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Michelle Shocked - Soul of My Soul
| Popmatters |
| In 2009, with Lilith Fair seemingly a part of ancient history, the craft and canon of female singer-songwriters is easy to take for granted. This perspective makes it easy to forget the women that were part of the movement since before it was a movement. Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes originally appeared in 1986—four years before Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records—when Shocked had no idea that she would ever have a website, much less that its front page would feature a picture of her with the first black president....full text |
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| Pastemagazine |
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Love’s song lingered on the lips of other singers,” Michelle Shocked sings on the opening track on her latest album. “But love’s song was never in my key.” With that those simple lines, the Texan troubadour acknowledges 20 years of going her own way, from the ups of Arkansas Traveler to the downs of To Heaven U Ride. But Soul of My Soul is an album about romance busted up and romance thought hard about, so “Love’s Song,” with its gospel airs and shuffling pace, acts as a promise that what follows will not be typical love songs. And “Other People” certainly isn’t. A spare tune with a quietly pained chorus, it is sung “citizen to country, not woman to man.” Yes, it’s a love song about patriotism and dissent, with the singer done wrong by a wayward nation, but the metaphor seems mismatched and labored. The similarly themed “Ballad of the Ballot and the Bullet Part 1: Ugly Americans,” though righteous in its outrage, already sounds like a relic of a very different time, even though it’s only a couple of months in the past....full text |
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| Newmusicreviews |
| Love and hate coexist uneasily in life, but in song they can spawn revelatory artistry. Such is the case with Michelle Shocked’s 13th album, which navigates deftly between those opposing emotions. On the “love” side, Shocked is celebrating her partner, artist David Willardson, with such cuts as the acoustic confessional “True Story” and the twangy, Bonnie Raitt-like “Love’s Song.” For the angry part of the equation, anthemic roots-rocker “Ballad of the Battle of the Ballot and the Bullet Part 1: Ugly Americans” delivers an uncompromising indictment of the past eight years. There’s also “Other People,” deceptively easygoing and lyrically deceptive, too: It’s a breakup song detailing a citizen re-examining her relationship with her country. “Soul of My Soul” rarely settles for a middle ground, and in the music, performed almost exclusively by Shocked and producer Devin Powers, one hears an urgency to the arrangements that serves the urgency in Shocked’s voice.”...full text |
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