Some writers put too much stock in the Great Opening Line. S.G. Goodman has a couple of those, but more often, the Kentucky artist’s best moments happen in the middle. Goodman is a structuralist at heart; all of her balancing beams connect in the center of the song, and it’s there we find out—not at the beginning, or even at the end—what this thing is all about.
In Goodman’s music, there is always a new way to understand where you come from. For her, that place is Hickman, Kentucky—a town steeped in the scent of redtops and tobacco fields, where gas station attendants still pump your gas, and families attend church no fewer than three times a week. It’s a place Goodman conjures up with tactile clarity on her third album, Planting by the Signs. Each song is drowsy with heat. Goodman’s voice, once climbing into yelps, now sits chesty and grounded, its depth evoking early Lucinda Williams filtered through Cat Power’s Moon Pix. She sings with a little tremolo so that God can hear her better, and delivers her lyrics with the charm and ease of someone showing you around their home while tea whistles on the stove.
Goodman finds her own perspectives and idiosyncrasies in tradition. Drawing from a roots-rock sound, the drums stomp and clap with a crunch. The baritone on “Nature’s Child” sounds soaked in whiskey. The burnished tones of her keyboard pads drift lazily across “Heat Lightning” like cigarette butts floating down the Mississippi. All across the album, Goodman showcases a great understanding of space and how to fill it. Where she puts busier, low-end percussion in the bottom of the mix, as on “Satellite,” she makes sure her arrangements are sparse on the surface, her vocals and guitar gliding softly.
Goodman also knows where balance isn’t necessary. She is so imaginative with words that you don’t mind when her lyrics topple the syllabic weight of the line. She could have rewritten the standout lyric of “Fire Sign,” “living like the sun don’t shine/on the same dog’s ass everyday,” with an eye toward metrical concision, but why would she? It’s too good; a proverb for the ages.
Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs: mamas working for measly dollars. Girls unable to escape their small towns. A dying dog on his way to heaven. Her view downcast, Goodman takes on the role of omniscient narrator, threading her characters’ strange particulars and stray observations into a web of connectivity. As Goodman sings on “I Can See the Devil,” each of them live “under the same sunshine” that made the potlikker grow.
These characters’ intentions come into focus in the song’s center, flanked on either side by a series of vivid scene descriptors. Goodman’s scenes across the album are all sharply visual, but there’s one image that’ll get lodged in your memory in particular. You’ll find it on “Snapping Turtle,” the album’s outstanding midpoint. Before ruminating on life beyond small-town life (and whether such a thing even exists), Goodman recalls coming upon kids brutally hitting a turtle with sticks in her tiny town. She asks for “a lick”—and just when you think she might join the cruelty, she flips it: She takes their stick, beats the kids senseless, and drives home with the turtle in the back of her truck. “I brought down the wrath of God himself,” she sings, her voice warbling. In that moment, she gets a little closer to God—or at least meets Him in the middle.
