Album Notes

So how would Michelle Shocked describe Deep Natural ? Well, it's "New Dub Blues & Gospel Birdsong." Oh.

Of course.

In other words, it's much like Michelle Shocked herself.

Not only is she in a category all her own, but that category doesn't really have a title yet.

Certainly not something as apt as New Dub Blues & Gospel Birdsong.

Maybe the category could be called Deep Natural.

Except that's the name of her new album.

Michelle Shocked is an icon, maybe, but an elusive one, a moving target, not a marketing niche.

A legend, but a lively one.

A relentless wanderer, a true traveler, an artist, an actual artist in an era that tosses that phrase like paper towels.

You can market a big splash, a next big thing, a huge hype.

But a real artist has a resonance, ripples, endurance.

Their work lives out a different life somewhere outside, inside our own lives.

Their name has a different taste on our tongues.

In a climate that rains unceasing irony, where the quick wind of cheap celebrity blows hot and blows cold, some artists still manage somehow to stay in tune.

Maybe there should be a category in the record store called Deep Natural.

But what is Deep Natural, and for that matter, what is this Dub Natural business? What in the world is New Dub Blues and what, pray tell, is Gospel Birdsong? New Dub Blues is precisely what it says it is: fresh blues, true blues, blues hand-carved by a natural blueswoman from way deep East Texas at the Louisiana line, border blues that doesn't look backwards as much as dance in face of the future.

Blues that gets that blues can never be a 12-bar cliche and still stay blues.

Dub is space-age technology innovated by Jamaica's reggae rocket-scientists huddled over the most battered of soundboards; usually considered a reggae secret weapon, now that Michelle Shocked has dubbed-out her own songs, we expect that all manner of heretofore unexplored territories are soon to show up on the new map of Dub.

And Gospel Birdsong? To sing the praise of the sky as the sun rises, to sing the glory of a new moon in the night.

To know the difference between the stars in the dark and the celebs on TV.

To sing free of chain or cage; to sing from behind bars thicker than any chain; to dance at a funeral, as they do in New Orleans where Michelle Shocked lives; to dance on your own son's coffin, as Michelle's friend Li'l Billie danced, knowing that this world was not really his home, not really.

To scratch his coffin with your shoes.

That's New Dub Blues& Gospel Birdsong.

That's why Michelle Shocked's name sounds different in your mouth.