In My Own Time (50th Anniversary Edition)

Album review

A half-century after the release of Karen Dalton's cult classic second album, In My Own Time sounds as magical as it always has; it was never—despite the album's title—that she was ahead of her time, but rather not of this world. Which is not to say she was some ethereal creature. After a whole life lived in her teenage years, married twice and with two kids, Dalton moved from Oklahoma to New York City to be part of the Greenwich Village 1960s folk scene alongside the likes of Tim Hardin and Neil Young. Bob Dylan called her one of his favorites, saying "Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday." She reportedly hated the comparison, though you get why Dylan made it: it's the weary ache and that slim silver thread of hope that remains. You can hear it on her cover of George Jones' "Take Me;" the piano flutters like it needs a fainting couch, but Dalton turns the quiet plea into something wistful rather than desperate. "Take me to Siberia and the coldest weather of the winter time/ And it would be just like spring in California," she sings, drawing out that last word like it's some impossible oasis. (By then, Dalton had had two teeth knocked out in a fight between boyfriends.) It's in her jaunty delivery of the Holland-Dozier-Holland's "How Sweet It is" and her interpretation of Richard Manuel's psychedelic country-rock "In a Station," Dalton blowing like wind through some desolate space. And lord knows it's in her most famous song, the Scottish folk traditional "Katie Cruel." Helped along by high-lonesome banjo, it's as haunted as they come. "When I first came to town, they called me the roving jewel," Dalton sings, managing to make it sound like she's not broken by it all. "Now they've changed their tune, call me Katie Cruel." Credit her wavery, light-refracted voice and the way it reflects both a fragility of nature and a hardscrabble strength of circumstance. (While the story of folkie Fred Neil secretly recording Dalton's first album by not telling her the tape was running has been romanticized, it's also exploitative and manipulative.) Dalton, who would disappear after In My Own Time, battled heroin and alcohol addiction and died at age 55 after an AIDS diagnosis. But her influence carries on, in Angel Olsen, Lucinda Williams, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett and Nick Cave, to name a few. This new expanded and remastered edition includes alternate takes of "In My Own Dream," "Something on Your Mind" and "Katie Cruel." The latter two light a small fire under the beat, but find Dalton less declarative, like she's consoling a friend in hushed tones. There are also several live tracks. "Take Me," captured in April 1971 in Germany, is so intimate it's disarming, Dalton's voice cracking on the line "like heaven to me." But there is strength—an almost defiance—on the songs from her Montreaux performance a month later, even in "Blues on the Ceiling" when she predicts she'll "Never get out of these blues alive." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz