Kelly Willis 'Translated From Love' album

Kelly Willis, named by NPR as "alternative country's golden goddess," returns after five years with the much-anticipated Translated From Love. The album is already garnering praise‹ Performing Songwriter says, "...Willis comes off like the prom queen who's learned how to tell fresh guys where to stick it and laugh while she does it," and Venus Zine says, "...this time around...we find a wiser more experienced singer....".

A video for the album's first single "Teddy Boys," will be filmed on June 6 in Brooklyn, NY and will include a cameo appearance by Adam Green (Moldy Peaches) who penned the tune. Willis says of the song, "Chuck brought that in, and it was one of the few songs we completely agreed on at the beginning. It was just complete fun, and an obvious nod to my rockabilly days ‹ I wanted to somehow honor and give respect to that." A digital single of "Teddy Boys" is available now at iTunes and other digital retailers.

Produced by long-time collaborator Chuck Prophet, Translated From Love is Willis' most adventurous album to date. Willis says, "The whole experience was surprising at every turn and challenging, too, doing some material that might not be what people expect out of me." She goes on to say, "I was able to get some songs written that I am proud of and excited about and that give the album some of its depth and personality and soul." Prophet describes, "We cooked up a cool record. Wrote a mess of songs. We got all Œhousewife goth' with it gingham aprons and bad blood." The album's 12 tracks are comprised of originals, covers and collaborations.

Willis co-wrote the six original songs including the Willis/Prophet tunes "Sweet Little One" and "Losing You," which feature the Tosca String Quartet and Greg Leisz on the twelve-string guitar and pedal steel. Appearing on the record are Willis' husband and highly regarded country music songwriter Bruce Robison on "The More I'm Around You" and "Too Much To Lose" and acclaimed singer-songwriter Jules Shear who contributes as a songwriter and musician on "Don't Know Why," "Lucky or Something Like It," and "Too Much To Lose." Translated From Love includes covers of Adam Green's "Teddy Boys," Stephen Yerkey's "Translated From Love," and a raucous, countrified version of Iggy Pop's "Success" featuring The Gourds and Michael Ramos.

Translated from Love is the follow-up to the acclaimed Easy (2002), of which Rolling Stone said, "Kelly Willis' sweet, burnished voice practically spells heartache... " Since her debut in 1990, Willis has released six albums. In 1999 Rykodisc released her breakthrough album What I Deserve, of which Time Magazine called the "country record of the year." Willis has spent the five years between Easy and Translated From Love raising her four children.

biography
As Kelly Willis planned to go into the studio last fall, she really didn’t know what to expect. She had spent the four years since co-producing her 2002 album, the lovely, laid-back Easy, on family matters: her oldest son Deral, born in 2001, got three siblings – twins Abby and Ben born in 2004 and baby Joseph, whose birth followed in early 2006. “This time around, I had absolutely no time or energy to be involved in the producer role at all,” Willis recalls. So she called a guy “who lives and breathes music,” whose instincts she loved and who she felt “really comfortable around:” Chuck Prophet, the edgy singer-songwriter who contributed guitar to both Easy and 1999’s acclaimed What I Deserve. Together, they would create the most sonically adventurous album of Kelly Willis’ seventeen-plus-year recording career, Translated From Love.

In the beginning, Willis assumed she would cut an album of covers since she’d been too busy changing diapers to write songs. Once Prophet arrived at Willis’ Austin, Texas, home things changed. Half of the richly textured album’s dozen tracks are originals, co-written by Kelly and her collaborators. Willis found herself pleasantly surprised that “I was able to get some songs written that I am proud of and excited about and that give the album some of its depth and personality and soul…” As Prophet describes it, “We cooked up a cool record. Wrote a mess of songs. We got all ‘housewife goth’ with it – gingham aprons and bad blood.”

Indeed, among the engaging originals and intriguing covers – derived from such tunesmiths as Adam Green, Damon Bramblett, Jules Shear, and – yes, you heard it right – Iggy Pop – there are musical nods to five decades of rock, pop, and country: girl-group drum sounds one minute, strings-drenched C&W angst the next.

