You Can’t Take a Bad Girl Home (Lonesome Day)
Lipstick noir doesn’t come any more tingly than titular lead-off “You Should’ve Known” (“you can’t take a bad girl home”), a midnight motorcycle ride of lust and regret. “So there goes your hope,” concludes the dreamy opener, “dirty as tailpipe smoke.” Dreams good and bad recur throughout You Can’t Take a Bad Girl Home. An undeniable Lilith Fair hook, the callous “Hey Doll” (“you’re just another lover”) comes hither next, only to be trumped by the sultry, Rickie Lee Jones girlishness of “Dreams,” a gorgeous cautionary tale about neglecting one’s better half. Swamp-mospherics coating the succeeding “Baton Rouge” summon Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano (“Bloodletting [The Vampire Song]”), only this gal ain’t coming back from the afterlife (“on my tombstone write, ‘She was here, but now she’s dead'”). The winsome vocal inset to simplistic festive jangle “Share Our Secrets” speaks to producer Fred Eaglesmith’s understanding not only of songcraft as a gemstone in need of the right setting but of vocals mic’d for maximum variety within an organic whole. Prime example: “Fireworks” is pure Lucinda Williams circa Sweet Old World. The seventh, eighth, and ninth slots suffer in comparison, but closer “Redhead Rosie” paddles ‘n’ twangs a riverboat pearl straight out of Delaney & Bonnie. You Can’t Take a Bad Girl Home, but you can sure as hell hole up at a Days Inn.
This article appears in November 19 • 2010.
