Caught in the Carousel

Kate Voegele

Don't Look Away
MySpace Records

Kate Voegele

From Sweet Honey in the Rock to the Indigo Girls, folk music by women has a proud tradition of blending personal vulnerability with progressive politics. By listing folk singers Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Shawn Colvin as her heroes in her MySpace profile, singer-songwriter Kate Voegele attempts to insert her debut album, Don't Look Away into this tradition. Eager to prove that the weight of her experience more than measures up, the twenty-year-old belts out, "I've loved a lot and here's what I've got" on the album’s opening track, "Chicago." And according to her promoters at MySpace Records, she's not just referring to experiences she may have had at college parties or after the prom: "Don't Look Away," the blurb reads, "is a bravura effort from an old soul with a youthful spirit."

While there's no question that Kate Voegele can vocally project, Don't Look Away is really more about bravado than bravura. On average, the songs' musical arrangements fall somewhere between an Avril Lavigne album and a Michael W. Smith musical—that is to say, an overproduced mixture of the embarrassingly earnest and carefully crafted. It sounds like something one would hear in the background at Knotts Berry Farm—or whatever rollercoaster park it is that Voegele had a gig at. (On a side note, amusement parks are not the kind of setting generally frequented by folk singers, unless one counts Joan Baez's appearances at the San Francisco's Gay Pride festival, which, if you're into the leather and all that, is sort of like an amusement park in some sense. But I digress…) In short, I'd place Kate Voegele less in the tradition of Joni Mitchell and more in the company of Hillary Duff. While I can't deny having spent the occasional Saturday morning in my early twenties hung over and watching "Lizzie McGuire," I would certainly be loath to call her an "old soul."

Established folkstresses—Joni Mitchell, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, Deb Talan, and Anne Heaton, to name a few—have a sort of gravitas about them that Voegele seems to lack. For the confessional singer/songwriter, humility and admissions of failure are part and parcel of achieving wholeness and strength. Vulnerability is painful, but key: this is the equation that made Joni Mitchell’s “River" so poignant back in 1971 ("I'm so hard to handle/I'm selfish and I'm sad") and that carries Anne Heaton's songwriting in the new millennium (from "Give In": "Me, I had to show you that I could fall down/My love is not professional").

Voegele's lyrics suggest that she is just coming into vulnerability—for example, in "I Get It," the singer's lover "turned the tables," causing her to suddenly learn that "this is how hurt feels." Vulnerability is experienced as inflicted rather than intrinsic. Furthermore, this journey into vulnerability becomes not a means to ultimate empowerment but rather—if I may quote a hated work by Freud—an "arduous and circuitous path" of avoidance. Couched in what first appears to be a spirit of grrl power-laden sexuality ("I've suffered enough to be free"), "Chicago" in actuality backslides at least half a century by suggesting that women are, in fact, ultimately dependent on men: "Well didn't I think you would always love me? And didn't I want you to take care of me, baby?"

Voegele further suggests that, not only should women be taken care of by men, they should feel entitled to it. When her expectations are not met (as Voegele so eloquently puts it, "Well baby, that's not happening"), the song's narrator leaves "on the 7 o'clock to Chicago" (to continue the hunt for a sugar daddy? One can only wonder).

Good news for Kate Voegele, though: it appears that many of her admirers have heeded her admonition to not look away, because they are flocking to her MySpace page in droves—conversely, the bad news is, not many of them, who left comments like "your gorgeouss," can spell). Neither can I look away, but that's because I'm still pondering whether the MySpace Records contract stipulates that its artists must have a certain percentage of their girlish frames visible in all publicity shots. I am also wracking my brains to think of any other "old souls" who own more than three tube tops.

After listening to Kate Voegele I briefly entertained the worry that misguided girl power will destroy the feminist movement from the inside out. Thank goodness I have four decades of women in folk music—along with the emergency "riot grrl" playlist I created on my iPod after surviving my first full listen to Don't Look Away—to convince me otherwise. "Now I'm a victim for the first time," sings Voegele. But women who really rock are about more than mere victimhood: they are survivors.

—Christine Fort