Six months after she triumphantly joined forces with Jon Bon Jovi on Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” at the Obama inaugural,
The 63-year-old vocalist, whose career was rescued from obscurity by 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (Anti-), breaks songs down to their narrative essence. Her voice is weathered, full of cracks and breaks, kind of like Tina Turner in bad need of a lozenge. It’s a lived-hard voice that, while not adept at soaring melody, is capable of communicating a song’s deeper meaning.
LaVette has the uncanny knack of making you consider anew lyrics that you’ve heard hundreds of times (and perhaps forgotten) . When she sings, on the title track, “I used to go the movies/ And I’d try to go downtown/ Somebody was always there tellin’ me/ ‘Little girl, you cain’t come around,’” stretching the words as a pleading lament, it personalizes the song in a way that I’d not heard before.”
Read more (plus video of LaVette and Bon Jovi at the inaugural).
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This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2009.