Mindy Smith—Stupid Love ****

Stupid Love

I don’t count myself a country music fan, at least not the present tense version of country music, which sounds to me more like bad 70’s and 80’s glam-rock than it does the Johnny Cash/Dolly Parton roots of true country. But it was hard not to have my head twist a bit  when I reviewed Mindy Smith’s debut album back in 2003. Like it did for at least half the planet, her version of Parton’s Jolene just about ripped my heart out. Still does actually. Which is why I listened to it 2-3 more times last night, after not having listened to it in at least two years, when by some fortuitous happenstance it popped back into rotation on my iPod. It also got me to thinking about Mindy Smith and what she was up to these days, and whether she’d lived up to the promise of her first album.

It just so happens that I got a little Twitter surprise this morning. Smith’s latest album, Stupid Love showed up on Amazon.com’s Daily Deal for $3.99, and I’m a sucker for deals. (This price is for today only , 8/12/09. Tomorrow it goes back to normal.)

I’ve listened to Stupid Love about three times now and there’s nothing here that rises quite to the level of Jolene on One Moment More. Then again, that’s like complaining that Cy Young only pitched one perfect game. What is here is that bit of beauty, that ineffable vocal quality that made Smith’s original disc something amazing. A kind of sadness tinged with just a whisper of hope and, as Will Hermes in Rolling Stone said, a touch of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac to sauce it up a bit.

Which brings me to another point, while Smith is still listed as a country artist I think it’s hard to quantify her music as country anymore. Sure, there’s a banjo here and a slide guitar there, but it’s more blues than country, more pop than twang, and, hey, Sufjan Stevens has a banjo in almost every song he’s ever played and no one would call what he does country .

What this disc is, is quintessential Mindy Smith, and I’m happy to say that she’s still beautiful after all these years.