Light On Dark Water

Terri Hendrix: Places In Between

As with a great deal of music that I like, I owe my acquaintance with this artist to my old friend Robert Woodley. Places In Between is an uneven album, but it’s made me want to hear more of Hendrix’s work, a testimony partly to the merits of the music and partly to something likeable in what I have to call its personality, which in turn refers, obviously, to the personality of Terri Hendrix and also to the spirit of her collaborators: she has a dynamite band led by her producer, main instrumentalist, and sometime co-writer Lloyd Maines (who is, I learn from AMG), a man with quite a musical track record of his own and the father of one of the Dixie Chicks.

This is a sort of folk-rock-country music with touches of jazz. To locate it in the popular music landscape, it’s somewhere in the general vicinity of Sheryl Crow’s. I’d have to say that Crow—or rather, looking at the credits on her albums, Crow and her collaborators—are, objectively, the superior songwriters. But I’ve never entirely warmed up to Crow’s work, respecting it somewhat more than I like it. This is a purely subjective thing, but, for what it’s worth, on the testimony of this album, I like Hendrix better. There’s a warm, engaging quality about her singing and writing; I keep coming back to the word “likeable”—I come away from the album thinking that she would be an enjoyable person to know, certainly not a sentiment inspired by every artist whose work one admires. Even her melancholy songs leave you with the sense that a sunny energy is going to reassert itself shortly. Her lyrics are sometimes a bit heavy on the you-can-do-it, fulfill-your-potential side, and I wonder about the implications of her adoption of “Own Your Own Universe” as a slogan for her record company. But as a distributist I have to cheer someone whose successful career has, apparently, been an end-run around the major record companies; maybe an achievement like that requires a touch of power-of-positive-thinking attitude.

In my opinion the best track here is “Wish,” and it’s superlative. Head over to iTunes or eMusic and give it a try. Runners-up are “Invisible Girl” (I would prefer its sometimes risqué story be a bit less explicit, but it’s quite a romp, with a wonderful bit of voice-and-instrument doubling in the outro), the title song, and “My Own Place.”

Here’s the artist’s web site, and here is her MySpace site, where you can hear some complete tracks, including “It’s A Given” from Places In Between.

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