'Bout Time

Talking on the phone from her hotel room in Paris, Bettye Lavette is having fun, and she's having it her way. And why shouldn't she? The veteran soul singer is riding high on the buzz generated by her new CD, I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, earning favorable reviews in high-profile publications such as Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times and Playboy; appearing on Late Show With David Letterman; and performing to enthusiastic, packed houses from Seattle to the City of Lights. The attention and acclaim are sweet vindication for a woman who has spent more than 40 years in the music business, working and waiting for the world to recognize her talent.

"This is the first record contract I've had that was based strictly on me, on my live show," Lavette says of her new deal with Anti, home to Tom Waits, Merle Haggard and Tricky, among others. "They just saw me as somebody who did a good show, and then they didn't inhibit me in choosing the songs."

Produced by singer-songwriter Joe Henry, whose 2002 production of Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up On Me gained critical acclaim and helped reinvigorate the legendary soul man's career, Hell to Raise is made up entirely of tunes by female songwriters, a notion that Lavette resisted at first but then embraced.

Sorting through more than 100 possible songs suggested by Henry, Anti Records president Andy Kaulkin and others, Lavette picked those on which she could put a personal stamp. "What happens is that I don't think in terms of how something will sound on the radio. Shit, I haven't had a record played on the radio in 30 years," she says, then laughs. "I only think in terms of my show. So when I choose the tunes to record, I choose them because I can see how they'll fit in my show, and I can see myself singing them. I'll think of how I'll be walking, how I'll hold my head, my hands, the whole thing."

Lavette selected works from a disparate group of singer-songwriters and rock, country and pop artists, including Dolly Parton, Fiona Apple, Joan Armatrading and Aimee Mann. Though none of the ten songs represent what would normally be considered soul music, Lavette's raw, throaty rasp transforms them, turning Parton's "Little Sparrow" into an anthem of defiance and Lucinda Williams' "Joy" into a near-apocalyptic travelogue chronicling her own real-life journey.

Lavette also knew exactly how she wanted to order the tunes she had chosen. "I went to Joe Henry's house before we went to the studio and sat there on his floor and sang the songs to him and said, 'This is how I'm going to sing them,' and I think he was a little surprised," Lavette says.

Ultimately, the only change in her original sequence was moving her version of Sinéad O'Connor's "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" from last to first. The song, rendered as a stark, emotionally naked, unaccompanied vocal, has replaced Lavette's early hit "Let Me Down Easy" as her show closer, and she originally wanted to use it to end the CD, too. Kaulkin and Henry suggested the song go first, another move that Lavette wasn't sure about.

"I always saw it as closing the show," she says. "I wanted to close the CD with it, but I understand what they were saying, and I think it was a brilliant idea. I was frightened to do it. I was such a punk, you know, because my voice has not sold on records. It was just a great compliment that they chose to do it that way. I would never have done that, honey. I wouldn't have had the nerve to do that for anything, and I had a real fit when they said they were going to do it. And then I thought about it and I said, 'My God, what an idiot I am. What greater compliment could the producer and record company pay you?'"

That one change notwithstanding, Lavette says the album is faithful to her original vision. "The way I sing the songs on the recording, that's the way I sang them to Andy the night before the recording session, and that's the way I sang them to Joe the morning of the recording session, and that's how I'm singing them now," she says.

A Detroit native, Lavette had some minor R&B hits in the '60s but spent the next two decades chasing a follow-up, recording singles that critics and collectors liked but the public didn't buy. An album recorded in 1972 for Atlantic was shelved without release, and it took until 1982 for Lavette to put out her first full-length recording, which also sold poorly. Along the way, a six-year stint in the cast of the Broadway show Bubbling Brown Sugarprovided a steady paycheck and a chance to further hone her performing skills.

When that ended, Lavette continued to perform live and cut occasional singles. When a French record company licensed her lost Atlantic album and released it in 2000, the singer was primed and ready to be rediscovered. A subsequent live album issued by a Dutch label and A Woman Like Me, the disc she made in 2003 with Robert Cray's producer, Dennis Walker, helped further her momentum, setting the stage for a career resurgence that now seems to be reaching avalanche proportions with her new CD.