Think about the ladies in Norma Tanega’s songs with arms interlocked, braced in opposition to the coolness of a Manhattan winter, queering the sleeve of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter of the 1966 semi-hit “Walkin’ My Cat Named Canine” offered a imaginative and prescient as rounded as Dylan’s or Aretha Franklin’s: self-mockery as self-reliance; folks music verities shorn of messianism and topicality; lesbian and none too indirect about it. Gathering two studio LPs with one other album’s value of unreleased materials, I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 marks the primary meticulous appraisal this multimedia menace has earned, and it’s a very good one—the gathering argues for an artist who may’ve been main had her label recognized what to do along with her, and had she taken the arc of a profession extra significantly than she took her independence.
“I by no means wished to be a critical artist as a result of I prefer to snigger an excessive amount of,” Tanega as soon as stated. The kid of a Filipino father and Panamanian mom, Tanega didn’t appear to be the opposite folkies. And the outlier turned her birthright into materials. I’m the Sky’s “If Solely I Had a Title like Norma Tanega” boasts the couplet, “It could actually rise to the event/Despite the fact that it’s not Caucasian.” A stint at Claremont Faculty finding out classical music precipitated a transfer to the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, the place she finally connected with Bob Crewe after her demos impressed the 4 Seasons songwriter; he and producer Herb Bernstein had been taken by a tune Tanega wrote a few cat she stored on a leash. This was superior. Within the post-Joan Baez period, Crewe and Bernstein fought the temptation to smother her with solemnity. Maybe the quietly homosexual Crewe acknowledged the sense of enjoyable and the tainting of acquired kinds, the gay’s lasting items to well-liked tradition.
And what tonal complexity Tanega delivered to her songwriting. The songs don’t cease their yuks and clucks. A sardonic epitaph or a pirouette on a tombstone, “You’re Useless” makes use of doomy chords to deal with a “you” who could be Tanega herself or a lecture on deliberate obsolescence: “You’ll by no means get a second probability/Plan all of your strikes upfront.” The gathering contains “I’m the Sky,” not fairly hippie bullshit stored at bay by her mournful, bassoon-like timbre, which darkens the glad songs and buttresses the unhappy ones. Even higher is “Jubilation,” a sexy-as-hell come-on during which an oboe deepens Tanega’s most lovesick melody; the valentine has the lilt of a canticle. “A Road That Rhymes at 6 A.M.” will stand as her anthem. “Syncopate your life and transfer in opposition to the grain/Don’t you allow them to let you know that they’re all the identical” features as recommendation to a potential acolyte, or as a lesbian’s avowal. The alone-and-in-love-in-the-big-city air has a wintry crispness.
