Linda Thompson: Fashionably Late : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When ex-fairport convention guitarist Richard Thompson and his folk-singer wife, Linda, split up in the early 1980s, the recorded document of their demise, Shoot Out the Lights, became one of British folk rock's greatest works. After the divorce, Linda recorded the comparatively disappointing solo album One Clear Moment and then was silenced by a rare condition known as hysterical dysphonia, a crippling case of stage fright. Fashionably Late, the singer's comeback after seventeen years away from the spotlight, is a long-overdue gem from one of rock & roll's finest voices. What distinguishes Thompson from your average hippie folk singer is the elegant grain of her voice, the subtle dissonance she employs in her harmonies with other singers and her storyteller's knack for placing the right emphasis on the right word at the right time.

The new album begins as a family reunion of sorts, with Linda, son Teddy and daughter Kamila harmonizing on the cautionary ballad "Dear Mary," and dad Richard injecting his familiar stinging guitar licks into the spaces between the voices. With a simple production style that keeps the music from being tied down to any particular pop era, Fashionably Late glides from the ruthlessness of the ancient-sounding, stripped-down, acoustic murder ballad "Nine Stone Rig" to Thompson's haunting, loss-of-innocence tale "The Banks of the Clyde." There's not a bum track on the album, but there are many highlights, including the stunning "Evona Darling," in which Linda and Teddy sing on what must be the finest mother-and-son duet ever recorded; and the bittersweet closer, "Dear Old Man of Mine," Teddy, Kamila and Linda's biting homage to an extraordinary father and ex-husband.