Records

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Changing Woman”

MCA 451

We’re never going to have another Buffy Sainte-Marie, so all you heads out there in the bog of the mid-sixties nostalgia waiting for another mouth bow solo, tough luck. Buffy has always been what the album’s title suggests--she went psychedelic about the time of “fire and Fleet and Candlelight, she rode on the Moonshot. On her first MCA album, the much-overlooked “Buffy” with the marvelous joke cover, she proved she has the capacity to be a Rock and Roll Goddess, and on “Changing Woman” she struts her stuff as a chanteuse. It’s a lush and rich, yet precisely tuned album; it shows facets of a woman’s soul that a man like me can never understand, but can marvel at and appreciate. 

Buffy always plots her own course, and her course here is through the sexual landscape of her mind. It gets wistful, pleading, raunchy and spiritual by turns. She creates tension in “till I see You Again (jusqu'au Je te Revoir)” by balancing the French and English lyrics, the earthy sentiments and the high blown phrases, and her voice against her slide guitar solo. It takes two or three listenings to let the feelings of the song sink in, but once it does, it’s there to stay. 

Another bizzaree winner is “Mongrel Pup”, the raunchy cut, brazenly erotic with lines like “little girls love the nature boy/Who lives among the shells/They love to see him bodysurf/Upon their little selves”, yet with a Space Age American Indian philosophy. Charlie McCOy’s guitar solo in sice and zingy too.

Buffy’s level of poetry hits high on Eagle Man/Changing Woman”, “Mongrel Pup” and “the Beauty Way”. And her vocal performances on “All around the World” and “A Man” are spacious, generous and soul satisfying. There are excesses, but nothing above the level of nit-picking. The album was produced by Norbert Putnam, who just may be the best producer in all of Nashville and possibly the world. 

Buffy has not sold out. She’s just reinvested herself. 

--Paul Grant.