Blue Roses From the Moons
Nanci Griffith and Darius Rucker make a very odd couple. She's the skinny, angel-voiced troubadour of Texas coffeehouses, while he's the brawny, gruff-voiced leader of Hootie and the Blowfish. Yet they both benefit from their duet on Griffith's 1997 album,Blue Roses from the Moon. She rarely gets to hear her songs delivered with such soul-flavored power, and he rarely gets to sing something as well written as Griffith's loving description of the Texas landscape, "Gulf Coast Highway."Not everything on Griffith's album is as well written as that 1988 song, and the first half of the album is dominated by new songs with unfocused lyrics and undernourished melodies. In the second half, however, the veteran singer-songwriter digs into the details of a relationship gone wrong and extracts tunes that dispel the misty wispiness of her worst work and provide the tough-minded clarity of her best. Songs such as "Not My Way Home" and "Is This All There Is" capture that awkward stage in a relationship when you're still fond of a person even as you realize the essential magic is gone. Best of all are the songs where Griffith throws off her sensitive introspection and attacks the music with the forcefulness of her new pal Rucker. She wrote the bouncy, tongue-in-cheek honky-tonk two-step, "Maybe Tomorrow," with her hero, Harlan Howard, and she gives an ex-lover a carefree kiss-off on the country-rocker, "Morning Train." On songs such as these, her energy is abetted by her producer, Don Gehman (John Mellencamp, R.E.M., Tracy Chapman) and by three of Buddy Holly's Crickets--guitarist Sonny Curtis, drummer Jerry Allison, and bassist Joe Mauldin--who play on half of the album's songs.--Geoffrey Himes