Review: Shannon Jae Ridout ‘The Magnolia Sessions’
Country-folk singer-songwriters have been with me for as long as I can remember, their music becoming part of the fabric of my life. Looking back, I realise how much I have relied on the honesty and warmth in those songs, and the quiet understanding they seemed to offer.
There was a time when I listened to early Eric Andersen, Joni Mitchell, Woody Guthrie and Bonnie Koloc almost obsessively. What drew me to these artists was never just the music. Their songs seemed to carry real lives inside them: love, loneliness, life on the road, loss and hope. That feeling came back to me listening to Shannon Jae Ridout‘s The Magnolia Sessions, along with her three previous albums.
Ridout‘s musical life seems to have grown naturally from that tradition. Raised in the western region of rural Washington state and classically trained as a clarinettist, she eventually picked up a fifty-dollar acoustic guitar and taught herself to play. Fascinated by old European ballads and murder songs, she gradually found her own way into songwriting.
For more than a decade she travelled around America, hitchhiking, busking and playing wherever she could. She also made music with her late husband, Nicholas Ridout. Together they formed Sour Mash Melodies and became part of the Spitshine Street Band. Nicholas‘ death in 2013 changed everything. Ridout continued with The Teardrop Trio and released Strung Up Sorrow, but then came a ten-year silence.
Her first solo album, Unwritten Scripts, arrived in 2010, when she was still developing her artistic identity. Ridout later described that early record as ‘stumbling to find my voice.’ I find that description touching because her songs still have that sense of discovery. They come from actual situations: relationships, separation, wandering, grief and loneliness. Landscape matters too. Roads, rivers and distant places often become part of the emotional story.
Her influences are not difficult to hear. I think of Karen Dalton for the vulnerability, Townes Van Zandt for the way sadness can simply be allowed to exist, and Neil Young for the sense of landscape and movement. There are also echoes of traditional country and folk ballads. At times, she brings to mind Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes, not only for its earthy, unguarded intimacy, but for the way the informal recording allows the surrounding world to become part of the music.
That same spirit is at the heart of The Magnolia Sessions – the brainchild of Dan Emery of Anti-Corp Music and Black Matter Mastering – yet Ridout never sounds unoriginal. She transforms these influences into her own sound, and that is why this is a natural setting for her. This earthly series consists of live performances recorded outdoors beneath a magnolia tree at the company’s Nashville base. Invited artists perform without overdubs or the usual studio safety net and trickery, while the sounds of the ambient environment remain part of the recording.
This session was recorded at night, and that detail matters. Crickets, cicadas, katydids and occasional frogs become part of what we hear. They don’t feel like an added effect; they make the recording feel real. You can almost picture Ridout sitting there with her guitar while the darkness carries on around her. It brings to mind, too, the old Woodstock Mountain Revue: Music From Mud Acres recordings, not because there is a direct connection, but because of that same impression of rural surroundings and informal music-making, where the place itself becomes part of the experience.
Voice, guitar, insects and darkness all seem to occupy the same space…
The nine songs come from different periods of the artists’ songwriting. Unwritten Scripts reaches back to her first solo album, Let There Be No Trouble to Strung Up Sorrow, while It Ain’t Right belongs to the newer Two Busted Boots And A Broken Heart period. I like that mixture. It gives the session a feeling of looking back without becoming a retrospective, as Ridout is returning to songs that have travelled with her.
Leavin’ Me brings a sense of departure, Let There Be No Trouble has the feel of an old folk ballad, and Two Sappy Fools adds some warmth. Mississippi Please returns to the road that runs through so much of her writing. The songs are melancholy, but never without tenderness.
However, the song that affects me most is Unwritten Scripts. The original recording dates from 2010, when Shannon and Nicholas had travelled to Santa Cruz, and she was still only about nine months into playing and singing on her own. Hearing her return to the song now is inevitably different.
The young woman who recorded it could not know what was coming: more time on the road, more music, marriage, the loss of Nicholas, years away from recording and eventually this return. The song itself doesn’t need to explain any of that. You simply hear it differently because she is singing it differently. That, for me, is the quiet power of revisiting an old song. The words can remain the same while the life behind them changes.
It Ain’t Right brings us towards the newer material, and by the time Highways Of Scotchbroom and Low As Low arrive, I have stopped thinking about everything individually; they have become part of one long evening. Voice, guitar, insects and darkness all seem to occupy the same space. And that is what I like most about The Magnolia Sessions. It doesn’t feel like a performance taken out of its setting and presented to us; the natural backdrop has stayed with it.
I have always been drawn to singers who make you feel they are telling you something they have actually lived, rather than simply performing an idea of a song. Shannon Jae Ridout has that quality. There is sadness here, and a great deal of journeying, but also resilience and a quiet acceptance of whatever the road brings next. Listening to her beneath that magnolia tree, with the night insects humming around her, I don’t feel that I am listening to a carefully constructed studio album. I feel that I have been allowed to sit nearby and listen. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is exactly what a song needs.
Label: Anti-Corp Music
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
