There are more high profile guests on Heidi Newfield’s The Barfly Sessions than one might find on most tribute albums. That’s partly due to the ridiculous amount of styles embedded in this one project, from blues-rock to slow burners, to country ballads and honky tonkin’ stompers. When Newfield shows up, she seems fair game for just about anything, conventions be damned. Led by her talented co-producer Jim ‘Moose” Brown, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader for Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, the dizzying array of collaborators and co-writers include Al Anderson, Jon Randall, Rivers Rutherford, Chris Stapleton, Matt King, Randy Houser, Jim Lauderdale, Delbert McClinton, Kenny Vaughan, Leslie Satcher, Mickey Raphael, and Waylon Payne.
Amazingly, none of them steal the spotlight from Newfield. This is clearly her show, as if she’s throwing the party and doing all the cooking, serving the drinks, choosing the music, and remaining the center of attention. She has that command of the recording studio too. She chirped in one interview, “No one was telling me what to do, No one put me in a box.” Newfield, a classic entertainer, is affable to her friends but conveys a defiant demeanor in many of these songs. Brown perhaps sums her up best with this statement, “Heidi and I have been friends for many years and I’ve always been a fan of her music, but I really had no clue to the depth of her musicianship, songwriting, and general bad-assery until now. She is a deep mix of old school country, Texas twang, blues and straight-up soul, and she absolutely delivers the goods on this record.”
In truth, Newfield hails from Northern California (Healdsburg, specifically), grew up on a horse ranch and chose a music career as a teenager, eventually riding Trick Pony hits including “Pour Me,” “On a Night Like This” and “It’s a Heartache” to awards, acclaim and packed houses. Her solo work and the runaway success of “Johnny & June” brought a fist full of Academy of Country Music nominations and her multi-faceted creativity into sharper relief. Credited with writing on 12 of the set’s 14 songs, she brings her musical stamp to all of them, charging out of gate hard with the Led Zeppelin sounding blues rock of “I Won’t Wait Around,” signaling some of the defiance that follows, none better than in a standout track she didn’t write. “Blues Is My Business” writer Kevin Bowe explains, “I’ve heard many, many versions … from Etta James to the old bar-band down the street … but no one owns this song like Heidi Newfield. Her combination of big-hearted soul and an even bigger middle finger gave this song exactly what it wanted. Having the legendary Delbert McClinton join Heidi was better than having the cherry on top — more like the spicy BBQ sauce, the perfect combination and flavor.”
Newfield models her approach on strong, powerhouse female vocalists. She’s a belter at heart but possesses amazing range, delivering for example the duet with Houser “Whitley’s Tombstone” with the finesse of the best country balladeers. It’s one of the only tracks where we don’t hear her blues harp but Mickey Raphael, not a shabby substitute, fills that gap. But she never wants the listener to settle into one groove. She follows that one with stomping “I Could Fall 4 U,” wailing away on her harmonica as Jim Lauderdale tries to keep pace with her raging enthusiasm and Kenny Vaughan rips away on his axe. Another similar sequence is the rambunctious “Bring This House Down” which is as representative of her slashing, no-holds barred attack, where the music matches these lyrics, “Oh we’re gonna bring this house down/They’re gonna feel the fire and see the smoke all the way/across town/It’s gonna get wild/It’s gonna get loud/There’s gonna be a pile of bricks and wood and stone/They’re gonna have to pull us out/Yeah we’re gonna bring this house down/ Oh we’re gonna bring this house down. She follows that rager with the sensitive “Temporary Fix” only to end fittingly in true Newfield style with “Come Hell in Highwater Blues.”
With the musicians aboard for the session such as guitarist David Grissom, bassists Michael Rhodes or Dave Roe, and drummer Fred Eltringham it would be hard to misfire but Newfield just soars and takes these songs to an unmatched energy level, pausing every so often to let us know she can be a country chanteuse too. This one of those roll-down-the-windows-and-let-the wind-blow-back-your-hair albums. Play it loud. Newfield takes no prisoners.
