Breakfast at Midnight
Rita Chiarelli
Northern Blues Music
2001
11 tracks
Rita Chiarelli is a big hit with blues audiences in her native Ontario and across Canada. She has a powerful reputation not just with the listening audience but with other musicians. Her talent, if I may say so, is legend. Now I have a confession to make. While I've heard a great deal about Rita Chiarelli for many years, this is the first time I've heard her. I just never seemed to be in a town at the same time as she was playing, and I never listen to a release until write the review. So I'm coming to this with fresh ears.
A couple of things hit you right off. This is rock and roll the way it was meant to be, hard-edged and aggressive with a driving blues rhythm under an inspired mix of gritty country and soulful R & B sounds. This music is made for dancing, for grooving, for escaping the humdrum of the everyday world. And this woman has a voice that would blow most other singers off the stage. Chiarelli's voice is big and powerful and she has it under perfect control. A phrase from Chiarelli could reach out and grab a listener across the room by the throat.
The songs on this release range from hard-edged electric blues to rock and roll that recalls the hardest driving rockabilly of five decades ago, to country and Tex-Mex sounds, to jazz-tinged pop, to sweet ballads, and even to poetic Cohenesque pieces. The range is impressive and wonderful to hear.
Someone once said that the mark of a great song is that on first listen it sounds familiar, as though you've heard it a thousand times before but can't remember where or when. The songs on Breakfast at Midnight are like that. I keep thinking that these songs sound like the rock and roll hits I was listening to through the Fifties and early-Sixties. I could swear that, given time, I could remember the artist who had the hit version. Not so. Every song on this release was written by Chiarelli
I come out of a literary background but I've spent a lot of time hanging out with musicians. The company I keep has coloured my preconceptions of Rita Chiarelli. For years I've heard about her fabulous voice, about her power and prowess as a singer, about her skills as a guitarist. Everything I've heard turns out to be true. But nobody ever told me what a fine lyricist she is.
Chiarelli's lyrics are tight and well-crafted. She seems to have a firm grasp of how people work, especially in and out of relationships. Even at their most gloomy, her stories reflect a certain empathy for the characters she writes about, and this comes through even more strongly in her vocals.
There's another way that Chiarelli's work is many-facetted. Just in the songs on this one release, I hear elements in her writing and performance that remind me of artists as diverse as Freddie Fender, The Texas Tornadoes, Robert Palmer, Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson, Alana Myles, Jummy Buffett, Conway Twitty, early rockers like Wanda Jackson and Brenda Lee (before she went pop), and any number of great blues artists. Like the many colours and divisions of light that sparkle through the facets of a diamond, these refractions don't detract from the whole. It's Chiarelli's own unique talent that ultimately shines through.
"Never Been Loved Before" is a case in point. The melody and rhythm fall somewehere between Eddie Rabitt and the Tex-Mex ambience epitomized by groups like The Texas Tornadoes, yet the lyric and the mood bring to mind Conway Twitty in the mid-Seventies when he was singing songs like "Tight Fittin' Jeans" and "You've Never Gone This Far Before."
"Midnight in Berlin" is a cool, jazzy number reminiscent of songs like "Fever" or perhaps something by Piaf in the Fifties, with a lyric that might have been written by Leonard Cohen in one of his more mellow moods. It's a jumpy little piece that just has to catch the listener up in its beatnick rhythm.
"If You Were Crying Over Me" is a sweet, pop-oriented ballad that managed to take emotion right to the edge of bathos without ever crossing over. It reminds me ever so much of the first wave of BeeGees songs, when they had hits with soft, well-written songs of love found and love lost. In composition, lyrics, and presentation, this is a beautiful song.
The final song in the set, "Eggs Over Easy" is a country song that brings to late night the same bitter edginess that Kris Kristofferson had brought to Sunday morning or that Cohen brings to many of his later works.
Every song on this release is worth comment, and every one is definitely worth a good listen. As a songwriter and as a performer, Rita Chiarelli is the cream that cannot help but rise to the top. Now that I've heard her work and had the chance to read her lyrics, I can understand why not just the public but her fellow musicians can only praise what she does. Rita Chiarelli is a true Canadian talent.
Visit the official Rita Chiarelli website at www.ritachiarelli.com. Listen to clips from Breakfast at Midnight and her releases here.
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Review written: March 10, 2005
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