Having recorded
Steve Earle's "Christmas in Washington" on her last studio album, 2003's Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, and his "Jerusalem" on her 2005 live album, Bowery Songs, and toured with him in between,
Joan Baez has turned to
Earle as the producer of her 24th studio album,
Day After Tomorrow; he also contributes three of the ten songs, two of them, "God Is God" and "I Am a Wanderer," specially written.
Earle seems to have taken as his assignment the goal of creating a modern
Joan Baez album that is in the tradition of her great albums of the 1960s. First, he assembled a group of acoustic musicians in Nashville, anchored by multi-instrumental string players
Tim O'Brien and
Darrell Scott (a rhythm section of
Viktor Krauss and
Kenny Malone is sometimes present also), and then he and
Baez cherry-picked recent songs from contemporary singer/songwriters working in the spirit of those
Baez covered earlier in her career, including
Elvis Costello,
Eliza Gilkyson,
Patty Griffin, and
Tom Waits. In making those choices, they looked to material that evoked
Baez's folk past. For example, as
Baez herself says of
Gilkyson's "Rose of Sharon," "If I didn't know otherwise, I would have just assumed that it was an old English folk song." "Scarlet Tide," written by
Costello and
T Bone Burnett for the soundtrack to the 2003 Civil War film Cold Mountain, in which it was sung by
Alison Krauss, naturally sounds like a 19th century American folk song. True to
Baez's longtime political commitments, it addresses war, as does
Waits' and wife
Kathleen Brennan's "Day After Tomorrow," which
Baez sings with only her own guitar accompaniment, while
Diana Jones' "Henry Russell's Last Words" tells the true story of a mining disaster.
Earle's "Jericho Road," first heard on his Washington Square Serenade album, is presented a cappella with handclaps and background vocals by
Earle,
Scott, and
O'Brien, sounding just like the sort of spiritual
Baez used to adapt back in the '60s. At 67,
Baez betrays some vocal aging, but she uses it wisely to impart extra feeling into what is often a downbeat collection of quality songs, and
Earle has succeeded in his attempt not to reinvent her, but to re-create her sound and message in contemporary terms. ~ William Ruhlmann