Shocked Tactics

DISC COUNT: "The original intention was to put out five albums," says Michelle Shocked. "When the Latin project and the blues project both imploded, I combined them."

Why Michelle Shocked only has three new albums.

by M.J. Fine

Michelle Shocked didn't mean to release three CDs at once. "The original intention was to put out five albums," she says on the phone from her Los Angeles home. "When the Latin project and the blues project both imploded, I combined them and called it Mexican Standoff. And when the electronica producer found that … the studio needed a lot more time, I delayed that one."

When you own your own label, you can put out as many albums as you please. Mighty Sound's first release was Shocked's 2002 gospel-dub double-disc Deep Natural/Dub Natural; since then, she's used the label to re-release and retool her entire discography, going all the way back to 1986's The Texas Campfire Tapes. (In a nod to its dubious origins, she retitled it Texas Campfire Takes.)

All caught up with her catalog and free of her ex-husband, she turned to recording several years' worth of songs in a nine-week span. In making her first post-divorce record, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Shocked and producer Dusty Wakeman drew inspiration from her 1988 folk-rock classic. "The difference is that on Short Sharp Shocked I went in telling the story of a young ingénue," says Shocked, 43. "Whereas with Don't Ask Don't Tell, I was telling the story from a mature, experienced point of view."

For Got No Strings, she enlisted former Hot Rize leader Nick Forster. "Nick knows Western swing inside and out. And I have a deep and abiding love for Western swing, in no small part due to the very successful efforts of Hot Rize." Having settled on a style, Shocked found a comfortable fit with songs from Disney films. "My sweetheart is a painter who draws heavily on Disney imagery for his subject matter. And my desire is to at some point collaborate with him on performances where he'll be onstage painting while I perform material."

She and her sweetheart, David Willardson, will get to collaborate this evening at an early show for WXPN's Kids' Corner. Shocked says it'll also be her first children's concert and a rare chance to air the Disney songs. (The later show focuses on Don't Ask.)

After knocking out two records in about five weeks, Shocked ran into trouble when she and Los Lobos saxman Steve Berlin clashed over how to make a song cycle based on the Spanish she's picked up here and there. "Steve's had the privilege with the Lobos of probably being among some of the greatest musicians in the world. And so there's a sincerity, there's a seriousness and, more importantly, I think there's an authenticity to it. And I just could not bring that caliber of authenticity to what my contribution to the conversation was. My contribution was much more of an appreciation, but ultimately an outsider's appreciation." Berlin may have been a Philly-born Jew with no background in Latin sounds when he first hooked up with Los Lobos, but now he's soaking in it. He was passionate about the music, Shocked says, but they couldn't agree on which approach to take and in what direction. That's when she felt the stress of running a label alone.

"The experience with Steve was very upsetting, because I was working without a net, you know? … I didn't have management, I didn't have labels, A&R people. It was just me and Steve, one on one. And so it was my judgment and his judgment, and I think, ultimately, it shook my confidence in that I wanted a little bit more, I guess, layers between us to kind of use as sounding boards." The blues project fell through shortly thereafter, but Shocked was determined to make her self-imposed deadline, whether or not the records were ready.

"After two very smooth, successful projects, this last project got quite complicated very quickly, and I was running out of time and I was running out of money and, more importantly, I was running out of confidence. And I ultimately had to just keep pushing," she says.

She took Berlin's basic tracks and went back to Wakeman to cobble together the Latin and blues material. "I took the whole big mess to Dusty and I dropped it in his lap. And he found a way of making the challenges seem not so insurmountable and unraveling the knots that seemed impossibly tangled."

If it worked, she says, it's because his outlook was more in line with hers. "Both of us are fairly irreverent Texas hillbillies, you know? And we weren't really trying to go for the big authentico production number that Ry Cooder pulled off with, say, Buena Vista Social Club."

Now that that's taken care of, she's looking ahead to next year's trilogy. Along with the delayed electronica project, Shocked says, it'll include songs she wrote in New Orleans and a tribute to Memphis Minnie. She doesn't want to say too much about how she'll pay her respects to the blues-guitar pioneer, but she's said her dream team would include Jill Scott and Lucinda Williams. Authenticity isn't an issue for her here, either. "Women who are in this business, which is still essentially a man's world, know the challenges and the struggles that we've had to overcome in order to sustain and survive and thrive in this business, and why should we imagine that it was any different or any less for a black woman in the '30s and '40s and '50s?"

Michelle Shocked plays Thu., June 30 at 5 p.m., $15-$25 (WXPN's Kids' Corner) and 7:30 p.m., $31-$33 (with David Berkeley), World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400.

Michelle Shocked
Don't Ask Don't Tell
Got No Strings
Mexican Standoff
(Mighty Sound)

Here's the short version: Don't Ask Don't Tell is the divorce record, Got No Strings does Disney songs western-swing style and Mexican Standoff catches Chicano rock snuggling up against Texas blues. But despite their stylized outlines, the three projects have more in common than not, and Michelle Shocked doesn't always stay inside their borders.

Don't Ask Don't Tell doesn't go into breakup mode until halfway through, but once there it doesn't merely wallow. "Evacuation Route" and "Elaborate Sabotage" are slow, sad and pretty, but the jive-talkin' "Don't Tell" strikes back at the drunken ex and calls out his whole family. Only "Early Morning Saturday" might woo anyone back to bed, but that's not the point.

Got No Strings is a likelier bedtime favorite — if the object is sending a kid to dreamland. A lulling "Baby Mine" sets the standard, but "Bare Necessities" and the hillbilly "Spectrum" stand out for their playfulness.

Mexican Standoff finds plenty of ways to say good-bye, in English ("The Bitter Pill"), Spanish ("Lonely Planet") and Spanglish ("La Cantina El Gato Negro"). The Latin-infused tracks are full of drama, but Shocked pulls off the blues numbers with more flair. She'd do well to revisit the road where she found "180 Proof," and if Don't Ask's "Hi Skool" is any indication, she's got a great garage-rock record in her yet.