Lionheart

Heather McEntire’s solo debut is a vivid travelogue of the American South penned in her native tongue of country music. Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction. It feels like a baptism, the sound of a woman newly believing in who she has always been. In Lionheart’s opening psalm, “A Lamb, A Dove,” McEntire presents a Biblical image of innocence and flight as she sings of an all-consuming force in her blood, her head, her eyes—and perhaps that force is her true self. “I have found heaven in a woman’s touch,” McEntire sings, clear and assured. “Come to me now/I’ll make you blush.”

McEntire grew up in a small Bible Belt farming community in North Carolina, listening to mainstream country, bluegrass, and church hymns. It was a context in which, she said, coming out as gay “wasn’t even an option.” McEntire has called her Southern Baptist family “mountain folk who grew up in a different time,” who still do not accept her. She spent nearly two decades rejecting country and religion—in the angular post-punk outfit Bellafea, the rootsy indie-country trio Mount Moriah, and backing Angel Olsen—before retracing her path back to both again. Lionheart is the sound of a woman, now 36, returning home with a new confidence, having seen the world for what it is.

When McEntire’s voice trembles at its vulnerable edges, or curls into a rave-up, she recalls Dolly Parton or Emmylou Harris. And yet Lionheart was inspired most directly by an icon of another breed. After feminist punk hero Kathleen Hanna saw McEntire open for her own band, she was so enchanted that she offered to do anything to help summon McEntire’s solo LP into existence. With Hanna’s encouragement and the suggestion that she “listen to Wanda Jackson,” Hanna became McEntire’s de facto producer, choosing songs from McEntire’s trove of demos and shaping the record’s gentle country sound.

McEntire’s primary subject is the South and its golden fields, gravel roads, valleys, and pine groves. The smell of tobacco fills a town; junkyards and bramble are dignified. McEntire renders it all with perceptive grace and a physicality. The melody of “Baby’s Got the Blues” crawls deep beneath the skin as she sings of “the dogwood and the chicory” and wonders over acceptance: “Do you see it in my hips? It is now what it is.”

Lionheart is at once devout and critical of religion’s shortcomings; McEntire’s queerness shines through every song. “It’s a wild world/That will make you believe/In a kingdom/Full of mercy and faith,” she posits in a glorious gospel sway on “A Lamb, A Dove.” She’s more elliptical than the pioneering gay country singer Lavender Country, but “When You Come for Me” contains a searingly poignant observation: “Mama, I dreamed that I had no hand to hold/And the land I cut my teeth on wouldn’t let me call it home.” McEntire has said she was inspired by a documentary about the country-establishment singer Chely Wright, who came out as a lesbian in 2010 in the face of the genre’s staunch god-country-family conservatism. Against such stakes, Lionheart feels like a miracle. Amid the continued fight for LGBT rights in McEntire’s home state, the record’s social and musical negotiation feels like an undertaking of consequence.

“Dress in the Dark” is Lionheart’s swaggering stand-off of a closer. McEntire lingers with smoke at the edge of each line: “I can only feel your heart/Through your dress/In the dark,” she sings. More than an outlaw, she’s a country-music outsider among country-music outsiders, reclaiming and rewriting its weathered language. Rather than a mainstream country label, McEntire has released Lionheart on indie stalwart Merge—her position recalls a young Lucinda Williams, who once said, “It took a punk label from England [Rough Trade] to recognize what I was doing,” which was something utterly new. As McEntire returns to tradition, she pushes ever further towards shaping a new one.