No Room on the Back of the Bus

A Dispatch From the Sports Desk

By Bryan A. Hollerbach

Currents of profound unease—political, social, and psychological—stir the songs on Val Goodrich’s Stray From the Middle like competing gusts lofting autumn leaves in a cul-de-sac.

Goodrich (who hails from Harrisburg, due north of Columbia) will visit St. Louis this Friday, April 15, to perform at Venus Envy 2005, to be held at the Grove on the 4100 block of Manchester. Specifically, she’ll open the event with a 30-minute set at 7 p.m. on the “Java Hut Stage”—as opposed to the “Kentucky Stage” or the intriguingly named “G-Spot Stage.”

Based on the evidence of Stray From the Middle, Goodrich should make punctual arrival worthwhile even for congenital twits who attend nothing without being fashionably late. Her second release, that 11-track disc issued last year from Pnambic Records. (As an aside, pnambic is a delightful cybernetic acronym that derives from the famous injunction in The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”) Stray From the Middle ranges from the gentility of the love song “All I Need to Know,” embellished by Greg Spillman’s cello, to the full-tilt-boogie rock ’n’ roll of the cautionary title track (from which the title to this dispatch was borrowed). Besides Spillman, backing Goodrich on the disc are such able musicians as Allen Beeson (who contributes brass accents on “No Answer”) and Pete Szkolka (who plays cathedral keyboards on “Send Me Your Bible”).

For her part, Goodrich, as a vocalist, here and there exercises less control over the upper reaches of her register than her lower, which tend toward the pleasurably sultry. On the opener, “Dark Dank Road,” she sounds strained in places, for example, and the higher passages of “Thin Line,” two tracks later, flatten where they should fly. That said, when Goodrich nails a vocal—as on “Stray From the Middle” and the bluesy “Because of You”—she does so with considerable skill.

As a lyricist, meanwhile, Goodrich, on her Web site (www.valgoodrich.com), cites Bruce Springsteen as an influence, and that citation seems believable. She lacks the Boss’s uncanny knack for the objective correlative, true, but so too do 99 percent of the musicians of the past three decades, at whatever level and in whatever genre; moreover, pace Mr. Eliot, popular music, like poetry, not merely needn’t but oughtn’t hew to some silly template. In that regard, Goodrich does the sage from Freehold, New Jersey, proud, writing with an economy bordering on austerity, wherein seemingly innocuous phrases conceal considerable emotion. “You might get what you’re askin’ for,” concludes the bridge to the title track, by way of example, and in George W. Bush’s America, that line (from a work that reminds us that a protest song need not blaze to burn) encapsulates signal despair and hope alike.

Regarding the event at which Goodrich will be performing, a few words seem needed. This year marks the seventh Venus Envy. Sponsored by a St. Louis–based nonprofit of the same name and co-sponsored by PlaybackSTL, it strives “to create female-produced arts events, outreach, and education programs that strengthen feminine diversity and promote empowerment,” according to the organization’s “vision statement.” Related celebrations occurred earlier in the month in Memphis and Baton Rouge, with a fourth scheduled for next weekend in Davenport, Iowa. Admission to the “mature audiences” event on Manchester costs nothing although Venus Envy helpfully and hopefully suggests a donation of $5 to $10 per person. To see and hear talent as promising as Goodrich, that seems a small price to pay—even without the titillation value of the G-Spot Stage.