You’re the Smell of Apple Pie to the Blind

This isn’t exactly a review, just a commendation of the most beautiful and unique voices I’ve ever heard, and share some lyrics from a songwriting talent that is simply unparalleled in modern country music. I’ve been listening to Martha Scanlan like crazy lately. She started out with a band called the Reeltime Travellers, which was more of a git-down bluegrass operation, and after writing the gorgeous “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen” for Cold Mountain, she went solo and made an album called “The West Was Burning” that is one of the best pure country albums I’ve ever heard, and I think stacks up to anything in the singer-songwriter spectrum.

“The West Was Burning” is a simple yet intricate musical affair, with just banjo and guitar on most songs, with occasional steel guitar and drums on a few songs. Scanlan is a story teller who is concerned less with getting a plot across than with transporting you to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, preserving a certain setting in a song. Namely, the mountains and wheat fields of Montana maybe 100 years ago.

My favorite song on the album is her cover of Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy.” Dylan wrote the song about Elvis, imaging a meeting between them that never took place. It is a perfect song for the album, contrasting the tentativeness and fragility of human relationships with the constancy of nature, which is a theme that continually shows up in Scanlan’s songs.

I went back to see the gypsy,
It was nearly early dawn.
The gypsy’s door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone,
And that pretty dancing girl,
She could not be found.
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town.

A lost love or broken life is contrasted with the stubborn repetition of nature. “Up on the Divide” tells the story of a widowed rancher whose wife died shortly after marriage, but whose grief does not deter the coming of spring:

Been twenty-two years since I gathered the stones Twenty-two more years since I made her my bride
And the springtime’s a-coming up on the divide.

The title track relates a lover’s dream during the fires of the summer:

Was the year the west was burning, I
was on a mountain sleeping I
woke up a-dreaming
about you
I was walking down a road of dust and bones and ash and following a burning set of tracks that led to you

I still see the fire in your stare
I still think I coulda burned up there

The most haunting song on the album, “Seeds of the Pine” is so good, I’m just going to put the whole song up:

Rains fell cold through June
grass is up to my thigh
say if it dries up it’ll burn just like the moon
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

I only want to dream about you
the dollar I could spend but I should save
just to see my fingers in your hair
the golden wheat around us and
beneath us where we lay

You’re a slow ride down a country mile
you’re the smell of apple pie to the blind
you’re the last light on a July western sky
you’re the center of the watermelon,
you’re a sweet, sweet smile

Cottonwood a-shakin in the breeze
surrounded by a starry sky
easy to forget the things we need
easy to stumble around mostly blind

I could tell you not to come in from the storm
I could tell you not to be so kind
I could tell you not to close the door
I could say I never wanted you for mine

Rains fell cold through June
grass is up to my thigh
say if it dries up it’ll burn just like the moon
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

say it opens up the seeds of the pine
say it opens up the seeds of the pine

The power of the set of metaphors in the middle is the fact that refrains from comparing nature to other things elsewhere in the song. She just tells about it, and it is enough that it is there, continuing in its rhythms and violent constancy as our lives come and go, as we make our awckward attempts at love.

The great temptation of memory is sentimentality. Scanlan is aware of it, and attmepts to resist by restraint. She knows that memory only works when used sparingly. “I only want to dream of you / a dollar I could spend but I should keep / just to see my fingers in your hair.”

Martha slows it down in the middle for a waltzy Patsy Cline-esque breakup song, to which her voice is perhaps not perfectly suited, but it is a terrific gettin-left song, in which she sits at home alone, drinking the beer her lover left in the fridge, thinking of him.

And somehow packing up your things
didn’t seem to bring
the peace that I’d hope to find
cause what you you can’t put in the truck
what you can’t pack up
is the space that you leave behind

Above all else, “The West Was Burning” is a probing of that space that is left behind when they leave: whether the death of a wife, the leaving of a husband, or the murder of Anna May Aquash on the brutal heavy-hitting protest song Isabella, these songs are memory in the truest sense: emptiness, the absence of what was once there. An emptiness that would be so much worse without good songs to sing about it.