Word: barnette
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...used by now to being told that Johns is an artist of the utmost profundity and difficulty that we assume, on peering into the well of his talent, that the fault for not recognizing masterpieces in it lies with ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe...
Andy Stuart Barnett...
...singer has become a legend that won't die. There's Patsy Cline: The Birth of a Star (Razor & Tie records), an audio collection of her TV appearances with Godfrey. A stage show, Always...Patsy Cline, played for two years in Nashville, Tennessee. The star of Always, Mandy Barnett, has just released her own album of Cline-inflected tunes. And for weeks the hottest country CD on Billboard's pop charts has been Blue, in which 13-year-old Texas phenom LeAnn Rimes does similarly in-Clined material, including the title song, which was written originally for the dead star...
...When Barnett was 13, she cut some unreleased sides for veteran producer Jimmy Bowen, yet another relic of the rockabilly years. Five years later, she was starring in Always, and transcending the kitsch format (a fan recalling her brushes with Patsy's greatness) by interpreting 18 Cline songs faithfully and imaginatively; she'd slow down the tempo, tease out the vowel sounds even further, add an Ozark twang that you won't hear on Patsy's records. Now an ancient 20, Barnett has her own, self-titled CD (Asylum). It stands as both a votive offering to her idol...
Most of the album's songs, written in the '90s, have a time-warp directness that locates them firmly in Clineland. Barnett climbs inside them all, the jingles and the ballads, with equal agility. But the standouts are the torch songs. The opening cut, Planet of Love, has a blue-eyed bluesy aggressiveness that Barnett builds nicely from a throaty murmur into a dominatrix growl; it's an invitation to a dangerous liaison, delivered deadpan. A Simple I Love You has the same let's-fall-in-love message, this time sung not as a come...