Brandon's Buzz

One of country music’s most beloved and respected artists looks back to the roots of her raisin’ with a challenging yet oddly comforting new project. Infused with the spirit and sound of warm, heart-tugging bluegrass, Coal finds the estimable Kathy Mattea continuing to stretch the staid boundaries of her creativity in search of a rich, resonant truth. Devastated by the recent rash of fatal mining disasters, and haunted by her own West Virginian upbringing (as the child from a significant lineage of black-lunged, sunken-cheeked coal miners), Mattea channels her own conflicted emotions and her own honey-sweet voice into eleven traditional dirges and spirituals.

By no means is Coal a happy-go-lucky affair — believe it, this record is about thirty-five miles of bad road and a lifetime removed from “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” Mattea’s 1988 breakout smash — but the album is undeniably compelling, and from a woman whose artistry has been essential listening for all twenty-five years of its existence, it’s a vital triumph.

A always insists that he detests country music with a purple passion, yet whenever I expose him to the best of the genre — don’t make me name-check Sugarland yet again! — he takes to it instantly. Every aiming to expand his musical boundaries (or, perhaps, just ever a glutton for punishment), let’s once more test A’s tolerance for a music style he continues to find alien. Mattea’s style was never stringently country — a fact that would eventually land her in trouble with the traditional radio programmers who would come to resent the pop-inflected invasion of the early ’90s — but in her prime, she was as consistent a hitmaker as existed in Nashville. And herewith, a fond look back at the highlights of a stunning string of smashes:

1. “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” (from Untasted Honey) — — the sweetly simple blockbuster that propelled Mattea into country’s upper crust. Soild proof that songs need not be excessive to be exquisite.

2. “Listen to the Radio” (from Lonesome Standard Time) — — one of a pair of superlative Nanci Griffith covers (the other being a brilliant reading of “Love at the Five and Dime,” featuring a note-perfect harmony vocal from the legendary Don Williams) which helped Mattea make a name for herself in her career’s early days

3. “Standing Knee Deep in a River (Dying of Thirst)” (from Lonesome Standard Time) — — a moving rumination on the fleeting, materialistic nature of life, with a flawlessly restrained vocal performance from a never-better Mattea.

4. “Asking Us to Dance” (from Time Passes By) — — a painfully gorgeous love song (accompanied by a strikingly serene music video that totally makes you wanna waltz in the rain) from 1991 helps Mattea kick off the second phase of her career in high style.

5. “Where’ve You Been” (from Willow in the Wind) — — by a long shot, this song — a devastating testament to love and its wrenching power to overwrite human foibles — wasn’t her biggest hit. Regardless, it’s the one everyone remembers. If you’re not weeping buckets by the end of verse three, neither are you breathing, in all likelihood.

6. “455 Rocket” (from Love Travels) — — nobody at stodgy ol’ country radio expected Mattea to blow back from a three-year hiatus sounding like this. Vamping it up like Shania could only pretend to, this fun, flirty smash — the videoclip for which won the Country Music Association’s Video of the Year award in 1997 — would become Mattea’s final top twenty single.

7. “The Trouble with Angels” (from The Innocent Years) — — a giddy, joyous cover of a Juice Newton classic makes Mattea’s major-label farewell one of her strongest tracks.

names dropped with reckless abandon: Don Williams, Juice Newton, Kathy Mattea, Nanci Griffith, Sugarland