American Prospect Review of Pay The Devil

Facing the Country Music

If Van Morrison and Neil Young share anything, it’s nothing much deeper than time, talent, and peculiarity. They’ve been around for the same stretch of years. Both began in other people’s bands, and had their first hits in the same era. Both went solo early, while maintaining long-term affiliations with other artists. Both stood out at The Band’s Last Waltz concert. Both have traveled the genre map, ranging widely and sometimes alarmingly over styles. Both are older now, and seldom perform hatless. Both remain creative and interesting to watch. Aside from all that, their fortunes are their own.

With his new album, Pay the Devil -- a collection of country and honky-tonk ballads, some classic, some obscure -- Morrison may be attempting the sort of transformation other pop and R&B performers have achieved by going country. Or he may just enjoy singing the songs of Hank Williams, George Jones, and Webb Pierce. He certainly hasn’t gone native or anything: Despite its steel-guitar keenings and upper-octave piano tinklings straight out of Nashville, Pay the Devil was recorded in Ireland with Irish musicians. In fact, publicity tells us that Morrison has never been to the capital of country music -- though he will be playing his first Nashville concerts in early March.

You might expect, given this, a more intriguing relationship between performer and material -- the kind of weirdness that can result when indigenous music is interpreted by an artist-fan without direct experience of the atmosphere that breeds it. (Like, say, Japanese surf music or Irish soul.) Instead the distance just sits there, gaping and inert, and Morrison does nothing to leap it.

He’s comfortable with these songs, but comfort doesn’t suit him: It can’t free him to do what he does best, which is to swing on an improvised vocal like Tarzan on the vine. What frees Morrison is a sense of questing, with eyes shut, toward some consummation of feeling, some raw mysticism embodied in an inner or outer landscape only he is seeing. Lacking that fixation -- who can say what its object is? Who needs to? -- Pay the Devil is not an enraptured search or even a jaunty excursion, but a vague stroll through an undefined elsewhere.

The album’s best track is a version of the 1958 Chuck Willis hit “What Am I Living For” in which ease approximates grace. Its best moment altogether is Morrison’s commentary as the song’s last chord fades: “That was worth it. That was worth it.” Just there, yes it was. But with only a couple of other exceptions (“There Stands the Glass,” “Till I Gain Control Again”), the worth of the album as a whole must rest in Morrison’s private satisfaction. If “worth it” has anything to do with “memorable,” Pay the Devil needn’t have been made.

Which is something you’d never say about other country crossover moves. On Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), Ray Charles contrasted his harsh voice with the smoothest of Hollywood backings for a sensually eerie, sandpaper-on-velvet effect. On The Blue Ridge Rangers (1973), John Fogerty sang naively, with romantic aspiration and without irony, as if the sentiments in his chosen country standards had never been expressed before. On Almost Blue (1981), Elvis Costello brought a vocal thickness and menace common in punk but largely alien to country -- slugged, suspicious, on the verge of either tears or obscenities. Each of these experiments clarified and emboldened something in the performer, some essence only implicit before.

Morrison, though, neither reconceives himself in country terms nor bends the genre to serve him. If country is white soul music, “soul” may be an overabundant commodity to a singer who defines the word by merely expanding his chest and opening his mouth. There is no effort to his soulfulness here -- and “effortless” in this case means not just ease and professionalism: It means lack of effort. It’s not that Morrison doesn’t bring himself to these songs; it’s that these songs bring nothing to Morrison’s self. Both songs and self go out unchanged, and the experience dies before it lives.

Expecting an artist’s every issuance to be a statement of purpose is foolish; wanting it to be a living experience is not. But does an artist always need to be fixated? Can his comfort resonate? Of course -- if his sense of comfort is rich enough to tremble with life, and if there’s fire in his warmth. Neil Young is not more gifted than Van Morrison, nor is he deeper in his visions, but as an artist he is less reducible to a set of consistent strengths. He’s done weighty, exhilarating work in the softest folkie modes, and in the harshest rock styles. Morrison’s mastery has always had a center; Young is indefinable without his extremes.
-Devin McKinney