Linda Thompson is greatest generally known as a singer and interpreter of another person’s songs. A particular another person: Richard Thompson, her ex-husband, with whom she made a couple of of the best British folk-rock albums ever as a duo within the Nineteen Seventies and early ’80s, lending dignified poise to his tales of struggling and strife. Linda made one album after they broke up, then started combating a situation referred to as spasmodic dysphonia, which causes involuntary contractions of the larynx that may make it tough to sing or communicate. She targeted on household life and launched no new music till the early 2000s, when remedy with Botox relaxed her vocal cords sufficient for her to make a cautious comeback. The three albums she’s launched since then are exceptional not just for the renewed energy of her voice, but additionally for her emergence as a songwriter, a craft she honed when it appeared like she may by no means sing once more.
Thompson’s dysphonia has since worsened. Proxy Music, as its title cheekily suggests, is a group of songs she wrote for different individuals to sing, inverting the composer-performer dynamic of her best-known work. With a couple of exceptions, the music, largely co-written along with her and Richard’s son Teddy Thompson, may match onto any of these traditional ’70s information, with stately acoustic instrumentation and melodies that wind patiently with out flashy pop hooks. Her sensibility as a lyricist is knowledgeable by the people custom, and he or she writes usually concerning the form of heartbreak and remorse that additionally characterised her songs with Richard.
However she’s additionally humorous—sharper and daffier than she ever obtained to be as her ex’s melancholy mouthpiece. In “Or Nothing at All,” a piano ballad about unrequited affection carried out tenderly by Martha Wainwright, Thompson describes real love’s deliverance not when it comes to excessive ardour, however absurd scientific precision: “100 males of their white coats/Would verify you with their stethoscopes/And hand you straight to me.” “Shores of America,” sung by Dori Freeman from the angle of a pioneer girl leaving a awful companion behind within the previous world, accommodates a zinger so good it’s exhausting to imagine nobody’s gotten to it earlier than: “And if it’s true/That solely the nice die younger/Fortunate previous you/’Trigger you’ll be round till kingdom come.”
Maybe impressed by the weird rotating-singer format or her years spent inflecting another person’s phrases and melodies along with her personal character, Thompson is playful and probing with notions of authorship and authenticity of voice that many different songwriters take as a right. She is particularly attuned to the gradations of distinction in perspective between a music’s author, its singer, and the constructed character of its narrator. Proxy Music opens with “The Solitary Traveler,” an emotionally advanced waltz whose lyrics, a couple of “depraved” girl who has misplaced her voice and the love of her little one’s father, appear drawn from Thompson’s biography. However additionally they gesture within the path of a folk-song inventory function she was sometimes requested to play earlier in her profession: the fallen girl, undone by her personal unhealthy decisions, an object of each pity and scorn. By the top of the music, Thompson has turned this misogynistic archetype on its head. “I’m alone now, you’d suppose I’d be unhappy,” sings Kami Thompson, Linda and Richard’s daughter, brassy and guaranteed. “No voice, no son, no man available/You’re fallacious as will be boys, I’m solvent and free boys/All my troubles are gone.”
