Tywanna Jo Baskette: edgy country music, without bright lights and big hair

While Tywanna Jo Baskette has spent her whole life in Nashville, she might as well be a world away from the country music capital. Her debut album, Fancy Blue (Sweet Tea/Terminus), is crafted in the Southern tradition of quirky outsiders like Vic Chesnutt and Victoria Williams, but draws on everything from Disney musicals to Antonioni films and Smiths records--as well as her own life--for inspiration.

Baskette's songwriting is stunningly direct and deceptively complex: "Pop Pop," for example, sounds like a nursery rhyme, but it is actually about her father's death in 1998 from lung cancer. (Her mother died from the same disease in 1985,) "People think it's a happy song, but it's really like, 'Pop! Pop!' My father is dead--everything is gone," she explains in her tiny, whispery voice. The song ends with what sounds like a giggle, but onstage it brings her to the verge of tears.

Baskette can't play an instrument, so she sings her melodies into a microcassette recorder, reeling off couplets about good underwear, bad valentines, and inconsolable loss--often in the same verse, always with a scarred beauty, "I consider myself a writer more than a singer," she says. "It's a way to keep things that aren't there anymore with me forever."

Stephen Mooallem is Interview's Music Editor.

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