Bettye LaVette doesn’t so much interpret the songs she covers as she psychoanalyzes them — and, in the process, herself. Seriously, that’s how much thought she puts into her artistry.
Starting as a teenage Soul singer in 1962 with “My Man–He’s a Loving Man,” LaVette’s powerful approach has propelled her into a late-period reinvention that has netted a new, growing audience and three Grammy nominations.
But there were hard decades between her debut and 2005’s I Got My Own Hell to Raise, the album that heralded her comeback as a bluesy interpreter par excellence and featured versions of songs by contemporary female singers and composers like Aimee Mann, Lucinda Williams and Fiona Apple. Before then, LaVette was fighting to be remembered and struggled to get heard and earn a living in music. To paraphrase a Ringo Starr song she did with utter conviction on her 2010 covers set, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, “It didn’t come easy.”
On her latest album, Things Have Changed, she’s taking on a songwriter with enough depth and historic impact to be worthy of LaVette’s intense and wrenching vocal approach: Bob Dylan. Intimidating? Not to her. The idea came about when her friend Carol Friedman sold the concept of LaVette covering Dylan — with Grammy-winning producer (and drummer with Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards’ band) Steve Jordan at the helm — to Verve Records.
Where to start when finding songs to cover from a prolific artist who has been writing and recording for six decades?
“He’s a brilliant writer, but I had no desire to listen to everything he had ever written,” she says. “I just needed 12 songs I could interpret and put myself into.”
As she’s done in the past, she turned to her music-loving husband to narrow Dylan’s catalog down to 50 songs he thought she might be able to relate to. She eventually chose 12.
Because the songs were chosen free of their importance to Dylan’s career, but rather because LaVette could hear herself performing them, there are only three from his classic 1960s period and a number of songs that aren’t even that familiar. Things Have Changed includes songs like “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” from 1979’s Slow Train Coming, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” from 1983’s Infidels, “Seeing the Real You at Last,” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ” from 2006’s Modern Times. Other songs have altered melodies and radically changed arrangements from Dylan’s originals — “Political World” has a Reggae groove propelled by Keith Richards’ guitar, while “What Was It You Wanted” features a chill Jazz/Soul arrangement reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”
Just how deeply LaVette thinks about why she should record a specific Dylan song is revealed in her decision to interpret the title composition, a tough and cynical, poetically inventive composition that won Dylan an Oscar when included in the 2000 film Wonder Boys. Beyond presenting lyrics from a woman’s rather than man’s viewpoint, she also decided to omit the line, “Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet/ Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street.”
“My clothes are too tight and my heels are too high to put anybody in a wheelbarrow and go running down the street with them,” LaVette says of her reason for the edit, “so I had to change that line.”
But other lyrics in “Things Have Changed” really resonated with her.
“The line that really drew me in was, ‘I’m in love with a (wo)man who doesn’t even appeal to me,’ ” LaVette says. “I directly associate that with my career — I apparently am in love with it, but it’s totally unappealing. For the last 30 years, whenever you hear me (sing that) something has hurt me, I’m talking about this business. So the song appealed to me strictly personally.”
She felt the song also addressed why she can’t stop.
“I’m 72 years old and look what it does to me,” she says. “But whenever it calls me, it calls me with something I can’t possibly turn down.”
Her record company requested she include at least two songs from the 1960s on the album, something LaVette resisted at first.
“I said, ‘My God, everybody has heard those in every fashion by now,’ ” she says. “So, when it came to doing those two, I told Steve (Jordan) that we have to think backward. I just can’t go forward with them the way they exist now.”
Sometimes, the reworking led LaVette and Jordan to recast the musical approach. But other times, the meaning of the songs changed. For Dylan’s 1964 song “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” which is believed to be about his breakup with girlfriend Suze Rotolo, LaVette heard something completely different and delivered it with that in mind.
“When I heard that (song), I couldn’t think of anything else except my mom and what a thoughtless young person I was,” she says. “Now I’m thinking continuously, ‘Is my daughter OK?’ Or my grandchildren. My mother was a serious mother and I’m sure she worried more than I do. That’s what I heard the first time I heard the song.”
As mentioned before, no one intimidates LaVette. And if she ever discusses her album with Dylan, she might have a few pointers for him on how to sing. For instance, she doesn’t feel his interpretation of his own “Emotionally Yours” — one of Dylan’s most straightforward and tender ballads, from 1985’s Empire Burlesque — is effective. She feels Dylan’s vocal on the original recording is too sing-songy, as if he was singing “Happy Birthday” to someone, and that it undercuts the lyrics, a dedication of unselfish, total devotion to a loved one.
“When I slowed it down, I’m telling you it broke my heart,” LaVette says about understanding the emotion behind the lyrics. “And I was so glad to know that, because I wanted to know he could feel that way, even if he often likes to mask it. It did me good to know he could feel that way.”
Bettye LaVette performs Thursday at Oakley’s 20th Century Theater. Tickets/more info: the20thcenturytheatre.com.
