Here’s a fascinating first album to review in 2023. Grey DeLisle put her musical career on hold for fifteen years while raising a family but, like many others, the pandemic changed her plans and she found herself revisiting her favourite songs and uploading covers of them to social media. In turn, this led to working with producer Marvin Etzioni on a covers album, and what an interesting set of covers they are. She’s now working on an album of originals for release this year. Grey’s been compared to Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette but, with the odd exception, these songs aren’t heartbreak country.

You wouldn’t expect a country artist to be covering ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, would you? No, but that’s the album’s opening song and Grey obeys the First Rule of Covers Club; make the song your own. Whereas the Pink Floyd original is strident and confrontational, with a full band sound, Grey’s version is much slower and built around an arrangement that’s paradoxically minimal but with a full band plus strings and horns. Grey’s vocal doesn’t push hard, but it’s close-miked and dominates the mix.

The straightforward country songs like ‘Tonight You Belong to Me’, ‘Borrowed and Blue’ and ‘Valentine’ are delivered beautifully with Grey’s voice evoking the Queens of Country (more Dolly and Patsy than Loretta and Tammy to my way of thinking) with the usual side orders of strings and pedal steel; it’s on the songs with less traditional arrangements that Grey and the band work their magic.

Just a few examples for you. ‘Girl’ is a reworking of an ’Electric Warrior’ T Rex song in triple time with a gorgeous string section replacing the horns from the original, while Marie Knight’s ‘Calvary’ starts as a straightforward gospel song at the lower end of Grey’s vocal range before the first chorus erupts into a New Orleans jazz funeral with strident horns. And let’s not forget John Barry’s Bond theme ‘You Only Live Twice’, (with The Satellites Four) delivered in a very easy listening style Grey’s take on ‘Georgia on My Mind’ at the higher end of her vocal range adorned by some plaintive harmonica from Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson’s harmonica player).

‘Borrowed’ certainly demonstrates the eclecticism of Grey DeLisle’s musical tastes and her willingness to deconstruct and rebuild a song to create a whole new work. There’s an art to reinterpreting just one song, but it’s a completely different challenge creating a coherent album full of reworkings; Grey DeLisle aces it.

‘Borrowed’ is released in the UK on Regional Records (RR0617) on Friday January 6th.

Here’s a link to the video for ‘Another Brick in the Wall’: