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Day After Tomorrow

by

Joan Baez

 
Day After Tomorrow
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One of folk music's greats enlists Steve Earle for a new album.

  • We Say...

    Review by Billy Altman

    2008 marks Joan Baez's 50th anniversary as a performer, and with the release of Day After Tomorrow, the 67-year-old folk diva certainly proves the old adage about how there may be snow on the rooftop, but there is still fire in the chimney. Her first studio collection since 2003's Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, Day After Tomorrow finds Baez singing with a voice that may be physically less imposing than in her younger days, but now strikes different — and in some ways deeper — chords than ever before.

    Ably supported by producer/guitarist Steve Earle and a stellar backing band featuring multi-instrumentalists Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott, bassist Viktor Krauss and drummer Kenny Malone, Baez explores recurrent themes of geographic and spiritual homes lost and found through thoughtfully chosen material from writers like Tom Waits, Patty Griffin, Eliza Gilkyson and Earle himself. Especially moving are two "letter" compositions: Diana Jones' "Henry Russell's Last Words," about a trapped miner writing a goodbye note to his wife, and the Waits-penned title track, concerning an American soldier in Iraq who confesses he's not fighting for justice or freedom, but simply "for my life."

    Throughout, Baez uses her ever-formidable interpretive skills to go beneath the words and melodies and reach the emotional core of each song. In the process, she reveals their inherent humanism — a binding thread that's been a hallmark of Joan Baez's music, and life, for a remarkable half a century. And still counting.

  • They Say...

    Review by William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

    Having recorded Steve Earle's "Christmas in Washington" on her last studio album, 2003's Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, and his "Jerusalem" on her 2005 live album, Bowery Songs, and toured with him in between, Joan Baez has turned to Earle as the producer of her 24th studio album, Day After Tomorrow; he also contributes three of the ten songs, two of them, "God Is God" and "I Am a Wanderer," specially written. Earle seems to have taken as his assignment the goal of creating a modern Joan Baez album that is in the tradition of her great albums of the 1960s. First, he assembled a group of acoustic musicians in Nashville, anchored by multi-instrumental string players Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott (a rhythm section of Viktor Krauss and Kenny Malone is sometimes present also), and then he and Baez cherry-picked recent songs from contemporary singer/songwriters working in the spirit of those Baez covered earlier in her career, including Elvis Costello, Eliza Gilkyson, Patty Griffin, and Tom Waits. In making those choices, they looked to material that evoked Baez's folk past. For example, as Baez herself says of Gilkyson's "Rose of Sharon," "If I didn't know otherwise, I would have just assumed that it was an old English folk song." "Scarlet Tide," written by Costello and T Bone Burnett for the soundtrack to the 2003 Civil War film Cold Mountain, in which it was sung by Alison Krauss, naturally sounds like a 19th century American folk song. True to Baez's longtime political commitments, it addresses war, as does Waits' and wife Kathleen Brennan's "Day After Tomorrow," which Baez sings with only her own guitar accompaniment, while Diana Jones' "Henry Russell's Last Words" tells the true story of a mining disaster. Earle's "Jericho Road," first heard on his Washington Square Serenade album, is presented a cappella with handclaps and background vocals by Earle, Scott, and O'Brien, sounding just like the sort of spiritual Baez used to adapt back in the '60s. At 67, Baez betrays some vocal aging, but she uses it wisely to impart extra feeling into what is often a downbeat collection of quality songs, and Earle has succeeded in his attempt not to reinvent her, but to re-create her sound and message in contemporary terms.

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