Linda Thompson is greatest generally known as a singer and interpreter of another person’s songs. A selected 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 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 converse. She centered on household life and launched no new music till the early 2000s, when therapy 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 would possibly 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 together 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 folks custom, and he or she writes typically 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 received 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 test you with their stethoscopes/And hand you straight to me.” “Shores of America,” sung by Dori Freeman from the angle of a pioneer lady leaving a awful associate behind within the outdated world, comprises a zinger so good it’s exhausting to imagine nobody’s gotten to it earlier than: “And if it’s true/That solely the nice die younger/Fortunate outdated you/’Trigger you’ll be round till kingdom come.”
Maybe impressed by the bizarre rotating-singer format or her years spent inflecting another person’s phrases and melodies together with her personal character, Thompson is playful and probing with notions of authorship and authenticity of voice that many different songwriters take with no consideration. She is very attuned to the gradations of distinction in perspective between a track’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” lady who has misplaced her voice and the love of her little one’s father, appear drawn from Thompson’s biography. However in addition they gesture within the route of a folk-song inventory position she was often requested to play earlier in her profession: the fallen lady, undone by her personal unhealthy selections, an object of each pity and scorn. By the tip of the track, 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 warranted. “No voice, no son, no man available/You’re fallacious as could be boys, I’m solvent and free boys/All my troubles are gone.”
