Narada
2005
Right Out Of Nowhere
About This Album
Veteran country singer Kathy Mattea returns with her third album on Narada, and it's easily her most consistent since she joined the label. Self-produced, Mattea once more layers in all her favorite touches like Bill Cooley's bouzouki and Randy Leago playing both accordion and sitar on the title cut, which opens the set. This track underscores a running theme in Mattea's work: transformation and change. This is a song, like so many others in her vast catalog, where the protagonist is torn about leaving one place in pursuit of an unknown future, but there is acceptance and resignation in her voice when she sings "Right out of nowhere/You open your heart/And let go of everything/You're going somewhere/And all you need to know/Is you're free to go." Two surprises here are in covers of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and John Fogerty's "Down on the Corner." That they appear on the same album is rather startling, giving the listener a gauge that this is no ordinary country record. The former tune is a largely acoustic read, with an organ and a Wurlitzer being the only electric instruments. Its layered guitars, mandolin, and bass flute offer all the urgency of the original, but in her delivery, Mattea makes the tune a gospel song, one that pleads for deliverance and is anchored in awareness.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,5,9,10 and 11)

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