Blues Roots: The Music of Canada's Rachelle van Zanten (Back to Francois)

Don’t let “The Cracks” fool you with its easy comparisons to Suzanne Vega, Catie Curtis, and Shawn Colvin. A fine acoustic, country-laden tune (more on that later), “The Cracks” lulls you in as the first track of Rachelle van Zanten’s Back to Francois. She comes on easy, and all hell breaks loose on her slide guitar for track 2, “Take Me Right Back.”

I’ve seen the Bonnie Raitt comparisons, but that’s the easy blueswoman namecheck. Listen as van Zanten gives out bursts of guitar between stanzas, and you see that she’s in the company of Eddie Turner, Kelly Joe Phelps, Jonny Lang, Paul Reddick, and Susan Tedeschi. Van Zanten studied under slide guitar master Lester Quitzau (who guests on “Take Me Right Back” and “Suicide Ride”), but there are also brief acoustic guitar storms where I hear the phenomenal sounds of Preston Reed.

Van Zanten plays Canadamericana, laying down tracks of easy Country flavor, but she can also dig a well to find those deep, down blues. “Got to Let Go” brings up that bucket of blues with a little twang in slide guitar while Joby Baker kicks out the funk on the drums and bass. Van Zanten’s guitar actually seems to grab a little of that riff from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”

The album doesn’t let you sit anywhere too long. “Rusty Boy” could be something from the Maritime Provinces and the Rankins (or the British Isles and Kate Rusby), but don’t stay with that pastoral air, because you’ve got to get yer “Yah Yahs” out—a stomp-driven, toy piano party for the guitar. “Bannister Man” has the tribal rhythmic feel of The Primitives’ “Shadow,” but van Zanten breaks up the trance with her mesmerizing acoustic slide which when combined with John Cartwright’s percussive guitar comes on like something from Keller Williams.

And now for that opening track of singer/songwriter folk bliss: “The Cracks.” The song itself may not have grabbed me, despite its beauty; van Zanten truly shines elsewhere here. However, on closer inspection, the lyrics of “The Cracks” overpower me.

Van Zanten told me that this song is about the end of a relationship with man she dearly loved, a bittersweet kind of leaving I’m guessing. However, for me there seems to be some echoes here of an adoption story. My ears were especially pricked by the line, “I loved you like a child of my own,” and that colored my original interpretation of the chorus: “Come here softly, the world is still sleeping. . .Close your eyes and soon she’ll be taking home.”

I imagine those words being spoken by a birthmom as she spends the last hours holding her baby in the hospital before the adoptive mother comes. She has the “peace to say” that the baby is her child, but that there’s also very good reasons for making the decision to place the child into the arms of adoptive parents. It’s not what van Zanten is singing about, but it is the emotion that comes through this tender opening song from a woman can also blister and bruise her guitar.

Thanks to Rachelle van Zanten for the review CD.