DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS   BY GREIL MARCUS

A TORCH SINGER OFFERS HOPE

          I had no problem playing Kelly Hogan’s Because It Feel Good (Bloodshot Records) over and over in the days after the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.   It was sitting in the CD player. I’d stumbled on it the week before. It sounded OK. It wasn’t as If I cared if I heard anything else. I was taking a break from the tele­vision, scared that I’d miss something. Hoping I’d miss something. Hogan has a past; doesn’t everybody?  If you want her life story you can look it up. Maybe on a better day you’ll run Into her and she’ll tell you hers and you can tell her yours.

     On Because It Feel Good Hogan is a torch singer. That doesn’t mean comes it off like the Statue of Liberty, though the image comes to mind. The Statue of Liberty might have been taken out, too; it might be taken out tomorrow. But in a way the metaphors the times force on music are always apt, can always tell you something if you let them. What is a torch singer but someone appearing in front of other people—maybe standing tall, maybe slumping, maybe sitting in a chair—and testifying that the worst life has to offer can’t kill her? Or hasn’t yet? You might hear endurance, you might hear triumph, you might hear a death waiting just off stage, suicide in one tune, murder in another, the end of the world in a third. “Our love will last till the end of time” means that time can come to an end.

     As Hogan sings, you are hearing a woman who sounds as if she can say anything, even if she also sounds as if she’s holding back at least half of what she has to say. Half of herself: she might need it someday. That’s the feeling on “(You Don’t Know) the First Thing About Blue.”   She takes you all the way into the song in an instant. She calls back the mystical nowhere Paula Frazer explored a few years back with her band Tarnation—a nowhere you knew had to be somewhere on Route 68, though now it might as well be in some downtown New York City bar.  Has everything changed? Has nothing changed? If history is made at night, does that mean history can really change the heart? Hogan merely comes down the stairs of the song, quietly, slowly, with a slow, quiet menace. She seems almost to regret the fact that the person she’s singing to will never learn, will make the same mistakes again and again and again.

     An echoed, chiming guitar comes in behind her, taking the story into the past, letting the singer walk past it into the future. “You say you’ll cry If you lose my loving,” she comes back to say. “You say you just don’t know... what you’ll do. Believe me, baby, you ain’t seen nothing-- Hogan lets the last line go into the air like smoke, Just as she’s already caressed “you’ll do” into a melodic curve so sensual it’s as if for a second she’s forgotten who she’s singing to or why.

     In its lack of any need to press, any need to make sure you get the point or appreciate how good the singer is, “The First Thing About Blue” radiates out across the album. It gives weight even to “No, Bobby Don’t,” a throwback to the sort of 1950s teen sob that could have been sung by anyone from Belle Midler to Rosie and the Originals (not only does the guitar play those “Angel Baby” triplets, the strings do). By the end of Because It Feel Good, the little ditty has faded into the plain desperation of Charlie Rich’s “Stay.” into the simple terror of Randy Newman’s “Living Without You.” As with a 1960s soul singer, there’s a stillness in each note. It you’ve heard the songs before, you probably won’t remember where.

     The torch singer wears her heart on her sleeve. Today on Hogan it looks good, like a dress she’s had for years that simply didn’t look right until now, when something in the air brought it into style. Up against the facts of life it’s the smallest thing in the world, but you pick up the pieces one by one.