Spotlight Album Review: Madeleine Peyroux "Let's Walk"

MADELEINE PEYROUX  - LET’S WALK

When Madeleine Peyroux released her debut album, Dreamland, in 1996, she was a 23-year-old singer who spent years busking in  Paris and had an uncanny vocal similarity to Billie Holiday. With a couple of old-time blues standards, a Patsy Cline classic, a song in French (“La Vie En Rose”), and a couple of originals, backed by first-rate musicians, it set the template for most of her catalogue. With Let’s Walk, her ninth album (and first in six years), Madeleine has teamed up with her longtime collaborator Jon Herrington to co-write all of the songs in an intimate setting, and the result is one of the most beautiful albums of the year.

The opening track, “Find True Love,” establishes the theme of walking and a tone that is both sweet and vulnerable: “Oh Let’s go down to the bayou and find true love/Listen to the blues and the gospel of Jesus.” But tellingly: “I promise to be open to feel joy and pain/The only way to make a life is to fail and try again.” That sense of engagement is central to Let’s Walk. “This music is part of a dialogue,” Madeleine has said. “Music is the only way I’ve ever built community.”

The second track, “How I Wish,” is a gentle waltz that betrays concern about fear and loathing in our country:

What I’d give and unlearn Should some peace & concern
Fill this empty dread on the wire we tread
Between fear and disgrace
Oh my red American face

That’s followed by “Let’s Walk,” with it’s steady, martial beat and gospel-like backing vocals, that could be the theme song of a peaceful protest march: “Let’s walk Let’s roll/You are the people of my heart and soul I want the world to know.” A couple of tracks are more personal than political. “Please Come on Inside” has a subtle R&B groove with Herrington’s growling guitar and background singers led by Catherine Russell. It seems to address a child:

The road Is long but I will be strong
Enough for the two of us to get by
So sleep into the morning child
Gonna Learn to live again by and by

And “Blues for Heaven,” featuring Andy Ezrin on Hammond organ, implores “Make room for a sinner like me.” She revisits her time in Paris and her fluency in French on “Et Puis” (translated “And Then”), which suggests she can escape the world’s insanity by going home to her little apartment in Paris. Right after that she tries out some Spanish and a Mexican feel on the playful “Me and the Mosquito”: “Every specie somehow must by Mother Nature come alive/But if it’s just the two of us I’d rather only one survive.”

The peppy “Take Care,” featuring Herrington on marimbas, offers some ethical food advice:

Perhaps you should abstain— This is for your health
I know it sounds insane— But please take care of yourself
No I don’t recommend a morose existence
Life is an art, and perspective needs distance
But you gotta get lean and scrappy and fight if you’re gonna begin to get living right

“Nothing Personal” digs down into some kind of #MeToo memory, an anti-torch song describing sex abuse in a harrowing way: “You rip and tear me/Unzip and wear me/You make it irreversible.” However, Madeleine doesn’t dwell on the negative. She come right back with the rollicking blues, “Showman Dan.” Sparked by a sizzling Herington guitar solo, it’s a tribute to her longtime friend and mentor, Daniel William Fitzgerald, the leader of the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band.

She met him in Paris at a low point in her life. “I was homeless and penniless and difficult and a child and arrogant and a budding alcoholic. He took me in. He gave me a job and a home and a second family.” He taught her much of the vintage blues which informed her early music and gave her a sense of purpose. If music saved Madeleine’s life, Let’s Walk will certainly enrich yours with its expressive vocals, deeply felt musicianship and humanity at a time the world sorely needs it.

photo by Ebru Yildiz