By Jimmy Draper

RADIO IS A sound salvation: In Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell's recent collection of essays and on-air anecdotes, the pop culture critic and NPR mainstay says her idea of rock and roll heaven is a place where "every now and then a song I like comes on the radio." That's all: three minutes of redemption.

Olympia, Wash., singer-songwriter Sarah Dougher calls her first childhood clock radio her "savior to the outside world," a lifeline of three-minute miracles. Today, however, it's nearly impossible to get to heaven by hitting scan on the radio: music's most moving moments are often destined to be trapped in the Discman's isolated spin cycle. Which is unfortunate, because as Dougher implies, half the thrill of music is the shared experience, knowing someone else out there is listening to the same song and perhaps feeling the same emotions. Radio makes that connection – that bond over the bandwidth – immediate and real. Dougher's statement is a reminder of radio's largely untapped ability to bring people together and change lives.

Sarah Dougher The Walls Ablaze (Mr. Lady) THE TITLE, and first, track of Sarah Dougher's new album begins directly after a fate-altering – maybe lifesaving, maybe disastrous – event. The songs that follow roll over rough sheets of rock that Dougher forms with her guitar, but however far they travel, that initial ambiguous ambivalent event never quite disappears from view. "Nothing to cry about," Dougher sings repeatedly on "No-Handed," as lead guitarist Jon Reuter spins one graceful Smiths-like melodic loop-to-loop after another. The next song ("The Scales") returns to the scene of what someone else considers a crime. "You couldn't see the scales fall off of my eyes," Dougher claims, but that charged metaphor doesn't contain as much meaning as her vocals. She sings the same line – "You know I couldn't help it" – over and over, but differently each time: her voice moves from choked-up anguish to wild strength to steely, defiant resolve. Thanks to drums by Janet Weiss and Hannah Blilie of the Vogue, The Walls Ablaze is a more propulsive, powerful work than Dougher's folk-tinged debut. Reuter is a superb guitarist: "Mirror/Shield" stomps in with a ringing majesty similar to that of the Who when they were on the threshold between garage and stadium; as "The New Carissa" likens a broken bond to a sinking oil ship, Reuter throws out a lifeline-like solo. With each song, Dougher adds to an American musical map, and "The Ground Below" charts classic territory, connecting love with stars in the sky and wide-open land in a way that feels anthemic yet real: familiar yet new. The thematic precision of The Walls Ablaze might be oppressive if Dougher's language weren't so open to personal interpretation; there is an air of the teacher to her lyrics that would be off-putting if it didn't seem like she were addressing herself as much as any listener. Rather than offer pop's comforts and escapes, she presents maxims that are part pep talk ("Events will never deliver their meaning to you") and part challenge ("The words you never find and the words you never use / Collect against your mind like the love that you refused"). The forward motion of these dozen songs gradually slows, giving way to stationary solitude ("The Old Way"). Yet even when her music has a drowsy, half-dreaming quality ("The Flag"), Dougher remains contemplative, weighing lucky breaks against mistakes and wondering if staying is the way to go. Johnny Ray Huston

Ever since she began her solo recording in 1996, Dougher – who's also one-third of the Crabs and Cadallaca – has written the sort of songs Vowell longs to hear on the radio: "speed or sorrow coming out of speakers with so much something that the world stops cold." Yet even though radio rarely plays her music, Dougher still writes from the perspective of a young woman who once looked to the airwaves for answers and found a religion in the radio.

Bay Guardian: What's your first memory of the radio?

Sarah Dougher: Until I was ten or so there was only one radio in our house, which was always on classical music. There came a point when I got a clock radio that was my savior to the outside world, and I listened to this station that was basically Top 40, which kind of sounded different when I was ten than it does now. But I used to just turn the clock radio on and sleep with it under the covers, up until I was thirteen. I would also try to write the lyrics of the songs down, like "How Deep Is Your Love" by the Bee Gees. The first single I got because I heard it on the radio was "Cruel to Be Kind," by Nick Lowe.

BG: When you listen to the radio now, where do you listen most?

SD: I just listen in the car, especially on tour. I listen to NPR if I'm up for it, but pretty much only contemporary country music.

BG: Does that influence your songwriting?

SD: I guess it does, just because I try to think about what the songs are about and sometimes try to copy them. I really like country music because of the stories, and also the breadth of experience that they try to represent. This is all a very cold analysis of it, but country songs talk about old people, kids, moms, people getting married and getting divorces, people losing their jobs – kind of normal stuff – in ways that surround those events with a rhetoric that makes them seem really exciting. So I'm interested in trying to figure out how it is that those things become interesting enough to be in those songs.

BG: I'm into older country, like Johnny Cash, and it's very similar to what you're describing. Do you think older country does that too?

SD: Totally. I really like that old stuff too. I just listened to this song the other day called "Miller's Cave," from 1964, and it's like, "What?!" This is a freaky song about putting a whole drama into a landscape that may feel really near and common to people. Like there may be a place just on the edge of town, a labyrinth you can get lost in and that all this stuff can happen around.

BG: One of my favorite songs is the Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra duet "Elusive Dreams," where this couple moves around the States but then their baby dies, and they just move on.

SD: Yeah, I think it's truer in older songs that an issue like abortion has euphemisms around it. But nowadays there's that Dixie Chicks song "Goodbye Earl." Really weird! It's about these ladies murdering this guy, and it's intense.

BG: Have you ever heard yourself on the radio?

SD: Once, with Cadallaca. It's really exciting! I haven't heard myself, although people have told me they've heard me on the radio. I get e-mails like "I heard your music on my college radio station, and I wanted to know where I could get your CD." That's great! But I only get two e-mails like that a month.

BG: What would you like to hear more of on the radio?

SD: Independent music and poetry. The last thing I stayed in the car to listen to was on All Things Considered. They were doing a piece on Remain in Light by the Talking Heads that was so interesting. I was just transfixed by the story behind [the recording], and they illustrated everything sonically so it made sense and sounded good. I don't ever make dates with the radio to listen to shows, but I actually really like Prairie Home Companion and This American Life. My parents totally love that show. I went to a taping of it once – now people who know I like the show will think I'm an even bigger geek.

PHOTO: CURT DOUGHTY

return to top | sfbg.com