NOISE: “Tennessee, you’ve been good to me”

Pub date January 3, 2007
WriterCheryl Eddy
SectionNoise

mindysmith1.jpg

I first encounted Mindy Smith on VH-1 Country, of all places — it was a video for her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” (with the divine Ms. P providing backing vocals), which matched Smith’s unfussy, dulcet voice with a mournful, almost eerie arrangement. Notably, she tweaked the chorus and made it her own, adding a lilt to the fourth “Jolene” in the refrain as she begged for mercy from the auburn-haired siren (in the video, caught mackin’ on Mindy’s man in a car in the woods). The follow-up single, “Come to Jesus” — from her Vanguard debut, One Moment More — suggested a more Johnny-Cash-finds-religion kind of Christianity than Bible-thumping zealotry, a theme that lurked around the edges of the album with references to angels and the like. Other lyrical topics included her mother’s death (the moving “One Moment More”) and the country throwback “Train Song,” about a woman waitin’ on a lover who’s left her lonely — and more than a little pissed about having to tend “all this shit” he left behind.