Becky Warren Creates A Winner With Undesirable

(review by Bill Glahn)

Back home they pass Christmas Day by killing something wild
And mark the years by where they strip the soil away
(We’re All We Got, Becky Warren)

On Becky Warren’s 2016 debut album, War Surplus, she established herself as both a compelling storyteller and social warrior by documenting the fictional relationship (based on her true experience) between an Iraq veteran with PTSD and his wife. It isn’t the usual fare of a Nashville-based artist who travels the connecting lanes of rock ‘n’ roll and country music. War has both personal and universal consequences and Warren’s songs convey both.

Warren has had a checkered career as a performing artist. As founding member of The Great Unknowns, the Boston-based band had already broken up by the time Amy Ray’s Daemon Records picked up their debut album Introducing The Great Unknowns (2004). Marriage to a soldier, soon to be deployed to Iraq and the PSTD that followed, occupied the next 6 years of her life. Warren dropped out of music completely. The Great Unknowns sophomore effort wouldn’t appear until 2012, this time with a new line-up and Warren as the primary songwriter. Titled Homefront, it would be her first record to deal with the aftermath of war on returning vets and their families. It went nowhere. She would spend the next four years sharpening her skills and writing War Surplus.

With Undesirable, her sophomore effort, Warren expands the landscape to the streets of Nashville. Not the streets of travel brochures – no, not those glossy fabrications of country music glitter. The streets that Warren is travelling on Undesirable can be found in any city of the size of Nashville – streets dotted with hotels with weekly (or hourly) rates, payday loan outlets, buy here/pay here car lots, homeless shelters, cheap wine liquor outlets, thrift shops and street venders. In Warren’s words, these are the streets of “forgotten forget-me-nots.” And the language in which Warren sings wouldn’t pass muster of any tight-assed copy editor - apparent from the title of the albums’ first track, “We’re All We Got.” Or the second, “Nobody Wants To Rock N Roll No More.” And that’s a great thing. Correct grammar doesn’t occupy those streets.

Stylistically Undesirable moves between the Midwest rock style of Tom Petty and the more countyfied musings of Lucinda Williams. Thematically and lyrically she’s in a territory occupied almost exclusively by “urban” music. As small town America becomes a thing of the past, with more and more country folks being displaced to the poverty centers of big metropolises (and that includes musicians), Warren currently is ahead of the curve. Way ahead. Undesirable isn’t all doom & gloom but, in the end, hopeful and forward looking. “Ain’t nobody gonna tell us baby/ We know we’re in a real tight spot/ We’re all we got.” In Warren’s worldview, that’s enough. And it's true. (A)

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