Joan Armatrading

It was a fine thing

[665/03]

[It’s back!]

A couple of months ago I was talking to a friend of mine and somehow the music of Joan Armatrading came up. I realized, almost to my horror, that I hadn’t listened to her music in a very long time. As soon as I got off the phone, I downloaded all of her albums in full and, a few days later, on a drive to visit my daughter at college (four-and-a-half hours round trip) I listened to Joan’s first eight albums beginning to end. I did it old school—one album at a time, every track in order. What was astonishing to me is that out of the 86 songs on the playlist there were only four I skipped over.

It’s very strange to me but I have no idea when I was first introduced to Joan Armatrading’s music. It simply feels as though it—and she—have always been part of my life. Her first album, “Whatever’s for Us,” came out in 1972, but I was seven at the time and I was definitely much older when I started listening to her albums. But I don’t associate her music with any specific time or place in my life, either—not home or camp or boarding school or college. It’s as if it was always there, just like Pete (Townshend) and Kate (Bush), their music so frequently listened to, such an intimate part of my life that I felt perfectly comfortable calling them by their first names and always assumed that my friends would know who I was referring to (which they did). (There were others as well that I felt similarly close to but, as for being on a first-name-basis—there was, apparently, a one-syllable rule).

Joan’s debut album, Whatever’s for Us, released in 1972 when she was 22, was actually the fourth or fifth I listened to, so I’d forgotten just how precocious her performance on it is. Although it doesn’t quite reach the brilliance of Kate Bush’s 1978 “The Kick Inside” or Tori Amos’ 1992 “Little Earthquake,” it’s quite something. The album is excellent and points to the promise that was realized in the extraordinary string of albums she released in the next ten years, from Back to the Night to The Key.

“Everybody Gotta Know,” a track on The Key (1983), the last Joan Armatrading album I ever listened to, was the “Everybody Hurts” of its time released nine years before the REM song came out.

This part gets me every time:

I think I've told it all
So plainly
But there's no one there
To hear the words I say
Sometimes
It all sounds so crazy
Your version of the story
That I know
Oh when your memory
Fails you

Everybody gotta know this feeling
Everybody gotta know
Everybody gotta know this feeling
Inside

The pacing, the built-in hesitations and truncated rhymes—it encapsulates how it feels to be in the midst of a universal experience in which you feel utterly alone. Your isolation—and conviction that your suffering is unique—means there is no comfort in the fact that almost everybody else on the planet has been through similar pain. The comfort is only retrospective. And her vocal register is really quite something.

Picking the second tune was hard—there are so many options. But “The Weakness in Me” (Walk Under Ladders, 1981) has always blown me away. It’s a sublime tune for anybody who has been in a love triangle or anybody who has experienced unrequited love or difficult, unfulfilling, aching love of any kind. It delves deep into the helplessness we often feel when at the mercy of our feelings. And, man, it hurts.

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BONUS TRACK

“It’s a fine thing” is a lyric from the chorus of the song “Kissin’ and a Huggin’” (Joan Armatrading, 1976). The chorus itself is a sublime tribute to young love but it’s the transition from the verse (which, quite honestly, I kind of can’t stand) to the chorus that is also a thing of beauty.

I may listen to the 12 Joan Armatrading albums that followed The Key—and I certainly need to figure out why I stopped listening to this extraordinary, versatile, and ground-breaking artist. But her first eight albums have given me endless joy and Joan will be part of my life forever.