Allison Moorer – “The Broken Girl”
Posted on | January 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
1. Allison Moorer and Steve Earle seem to be a good fit, with Earle’s recent record Washington Square Serenade showed him getting damn near mushy on songs like “Days Are Never Long Enough” and “Sparkle and Shine”. The newfound happiness of the relationship has allowed Moorer, on the other hand, to approach difficult material with unrestrained emotion, even on subjects that strike close to home. “The Broken Girl”, the lead single from her new record Crows, shows her highlighting women who have been victimized for many different reasons.
2. Moorer skips over a whole lot of backstory and jumps right into the character, who has replaced “all the happy” in her head, and whose “every step feels like a mistake.” The implications of what happened are many, from abuse to ignorance, but she shows the confusion of the character by noting that even the omniscient narrator doesn’t know how she got “so blue”, broken into “too many pieces”. Moorer gives a voice to the large amount of women that suffer from verbal and physical abuse but never speak out. The central character gives no reason for not speaking out, but is sure she’ll “never say a word”. In light of Moorer (and sister Shelby Lynne)’s family tragedy, this gains a whole new meaning as well, highlighting victims of tragedy who find themselves unable to speak out.
3. Producer R.S. Field (Shelby Lynne, Hayes Carll) gives the song a jangly, relatively lighthearted touch, with an arrangement that wouldn’t be far off from a Jayhawks song. This treatment makes the tough subject matter go down easier, and stands as a metaphor for Moorer’s increased ability to unflinchingly write on difficult subjects. Whether that is a result of age, experience, or her marriage (and child) with Earle, fans of Allison Moorer are the ones reaping the rewards.
Allison Moorer – The Broken Girl
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January 27th, 2010 @ 3:14 am
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