Jennifer Warnes - Another Time, Another Place (2018) [SACD]

Legendary singer-songwriter Jennifer Warnes has created a beautiful, elegant new album. Much anticipated album! First new release in over a decade! Beautifully recorded and carefully mastered.
Reuniting with bassist-composer Roscoe Beck (who co-produced her seminal classic Famous Blue Raincoat), Ms. Warnes shapes ten classic tunes into a timeless narrative of living, loving and making sense of changing times.
One of the most-loved singers of our time, Jennifer Warnes has returned with a modern-day masterpiece called Another Time, Another Place. With glorious production and performances, and of course, impeccable vocals, Another Time, Another Place features the cream of the crop of songwriters including Eddie Vedder ("Just Breathe"), Mark Knopfler ("Why Worry"), John Legend, Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks and more.
Joining Warnes are brilliant musicians and friends such as Dean Parks (Steely Dan, Bob Dylan), pedal steel king Greg Liesz (k.d. lang, Eric Clapton) and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (Frank Zappa, Sting). Jennifer Warnes has always been known as someone who makes beautifully crafted records with an open heart, unafraid to show emotion and love through her work. It's the perfect time for Another Time, Another Place.
Jennifer's long-time mastering engineer Bernie Grundman artfully brings out all the detail, presence and harmonic body of this amazingly life-like recording. Impex's luxe presentation features an 18-page booklet of lyrics and photographs.
Every new album Jennifer Warnes creates is a showcase of musical beauty, lovingly crafted and gorgeously performed. We can expect nothing less of one of the world's greatest interpretive singers.
"I had a series of losses," she says. "Horrible losses. Many in a row. It shook me up quite a bit. My mother was my significant other person, and went all over the world with me, and was the one who believed in me. She died in 2001. In 2013, my two sisters died a week apart unexpectedly. Then my manager was hit and run, and died instantly, close to the death of my two sisters, and then I put my dog down. Then Leonard Cohen died."
Perhaps not coincidentally, it's Roscoe Beck - producer of Famous Blue Raincoat and Cohen's musical director in his final years - who acts as Another Time, Another Place's co-producer, helping the 71-year-old find a way to express her sadness.
It wasn't purely despair at her own losses that, for the first time since The Well, provoked Warnes' formal return to the studio - or, more accurately, Beck's kitchen, where they had to turn off the air conditioning and fridge to record. She also had more altruistic reasons.
"The depth of pain," she explains, "that a person goes through at certain chapters of their lives is."
Her voice trails off before she again tries to explain her motives.
"You can't really share that, but I felt I could make a record that would offer comfort to people going through stuff similar to me. It was really important and intentional to make a tender record. The world is in such distress, so the sound of a woman's voice being tender in a recording that could be sent all over the world - that was clean, clear, wise and enjoyable - might help. It would help me to do it, and it would help others to do it, so you feel that it delivers some kind of sanity. That's a good thing to give to somebody.
"In my younger years," she adds, sipping white tea, "you wanted to give them a sexier feeling. You wanted to give them a 'Tear The Door Down' feeling. At this time of life, it was like, 'Oh my God, there's so many suffering people!' I don't have one friend that doesn't have something going on in their lives. So what's my job? If you take that little CD and it fills an hour of your time, it ought to make you feel something. It ought to cure something. Who wants a goody two-shoes record that makes you feel unreasonably happy in a world like this? That was the question I asked myself: 'What does it mean to make music that helps others?'"
It's hard to believe she could have succeeded better. Another Time, Another Place boasts rare poignancy, unfiltered vulnerability and genuine compassion: a feminine counterpart, one might say, to Johnny Cash's final releases. Its skeletal arrangements and refined production reveal Warnes' extraordinary sensitivity, something underlined by its opening song, a startling cover of Pearl Jam's Just Breathe (from 2009's Backspace). Its selection, suitably, was provoked less by an urge to surprise people than for its sentiment, which encapsulates much of what makes the record so special. "Yes, I understand," Warnes's warm voice trembles, "every life must end," before adding "I'm a lucky one, to count on both hands the ones I love."
The rest of the album is equally wistful, whether John Legend's delicate "Once I Was Loved", in which she forgives a woman interacting with her former lover, or the elegantly laidback "The Boys And Me", which she co-wrote with Michael Smotherman - a songwriter and touring member of Captain Beefheart's band - or the reassuring "Why Worry", penned by Mark Knopfler for Brothers In Arms.
"This is a real treat for the ears. The perfect guitar tone, the decay of the notes beautifully natural, the instrument separation and vocal layering on this record sounded spot-on in all the tracks I heard across several systems. But the 'Why Worry' cover on the M2s was magical. A superbly musical presentation from both LP and playback. Indeed, we need not worry as audiophiles. We have talent like Jennifer Warnes returning after 17 years sounding as spectacular as ever. And we have fine people like Abey Fonn, Laurence Aston, and Bernie Grundman making sure the beauty of her voice and the other instruments come through as clean and natural as possible. I suggest you get a copy whatever your digital or analog proclivities. You won't be disappointed." - Lee Scoggins, Part-Time Audiophile, Munich 2019
Tracks:
01. Just Breathe
02. Tomorrow Night
03. Once I Was Loved
04. So Sad
05. I See Your Face Before Me
06. I Am The Big Easy
07. The Boys And Me
08. Back Where I Started
09. There's A River
10. Freedom
11. Why Worry
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