Artist:     Allison Moorer

Album:     Blood

Label:     Thirty Tigers

Release Date:     10.25.2019

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All inspiring music expresses deep human emotion through a catching melody. Blood qualifies tenfold. Through it, Allison Moorer’s early life flows vigorously and exquisitely, but also stings like bitter medicine. The words to its ten songs had to have cured Moorer to some degree, and now they’ll completely captivate her audience. These incredible, autobiographical vignettes are the audio companions to the chapters of Blood: A Memoir, Moorer’s written account of her upbringing with her sister, singer Shelby Lynne, and their coping with a father who ultimately shot and killed their mother, and then himself when Moorer was 14 and Lynne 18.

Allison Moorer is absolutely unmatched in luxurious voice, and she’s never sounded better than she does here. Moorer and her producer and guitarist Kenny Greenburg chose mainly gentle accompaniment to bring these songs to soul-stirring life. “Bad Weather” opens the set like a dawning, a storm slowly brewing, the music swaying deceptively. Moorer sings “And the sky looks like bad weather, nothing shining through the grey, looking for my sweater, waiting for the rain,” as if mundane. Yet her words signify a fear of the inevitable. Those thoughts give way to the lovely acoustic guitar strumming of “Cold Cold Earth,” in which Moorer recounts the heart-rending story of alcoholic madness and the eventual breaking point, with The Steeldrivers’ Tammy Rogers accenting the drama with chilling squeals of fiddle. The words, sung with both love and grief, cut to the bone. The soft acoustic “I’m the One to Blame” contains words left by perpetrator Vernon Franklin Moorer, completed in song by Lynn, and sung by Moorer in burnt ginger tones, like the color of her hair. Moorer gives her mother’s challenging life an angry rock ‘n’ roll telling in “The Rock and the Hill,” at points screaming in frustration and bitterness. But in “Blood” she’s tender as can be and quite telling, singing “You don’t have to explain, I’ve got your blood runnin’ through my veins.”

Although a matter of public record, Allison Moorer has always avoided discussing this dark chapter of her life. She’s now revealed the details bravely, and with beauty and eloquence beyond any norm.

—Tom Clarke