Threads

Some years ago, at a place where I was working, one of my co-workers used to put a record by Lucy Kaplansky on the stereo a fair amount. I always liked what I heard, but I never got quite around to buying my own copy. She had gigs in the area now and then, and I meant to go see her, but something always came up and it didn't happen. Now I'm doing a bit of catching up, in particularly with her two latest records, The Red Thread, which was released in 2004, and Over the Hills, which is just out.

Kaplansky's path into the music business hasn't been quite the typical one, if there is such a thing. A Chicago native (her father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago), she initially passed up college in favor of New York City and the folk music scene, then shifted course, got a Ph.D., and became a clinical psychologist. A few years later some old friends helped her land a recording contract, and since the mid 1990s she's been making music full-time. A fine singer, with a distinctive, slightly nasal voice and a straightforward delivery, she mixes her own compositions (many of them co-written with her husband, the filmmaker Richard Litvin) with covers of songs by Richard Thompson, Julie Miller, and others. She has recorded with the same producer and musicians several times, and as a result her records often have a similar feel, polished but well balanced, giving her singing plenty of room to shine.

The Red Thread includes several songs written in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, but the album also draws on milestones in her personal life, notably the adoption by Kaplansky and her husband of an infant girl from a Chinese orphanage. The title derives from a Chinese folk belief which holds, according to a note from Kaplansky, “that when a child is born, an invisible red thread reaches out from the child's spirit to all of the important people who will be a part of the child's life.” The title song (which I'm actually not that wild about, musically at least) refers to the same belief, and extends it by linking the child's ties to Kaplansky with the singer's connection to her own parents. The red thread, of course, suggests both blood coursing through the body and inheritance, “blood ties.” More interesting to me is “Brooklyn Train,” incidentally a relative rarity among Kaplansky's material in being accompanied by piano rather than guitar. Here the lyrics, which in the verses describe riders on a subway train sometime after 9/11, evoke, in the chorus, an interesting transubstantiation:

Down below on iron veins,
Rolling waves of subway trains.
Rails of mercy cross the lives of men,
Safe in the body of New York again.

Amid all these others,
It's myself I see.
And the thread that
Connect these faces to me.
And those who rode these
Rails before me,
And the others who'll ride this
Train after me.

Not only family members but fellow inhabitants of the city are linked, vertically in time as well as horizontally in space. The threads run between them like hyphae, the microscopic filaments of fungi that spead out underground, invisibly connecting the emergent fruiting bodies we call mushrooms. It's interesting that when an interviewer pointed out to Kaplansky how much the lyrics on the album echo the red thread theme, she maintained she hadn't realized it before.[*] I'm told, by the way, that if you look very closely at the cover photo you'll find that Kaplansky has a red thread tied around her one of her fingers.

Over the Hills, Kaplansky's new record, includes several borrowed tunes, one or two of which, like a fairly tame cover of June Carter Cash's “Ring of Fire,” could have been left out, but there are several fine original songs on it as well. Most of these deal with family connections, both past and continuing, vertical threads between generations. “The Gift” looks back to her grandfather, an immigrant and “learned man of God,“ who had to mend clothes to get by but whose knack for music was passed down to his son and in time to Lucy. “Manhattan Moon,” which features a dead-on mandola part, captures Kaplansky's daughter's first encounter with the Moon. “Today's the Day” records, with simple affection, her parting with her dying father:

Out beyond this silent room
Out beyond this love we share
There's a place we both know
I will meet you there