Plumb
"I was a tender reed, bent in the wind..."
-- Plumb, "Sink 'n Swim"
Remember this line -- there's more to come...
One day, a few hours be ing what she thought would be her last gig, Plumb was handed a note that changed her life.
She was making an afternoon appearance at a local record store. Fans were lining up for autographs, or to shove urgent notes at the young singer with the curly jet-black hair, riveting stage presence, and spellbinding way with a song.
The buzz was on full blast for Plumb. Her first two albums each sold more than 100,000 copies with the most minimal promotion -- in fact, the second was released only days before she broke her ties with the label.
Despite all that, despite the pens and CDs waving in her face and the familiar mantra that "you rawk!" shouted in her direction, Plumb stood at a crossroads. Even as she smiled and signed, she was thinking that maybe she couldn't do this anymore. Hassles with her label, the grind of the artist's life, thoughts of hanging it up as a performer and concentrating purely on songwriting or production... doubts had been nagging at her for some time, and that day in Fresno she was thinking that maybe this was the end of the road.
That's when Briana stepped up and introduced herself.
"This girl said, 'I know you're really busy, but I want to give you this note because a song you wrote has meant a lot to me,'" Plumb recalls. "I didn't read it until later, in the car. And it shook my world."
The letter was about "Damaged," a song Plumb had written and recorded about a girl coping with being molested as a child. The message from Briana was simple: "Whatever you do, I just want you to never forget that you have helped change someone's life."
"Sitting in the back seat, I felt a knot in my throat," Plumb continues. "Here I am, contemplating not even doing this anymore because I had gotten a bitter taste in my mouth about the business. But it hit me now that this wasn't about me. I'd been given a gift to communicate, to encourage and inspire. It's not up to me to say, 'I don't want to do that anymore.'"
With that moment far behind her now, a rejuvenated Plumb presents her Curb debut, Beautiful Lumps of Coal. Produced by Plumb and Jay Joyce (Patti Griffin, Rubyhorse, Lisa Germano), it's a vivid, vibrant explosion of music. The sound embraces raw, gutsy rock, exuberant pop, sweeping string-blown ballads -- a rainbow of styles, unified by Plumb's double-barreled gifts as a singer and songwriter.
First, the voice. It's... well, it's a wonder. No one in music today tops her ability to draw listeners into an intimate, whispering intro and then send them soaring through a storm of escalating passion, as on "Boys Don't Cry." Yeah, we know, that's saying a lot. But that's also just the beginning. Listen to her caress the lyric on "Go," a song of tender farewell, or announce her escape from a more suffocating relationship in the resonant, declamatory choruses of "Free." This is a voice to reckon with, by anyone's measure.
It's also perfectly matched to the material. Messages ride strong currents of melody on each track, some of them urgently emotional ("Hold Me"), others shining like beacons of hope for listeners who live in darkness. ("If you've been there, you know/if you're still there, hang on," she urges on "Nice, Naive and Beautiful.") Every one of these tracks has that combination of musical and topical immediacy that identifies those artists who have the pulse of their fans beneath their fingers.
Plumb has been there. She responded, as a fan as well as an aspiring singer, to Patti Griffin, Poe, Suzanne Vega, Alanis Morissette... to artists who nourished their work through the bonds they built to their audiences. Music as connection, set to the rhythms of life's rewards and challenges -- this, from the beginning, was the model for the young woman who would become Plumb and step at last into the spotlight on her own.
She was born in Indianapolis, raised in Atlanta. From the start Plumb was drawn to music, but in those early years she never dreamed she would follow this muse all the way into business.
In fact, where the typical superstar biography describes years of doggedly chasing success, Plumb's story is more about receiving gifts -- gifts of talent and opportunity that seemed to come unbidden toward her.
After graduating from high school, while planning to major in special education at college, Plumb took a few gigs as a backup singer in Atlanta. At first, this seemed just like something fun to do until real life would intervene. But when she was invited to start singing backup with the band Benjamin, she found herself on the road for a few years. This led to session work, and that prompted her to finally set her college plans aside and move up to Nashville.
Once again opportunity presented itself, when Plumb was offered a record deal solely on someone hearing her backup singing. She was all of twenty years old. "This was definitely not something I planned out," she laughs. "I was happy just doing other people's stuff, so I didn't have a style of my own. And as a backup singer I would just stand behind the star, go ooh and ah, and do the little arm wave. All of a sudden I was wanted up front, and I was responsible for communicating everything."
They also wanted her to write original material -- something she had never even imagined doing. "I was frustrated that they didn't just find a bunch of amazing songs for me," she says. "I thought, do they think I have potential, or do they want to be off the hook about finding songs for me? Whichever it was, it doesn't matter now, because I'm grateful that they forced me to write -- and now I see myself growing as a songwriter every day."
Working with Matt Bronleewe, her neighbor and a fledgling producer, she recorded her first album, Plumb, in 1997, then left for an extended tour. Despite minimal promotion from the label, the album built an underground following with its modern rock sound and upbeat lyrics. The momentum built with her sophomore release, candycoatedwaterdrops, in 1999. On disc and in concert, Plumb's performances bore fruit: As one reviewer noted, "If you enjoyed the Cranberries, No Doubt, or Texas, then you will love Plumb to bits."
With Beautiful Lumps of Coal the creative fire burns brighter, and the light of Plumb casts further into the world than ever. Much of this has to do with the freedom she's earned following her break from her previous label. A number of majors chased her, but Curb won her affiliation from the get-go.
"I said to each interested label, 'If I sign with anyone, I want the moon,'" she says. "But the first draft of the contract that Curb sent was more than I had even considered asking for. Another opportunity had fallen into my lap... so, again, here I am."
And where is here? On Beautiful Lumps of Coal it's closer to her own heart than she's ever been. "On my first two records I was very good at writing about things I knew about or people I knew," she says. "But I wasn't on an intimate level with myself. It wasn't that I was afraid of being vulnerable; it was just an avenue I hadn't explored. I just didn't know how to write about me."
In fact, Plumb insists that the songs on Beautiful Lumps tell a single story of change -- of her own recent transformations, from being alone to being married, from one label to another, or from older relationships to the realization that her needs for friendship have evolved in unexpected ways. "Change of any kind involves loss," she says "And any kind of loss involves grief. Even when I got married, for four days after my honeymoon, I was a little depressed -- not because I wasn't in love with my husband, but because all of a sudden someone was living in my house, brushing his teeth the same time I did. I was ecstatic about being married, but even then there was a bit of grieving because I had lost something too.
"And through this kind of grieving I've grown to be in a better place, with better management, a great marriage, stronger friendships, and more independence at the same time."
This inspiration breathes life into this remarkable album. And while Plumb is quick to honor God as her source, it must also be said that some of that intervention passed to her through the note that a fan slipped into her hand some two years ago in Fresno.
But there was more than the note in that gift from Briana. "She had put her letter inside a card," Plumb remembers. "When I finished the letter and closed the card, I saw that there was a picture on the front of a cattail in a pond, with a caption that read, 'The tender reed, bent to the force of the wind, soon stood upright once the storm had passed.'"
With Beautiful Lumps of Coal Plumb stands unbowed, her music resonant and alive. No storm can take her down; she is here to stay. |
