MUSIC NEWS- Best known as SNL's “The Beehive Queen”, the flashy, gritty long-time featured vocalist with the Saturday Night Live Band, Christing Ohlman has wrapped up her first new album in nearly five years. The April 6 release, The Deep End will be out via the Music Group through Select-O-Hits and includes a stellar support team.
Having earned herself the respect of many fellow artists over the years, Ohlman has been able to assemble an amazing group of them to pitch in on the new album, including - Marshall Crenshaw, Dion DiMucci and Ian Hunter as duet partners, along with some imprssive players: G.E. Smith, Eric “Roscoe” Ambel from the Del-Lords, NRBQ veteran Big Al Anderson, Catherine Russell, the Asbury Juke Horns (Chris Anderson and Neal Pawley) and others.
In the swampy, guitar-driven style of contemporary rock/R&B, Ohlman and The Deep End co-producer Andy York created 15 songs of life and love tempered by loss. It's Ohlman’s first album of new work since 2004; her recording hiatus followed the deaths of her long-time producer and mate Doc Cavalier and guitarist and founding member of Ohlman’s Rebel Montez band, Eric Fletcher (band's now comprised of Michael Colbath, bass; Cliff Goodwin, guitar; and Larry Donahue, drums.)
The cover tunes on The Deep End were carefully picked from her fabled record collection. She duets with Dion on the obscure Southern soul gem “Cry Baby Cry” and with Crenshaw on a Motown classic, Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells’ “What’s the Matter With You Baby.” A third duet with Ian Hunter on Ohlman’s own “There Ain’t No Cure” celebrates her love of the music and the language of the Delta behind a punked-out, soul-searing groove. Among the other eleven new originals that includes “The Gone of You” (a song of loss and longing so central to The Deep End’s theme that it appears twice: in a full-band version and in York’s evocative, loop-driven demo, dubbed “After Hours” both for Ohlman’s late-night vocal and its darkest-before-the-dawn sensibility); the Muscle Shoals-tinged ballad “Like Honey”; flat-out barnburners “Bring It With You When You Come” and “Born To Be Together”; and Ohlman’s post-Katrina lament “The Cradle Did Rock”, which will appear later this year alongside tracks by Irma Thomas, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint as a bonus cut to the reissue of Get You A Healin’, a CD to benefit the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. The late Eric Fletcher is memorialized in the album’s third cover, a reading of Link Wray’s “Walkin’ Down the Street Called Love”.
Besides her years on Saturday Night Live, Ohlman has quite the impressive resume. She sings on the theme song for 30 Rock; performed at Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary bash at Madison Square Garden with George Harrison and Chrissie Hynde; performed at President Obama’s Inaugural Gala in Washington, D.C.; led Big Brother & the Holding Company in a Central Park tribute to Janis Joplin; worked on a musical with Cy Coleman, who compared her sense of timing to that of Peggy Lee; and frequently duets with blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Eddie Kirkland. She also edited Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography 2Stoned (Oldham described Ohlman’s Wicked Time as “a deep swamp theme to a movie Burt Reynolds wished he’d made’) and worked with Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder at the Rhythm & Blues Foundation Awards, while keeping up her concert schedule at clubs up and down the Eastern Seaboard with Rebel Montez.
Reflecting on The Deep End’s central theme of love both lost and found, Ohlman recently said, “Rosanne Cash and I were talking and she asked me if I’d written sad songs. It wasn’t until then that I realized I hadn’t. Ultimately, this album is about love and the courage to fall into it. Loss just informs you; it opens emotional doors that couldn’t possibly have opened before, no matter how much you thought you knew about it. I wrote about love — the newness of it, the glory of it, the loss of it, the sadness that can come from it, the wonder of it . . . the sweet bitterness of it.”
MNN looks forward to the full release...
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