Arts
By Jewly Hight
Adrienne Young
The Art of Virtue (AddieBelle/Virtual Label/Ryko)
Playing The Station Inn July 7
When artists cram veiled moral messages into their music, the results can be cumbersome, contrived and easily dismissible. Not so with Adrienne Young. Her approach to making music is rife with lessons borrowed from a long-forgotten way of life, and it all seems as natural as the organic garden in her backyard.
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The Art of Virtue, Young's second album, continues her felicitous pairing of bluegrass, folk, Appalachian and Anglo-Celtic flavors with agrarian themes. Those traditional values—not traditional like the Republican Party platform, but traditional like the adages of Ben Franklin—permeate how she handles touring, how she runs her fledgling record label, AddieBelle, and virtually everything related to making music. Young's holistic vision makes her a striking, unique presence in Americana music.
"Branding used to be why a Sears & Roebuck catalog was like a Bible, because it was filled with things that would last a lifetime," she says. "Quality used to be what this country was about. I wanted to create something that would make people feel good about buying, that would be something for the whole family. I just want people to associate AddieBelle with an undeniable sense of quality, value and respect."
Virtues Put Into Action: Adrienne Young with her band, Little Sadie.
When you open Young's ornate, sepia-tinted album packaging, several items tumble into your lap, one of which is a booklet containing Franklin's 13 virtues. These are meant as "inner seeds," expanding the allegory begun by the seed packets enclosed in her first album, Plow to the End of the Row, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package. Young is more concerned with making her listeners feel appreciated than with keeping down her cost per unit.
This ethos of consideration pervades The Art of Virtue. The idea of recognizing the consequences of our actions surfaces in the wistful two-step "Hills and Hollers," in the bare sorrow of "Walls of Jericho" and in the folk anthem "It's All the Same." With a supple lilt in "Walls of Jericho," Young asks, "Such a Rich Man's scheme using / Poor Boy's dreams / To fight the fight / How far will we go pretending we don't know / What is wrong or right?" Agile fiddle runs figure prominently on several tracks, complementing Young's clear, honeyed vocals. Crisp banjo, mournful Dobro and acoustic guitar are anchored by the light thump and swing of the rhythm section.
Young isn't paying lip service to bygone days. Among the album's 15 tracks are rejuvenated old-time fiddle tunes ("Bonaparte's Retreat" and "My Love Is in America") and a gospel standard ("Farther Along"), all of which her band, Little Sadie, navigate with infectious spirit. The album closes with an update of the Grateful Dead's beloved benediction, "Brokedown Palace."
A true student of Ben Franklin, Young didn't release two albums of agrarian-minded music and leave it at that—she put the concepts into action. Her touring itinerary is peppered with unconventional gigs. Along with nightclubs, she and her band do school performances, giving students a living, breathing, entertaining history lesson.
"I feel like, in schools, music and the freedom of expression it encourages is a positive influence that we need to keep, because sometimes the pages in a science book can be flat," she says. "We have unbelievable amounts of inquiries from people. I have 150 schools that are ready for us to come, and we just have to figure out how to be able to afford it. The main idea that I want to leave with the children is that acoustic music is as exciting and enthralling as any electric guitar rock band. In the more urban areas, they've never even seen a banjo, and when you turn them onto the music, then you're turning them onto all of the ideals that were socially present when that music was being created."
Next on the innovations list is a new kind of festival merchandise tent. Young is a spokesperson for FoodRoutes, an advocacy group for sustainable agriculture, and she wants local farmers selling their produce alongside her CDs. "Sustainable agriculture really holds the key to this country getting back on track in terms of understanding how much power we have as individuals to be self-reliant, and to know what it takes to put food on the table when it's not out of a can or from 3,000 miles away," she says. Still to come is a folk school offering workshops on self-sufficient living, disciplines Young says will "get hunters and hippies together."
If there were a trace of smugness or sanctimony in Young's idealistic message, it might fall flat. But there isn't. In her hands, neither meaning nor music suffers. Young has the gumption to brave uncharted territory in a homogenous industry. "I'm not going to worry about what my bank account looks like until it's gone, and thus far it's never been gone. I'm just going to do the best I can do and have faith that the universe will provide, because there are abundant resources."