“We wrote some songs that just lent themselves to that encyclopedia of sounds,” says Willis, “plus Chuck really did his research about my history and my career and he knew that when I first started out I was doing rockabilly music.” Hence, the nod to Willis’ first band (at age 16!), Kelly and the Fireballs, via Adam Green’s retro-cool “Teddy Boys,” with its wry, ‘80s-style Moog synthesizer.

Another of Willis’ former combos, Austin’s roots-rockin’ Radio Ranch, was represented by its former guitarist Michael Hardwick, who played dobro on “I Must Be Lucky.” The bluesy original (by Willis, Prophet, and Jules Shear) features a gutsy reading by Willis who “comes off like Link Wray’s girlfriend ,” according to Prophet. Imbued with been-there-done-that attitude, it’s a kind of companion piece to a song Prophet played for her on guitar one day – the sarcastic “Success.” Says Prophet, “She lit up when she heard that Iggy song, especially when it came to that line. ‘Here comes my face/it’s plain bizarre’.” “I’d never heard it before and it just cracked me up,” Kelly agrees. Fueled by Michael Ramos’s vintage Vox organ (“96 Tears” style) and the Gourds’ slaphappy background vocals, Willis sasses Iggy’s taunting lyrics with hard-won conviction. “In the beginning, I was a little worried about doing ‘Success’ and ‘I Must Be Lucky,’” says Willis, “because I hadn’t done that kind of thing in a long time. But then Chuck showed me this picture of me on Wikipedia – it’s a photo from my first record [in 1990]. I’m wearing this leather jacket and I have this fake pompadour, and he was like, ‘That girl could do it.’ He was right – they ended up being some of my favorites. It was so much fun!”

The yin to those songs’ yang are such tearjerkers as the Willis-Prophet co-write “Losing You,” accented by Greg Leisz’s emotive pedal steel. “There’s a sadness below Kelly, as if she’s been touched by fire a time too many,” says Prophet. “You can hear it in her voice.” That yearning, triste quality really comes across in the bittersweet title track, with its evocative accordion and acoustic guitars. “Chuck brought that song in and I thought it was just stunning,” says Willis.

It was Willis’ remarkable voice that stunned those in the studio, according to Prophet. “She’s one of those singers who can make a track come alive. She’s got that kind of charisma.”

Translated From Love documents Willis really cutting loose, perhaps more than she ever did back in the 1990s, over the course of three country albums for MCA. “I came from the school of Nashville where you try to get as many tracks as you can in a day,” says Willis, “but this time we would spend an entire day on one song, just play it to death, over and over, backwards and forwards, and the songs would kind of morph into something else. It was a real organic process and the songs found their natural little niche.” Thus the Bobbie Gentry-esque arrangement of Willis’ ode to a lost love, “Sweet Little One;” the catchy pop-rock bounce of “Don’t Know Why,” a collaboration with Prophet and Shear; and the torchy waltz “Stones Throw Away,” another Willis-Prophet composition, this time in cahoots with Greg Leisz. “I had that title and the riff,” Kelly says of the song’s genesis, “and the two guitar players [Prophet and Leisz] started to go to town on it. Every time I’d bring in a song, it would be this kind of starry girl thing, and then the guys would just totally ‘boy’ it up!”

One of those, the powerful “Too Much to Lose,” features husband Bruce Robison on vocals. “Most of the songs I write are inspired by being married for ten years and trying to maintain the marriage,” Willis explains. “That song is about weathering a relationship, all the ups and downs, and making it work – how there’s too much to lose at this point. Initially, I had Bruce sing on it because I thought that he would be the best voice for it, but then as we did it, it felt really special, like ‘Wow, he is the only person who should sing with me on that song!’”

For Willis’ part, she hopes that the sonic adventures which transpired while making Translated From Love will convey to listeners what it brought to her: “I didn’t want to feel like I was spinning my wheels and doing the same old thing. The whole experience was surprising at every turn and challenging, too, doing some material that might not be what people expect out of me. I felt like I had something to prove, and I want people to do a double-take when they listen to this.” Most of all, though, says Willis, “I just wanted to go in and have fun!”

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Tracklisting

Kelly Willis - Translated From Love