The Scene Of The Crime

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Blues Rock

• gritty
• earnest
• southern

About

Soul music veteran Bettye LaVette sees things come full circle with her 2007 studio release <i>The Scene of the Crime</i>. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama (“the scene of the crime”), 35 years after her 1972 album, <i>Child of the Seventies</i>, was shelved by Atlantic Records, it fires back on all cylinders. “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye Lavette),” the one original composition co-written with producer and Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood, captures LaVette’s deep pain and bitterness over this career-inhibiting move. Elsewhere, she employs the same tough, schooled and scarred voice for a well-chosen collection of tunes, from the gentle dissipation of Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces,” the wry truths of the George Jones hit “Choices” and the out-of-left-field cover of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” that immediately becomes an R&B standard in LaVette’s experienced hands. Drive-By Truckers and Muscle Shoals veterans David Hood and Spooner Oldham provide solid, restrained backing that make this a modern, yet essentially undated and unpretentious, soul music recording.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits