayne Jones