We’re all drifters
singers and sisters
brothers and lovers and mothers and confidantes.
We were born alone
we’re alone when we’re gone
so while we’re here, we might as well just
sing along.
With these words in the chorus of the song “Drifters,” the Continental Drifters declare themselves. It’s an elegy, a hymn to themselves and others like them who’ve survived and are now doing what they do on their own terms.
The Drifters are a collective of sorts, six musicians who’ve removed themselves from the maw of the machine in Los Angeles, now living, working and making music in New Orleans. The three main singers and songwriters are Vicki Peterson, late of the Eighties super-girl-group The Bangles; Susan Cowsill, late of the Sixties family pop group The Cowsills; and Peter Holsapple, late of the indie-rock group The dBs, and Cowsill’s husband.
Rounding out the group are drummer Russ Broussard, bassist Mark Walton and guitarist Robert Maché. All six play multiple instruments and contribute vocals.
Vermillion is one of those albums that sneaked up on me. On the first couple of listens, everything sounded good enough, but nothing really grabbed me by the ears and demanded my attention. Then, somewhere around the third or fourth time, I found myself drawn into these songs.
This is real music, by real people, for real people. The singing, the playing, the arrangements, the production &mdash all are professional and workmanlike, and at some point you realize that many of them are little, unobtrusive works of art. Don’t count on hearing these on commercial radio, because they straddle a number of genres, including folk, rock and country, with a little bit of soul thrown into the mix.
The album opens with “The Rain Song,” a mid-tempo rocker about missing a former lover, written and sung by Peterson and Cowsill. It’s one of three songs in which rain is the central metaphor, and a good one to open with.
The two women sing a lot of close harmony and unison parts, a good strategy with two voices of similar range but different texture — think of a female Lennon and McCartney. Cowsill, who sings lead on “Rain Song,” has a dark, warm, earthy voice, full of texture and nuance; she gives a line like “hell, I don’t even miss you half the time” exactly the right touch. Peterson’s voice is clear and clean but still expressive, as she shows on “Who We Are, Where We Live” when she sings “Now your bed’s too big and the pillow’s too small/and you gotta try and make sense of it all.” And when they join in three-part harmony with Holsapple’s baritone, magic can happen.
“The Rain Song” is a densely layered affair that doesn’t sound overproduced, and still has an open, airy feel to it. Lots of big, fat, low notes on guitar give it a slight country feel. On the second bridge, the two women chant “rain, rain” down through several minor chords and back up to the song’s dominant major key, and you can almost see the rainbow as the sun breaks through the clouds.
Vermillion is full of neat little moments like that.
There’s Holsapple’s B-3 organ, burbling along underneath the vocals and then breaking through for swelling solos, on several songs. There’s the nifty trick they do with the lyrics a couple of times, when the last word of the verse becomes the first word of the chorus, or vice-versa. There’s the matching of disparate instruments, like the stabbing, Telecaster-like guitar paired with mandolin and the gospel-flavored harmonies on “Watermark.”
Holsapple takes lead vocals on three of the songs, including the high-octane, indie-rock “Don’t Do What I Did,” full of rumbling bass and rockabilly guitar licks. He and Cowsill do a passable “homage” to John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X with their vocals on this one, complete with flattened harmonies on the verses and unison belting on the bridges.
Peterson provides the harmony on “Darlin’ Darlin’,” Holsapple’s stab at Motown soul. He doesn’t really have the vocal chops to carry this number, but he still throws a lot of soul into it, and the guitar and organ work are sublime.
Holsapple’s “Daddy Just Wants it to Rain” is a bit lengthy at over seven minutes, but it’s a touching ballad about a taciturn Midwestern farm family coping with various kinds of drought.
But the women vocally dominate the rest of the disc, and they carry it off well. Among the best is “I Want to Learn to Waltz With You,” with Cowsill on lead and Holsapple on harmony as well as organ and what sounds like accordion, though none is credited in the liner notes. It’s a heart-tugging and yet clever song about mature love, like several others on the album.
The best rocker on the album is Holsapple’s “Meet Me In the Middle,” a big, loose-limbed anthem that’s downright Stones-like, from Cowsill’s raw lead vocal and Holsapple’s ragged harmonies down to the tinkling honky-tonk piano and the way the guitar and bass play the main riff in unison. Cowsill cuts loose on the mid-tempo rocker “Spring Day in Ohio,” with its in-your-face refrain, “This is your life, how do you like it so far?” The pairing of vibes and Holsapple’s swelling, throbbing organ is particularly effective. “Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway” is a Springsteen-esque road song, a shambling anthem packed with lyrical imagery like the chorus’s “white noise and lightning on the radio.”
Peterson’s “Who We Are, Where We Live” is an emotion-packed ballad even if you don’t know that it was inspired by the death of her fiancé from leukemia. Her straightforward delivery is augmented by sparse instrumentation that give the song a dry, desert-like feeling that perfectly fit the subject matter, with lyrics that could come right out of the Richard Thompson songbook: “Emptiness is the foundation/Soul and center of our little nation.” “Anything” is a perfect little country-folk ditty to end the album, a love song penned and sung by Peterson and Holsapple, accompanied by acoustic guitar and mandolin.
Neither the Continental Drifters nor Vermillion is trendy or hip in any way. In fact, some of the lyrics and sentiments would be downright corny if they didn’t spring from such a well of experience. These are folks who have been through the wringer of the music business, and now they’re making music their way, for themselves and whoever wants to listen. I’m generally not one to make predictions, but most or all of these songs could age very well and sound just as good and fresh a year or five or 10 down the road.
(Razor & Tie, 1999)
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