Careless Love (2004)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
Listening to Madeleine Peyroux creates a particularly calm sense of enjoyment. The songs on this album don’t get you up and dancing or get you pondering politics or your own mortality. The songs themselves are full of feeling, but don’t manipulate your emotions to uncomfortable extremes. This is the music of a particularly elegant, lowly lit but still friendly and welcoming cocktail bar – perfect for lounging with a slight buzz and letting your mind drift away through the music like lazy coils of smoke.
Careless Love is a set of covers of old jazz songs, country music and American folk (plus one original song), all conducted in a mellow, jazzy manner that suits Peyroux’s equally mellow voice. In fact, the pervading thought that I have when I listen to this album is that she sounds almost exactly like Billie Holiday. Her tones are warm and gentle, and her phrasing has enough of a swing to it to get your foot tapping without raising your heartbeat above a pleasant resting rate. The resemblance is at times uncanny, but aside from one or two Holiday favourites, the songs here usually help the album steer clear of feeling like a tribute act.
And the song choices are inspired. They bring a new slant onto classic songs but retain enough of the originals’ edge as to stop it descending into ‘a bunch of songs covered in a wacky, unusual way’ territory. Peyroux’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ are both given different atmospheres but allow the lyrics their original weight, whereas ‘Lonesome Road’, ‘Careless Love’, and ‘No More’ capture the charm of the originals while updating their sound. Most impressive for me is ‘Weary Blues’, a cover of Hank Williams’ ‘Weary Blues From Waitin’’. The song is a heartbroken call into the empty night from an abandoned lover. Peyroux’s rendition is a slow and mournful blues, and the pain in her voice gives you the idea that this is a song of bereavement. So you go to listen to Williams’ 1951 original to hear how it sounded in its fully countrified manner…and in comparison, it sounds as if he got the complete wrong end of the stick – and he wrote it! The original seems bizarrely frivolous, as if he’s having too much fun for the upsetting lyrics. It’s fairly quick, it’s in a major key…it even has yodelling in it! Somehow, it feels that Peyroux did the song much more justice on this album than Williams did in the first place.
As much as I dislike the term, Careless Love is a great ‘easy listening’ album. It’s one that you can stick on and enjoy in the simplest way – these are sweet sounds that can balm the ears. And if you want to extend your listening experience, her previous album, 1996’s Dreamland, is also a very nice recommendation: listen out especially for similarly chilled versions of ‘Walking After Midnight’ and ‘La Vie En Rose’.
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