Mavis

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/12/02/3296341/mavis-staples-comes-to-helzberg.html

Mavis Staples’s new album, “One True Vine,” is both a sequel and a reversal. It’s her second collection of (mostly) gospel songs produced by Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, following up their 2010 collaboration, “You Are Not Alone” (Anti-), which landed Ms. Staples her first Grammy Award (for best Americana album) in a career that dates to the 1950s.

Well into the 1990s, Ms. Staples’s deep, husky contralto, at once devout and sensual, was at the center of her family band, the Staple Singers, who moved from gospel churches in the 1950s to civil rights rallies in the 1960s to the pop charts with 1970s hits like “I’ll Take You There.”

On “You Are Not Alone,” Mr. Tweedy had clearly studied Pops Staples, who led the Staple Singers as guitarist and songwriter; the songs were full of pithy, syncopated reverbed electric guitar, and they exuberantly affirmed the power of faith. “One True Vine” is quieter and darker: no less reverent, but far more pensive about it. It ponders more than it proselytizes.

Mr. Tweedy plays most of the guitars and keyboards on the album; his son Spencer Tweedy plays drums. Jeff Tweedy sets the new album’s solemn tone with three songs he wrote: measured, midtempo tunes that have as much to do with solitude as with redemption. Two of them, “Jesus Wept” and “One True Vine,” don’t mention any deity in their lyrics. “Jesus Wept” longs for a reunion and reconciliation, while “One True Vine” praises “The only one that I believe,” but immediately adds, “I trust you/I hope that someday you will trust me too.” In “Every Step,” Ms. Staples insists, “My Lord he knows me every step of the way,” but the song’s minor key, trudging beat and austere guitar, along with Ms. Staples’s bluesy voice, make that line awe-struck and fearful, not sanguine. The album opens with a hymnlike song from the band Low, “Holy Ghost,” that treats faith more as an intuition — “Some holy ghost keeps me hangin’ on” — than a doctrine.

There are some optimistic moments. “Far Celestial Shores,” written for Ms. Staples by Nick Lowe, envisions heaven not only as a realm of abundance and joy, but also as “a place I know for certain I will someday see.” And the gospel standard “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)” is lean — acoustic rhythm guitar, brushes on the drums — but determinedly celebratory. Yet, as a whole, “One True Vine” is as introspective and diffident as a gospel album can be. Bravely and intimately, it leaves room for doubt. – JON PARELES (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Mavis! Review [Philadelphia Film Festival 2015]