One of my first real Chicago experiences after moving to the city a few years ago was seeing Kelly Hogan take the stage during a Drive-By Truckers show. On an encore of "Angels and Fuselage", she sounded like one of the angels welcoming Ronnie Van Zandt to rock'n'roll heaven. Still, she didn't look quite comfortable up there, and slipped unceremoniously out of sight before the song ended, as though upstaging another singer might be the most unforgivable offense imaginable.
That thoughtfulness, especially when coupled with such a commanding voice, is an excellent trait in a collaborator; throughout most of her career, Hogan has been an exceptional side player. After the Jody Grind's tragic split in the early 1990s, she did a brief stint playing in the Rockateens (in a mostly non-vocal capacity). More recently, she's been a mainstay in Neko Case's backing band and has sung with approximately everyone in the world: Mavis Staples, Andrew Williams, Amy Ray, Alejandro Escovedo, Archer Prewitt, even Silkworm. Her CV reads like the table of contents for an amazing book about the last two decades of Chicago's independent music scene.
By contrast, Hogan seems chronically uninterested in playing lead. Her 20-year career has yielded only four solo albums, one of which shares equal billing with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts; I Like to Keep Myself in Pain is her first in more than a decade. Much like 2001's Because It Feel Good, Pain is a collection of covers, revealing Hogan as-- no great surprise here-- an amazingly subtle and intuitive interpreter of others' songs and sentiments. The usual suspects are all here: Freakwater's Catherine Irwin, Jon Langford, the late Vic Chesnutt, and Brett and Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family all contributed to the tracklist. Not every song is suited for Hogan's vocals-- John Wesley Harding's "Sleeper Awake" gets away from her, and Matthew Stephen Ward's "Daddy's Little Girl" sounds dour and halting-- but most of the tracks are well chosen. Stephin Merritt's "Plant White Roses" in particular gives Hogan not only one of the album's loveliest hooks, but also one of its most bittersweet sentiments.
Hogan may keep herself in pain, but she never wallows. In fact, perhaps more than any of her peers, she conveys the depths of heartache with great dignity, without resorting to histrionics or theatricality. She floats through Irwin's "Dusty Groove", subtly suppressing a Southern accent until she gets to the climax, which she attacks like she's auditioning for a part in Coal Miner's Daughter. By contrast, her take on Langford's "Haunted" is bright and buoyant, as though there's comfort in the painful memories of the past. She turns each of these songs into a short story, complete with character, perspective, and plot. In particular, her treatment of "We Can't Have Nice Things", written by Andrew Bird and Jack Pendarvis, slyly reveals new layers with each verse, turning a threadbare predicament-- a relationship built on conflict and recrimination-- into something much more complicated and real.
Her vocal on that song is harrowing, but the jazzy arrangement undermines rather than underscores the melancholy of a destructive relationship. And that's the sad but undeniable flaw in I Like to Keep Myself in Pain: Her backing band is never as attuned to the singer as the singer is to the song. It's all the more unfortunate considering the personnel: Scott Ligon of Terry Adams' Rock & Roll Quartet, legendary session drummer James Gadson (Supremes, Ray Charles), Daptone exec and Dap-Kings bassist Gabe Roth, and Booker T. You almost have to laugh at that incredible line-up, but then almost cry at the shirt-and-pants accompaniment they provide, which hovers between soul, country, and pop without actually sounding like anything specific.
Too often the band just skims the surface rather than get their hands really dirty, while Hogan inhabits these songs deeply. They can't summon the grit to convey the dark drama of Chesnutt's "Ways of This World" or Robbie Fulks' "Whenever You're Out of My Sight", which end up sounding slick instead of soulful. It doesn't help that the backing vocals sound shoehorned into the arrangement, disruptive instead of supportive. Perhaps, much like the woman they're supporting, the backing musicians are wary of upstaging the lead. That sensitivity is respectful and respectable, but listening to I Like to Keep Myself in Pain, it's hard not to wonder how she'd sound with slightly less sympathetic collaborators-- with people who might push her a bit more, who might have the audacity to sound as distinctive as she does. This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.
