Kelly Willis
Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can tell a few things about a country singer by her hairdo. On the first of three poor-selling albums for MCA’s vaunted Nashville division, Well Travelled Love, Kelly Willis looked like a bookish bumpkin proudly displaying her first perm; as if in desperation, her coif grew even poofier on her 1991 follow-up, Bang Bang. But on the cover of her brand-new album, What I Deserve, her stringy blond hair is parted down the center and tucked behind her ears, framing her chiseled features and square jaw in a manner that highlights her all-American beauty with minimal fuss. And correspondingly, she’s never sounded more comfortable in her own musical skin.
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When Tony Brown–the MCA honcho who had ushered left-field talent like Lyle Lovett, the Mavericks, Nanci Griffith, and Steve Earle into the country mainstream–signed Willis in 1989, she was only 20 and exceptionally malleable. A few years earlier she’d moved to Austin from Washington, D.C., with the rockabilly band Kelly & the Fireballs. Drummer Mas Palermo, her boyfriend, wrote most of the group’s songs. They found moderate success in the clubs, but before long several Austin locals, including longtime retro-country fixture Monte Warden and Carlyne Majer, who’d later become Willis’s manager, suggested she convert to country. She took their advice, reconfiguring the band as Radio Ranch and impressing Griffith, who tipped off Brown.
For the third album she was set up with producer Don Was, who’d worked with everyone from Bonnie Raitt to the B-52’s, and his distance from the country machine afforded Willis the opportunity to do her most distinctive work yet. The album featured a better batch of songs than either of the others, and Was used Nashville players noted for their good taste, like Kieran Kane, Mike Henderson, Glenn Worf, and Richard Bennett. Willis’s voice sounded better than ever: she’d figured out how to control her seductive quaver; she was learning how to luxuriate in the ballads, like the lovely duet with Kevin Welch “That’ll Be Me”; and on upbeat material like Marshall Crenshaw’s pop-inflected “Whatever Way the Wind Blows” she no longer sounded breathless.
And while numbers like Damon Bramblett’s lilting “Heaven Bound,” Robison’s can’t-let-go ditty “Wrapped,” and Dan Penn and Chuck Prophet’s warm country-soul tune “Got a Feelin’ For Ya” are as strong as anything she’s recorded (and vastly superior to anything Lone Justice ever did), thanks to lackluster material like Westerberg’s “They’re Blind” and her own self-helpish “Happy With That” (“It’s no good to lose heart / It’s no good to lose sight / It’s no good to have nowhere to go that feels right”), What I Deserve is not the brilliant album MCA prevented Willis from making. She may not have a brilliant album in her.
