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"Pearl," Melissa Reaves, and a Career Cut Short

Melissa Reaves's CD "Sentimental Anthem" came out back in 1999. But for an independent artist, that's not such a long time ago. And if, as her website claims, she plays 200 shows a year, she's one busy woman.

I recommend the album to all Janis fans. Although Reaves is no Janis imitator, she has as much claim as anyone could have to Pearl's legacy.

There's no denying that Reaves has that passionate Joplinesque magic in her voice. It's a voice both powerful and gorgeous (and that's one "combination of the two" Joplin herself couldn't claim). I think Reaves could probably sing the pants off anyone alive today.

She's also technically a better singer than Joplin. Of course she's had more years to develop professionally than poor Janis ever did, along with the benefit of a steadily building career instead of the dangerously explosive celebrity that hit Janis.

What Reaves (or at least "Sentimental Anthem") doesn't have is the kind of inspired song choice that characterized Joplin and her collaborators especially during the Big Brother and Full Tilt Boogie periods. Janis fans debate endlessly the merits of the successive stages of her frantically compressed career: for example, I don't think we'll ever reach a consensus on the wisdom of Janis's leaving behind the experimental psychedelic blues-rock of Big Brother and the Holding Company in favor of more traditional R&B/Soul song forms. What path, or paths, would she have taken from there? Where would she have shined the brightest? Where would she be today, musically and personally?

Of course we'll never know, but "Pearl," her posthumous album, provides some basis for speculation. The horns are gone. The sound is stripped back to guitars, keyboards, bass and drums - a little closer to the Big Brother sound. (If you ask me, some of the guitar breaks on the instrumental "Buried Alive In The Blues" echo Sam Andrew's lines from "Piece of My Heart.") The songwriting on "Pearl," while still heavy on the soul, is both more rocked-out and a little more adventurous than on "Kozmic Blues." This is evident from the start of the album: although we can call "Move Over" a rock song for want of a better term, no one but Janis could possibly have come up with it any more than someone other than Jimi Hendrix could have produced "Purple Haze."

The unexpected chord and key changes on the "Pearl" album, the twinkling piano touches of "A Woman Left Lonely" and "Half Moon," the Dr. John-meets-proto-heavy-metal swank of "Buried Alive," the odd time changes of "My Baby," the startling shift into country-rock for "Me & Bobby McGee" - all these add up to a lot of interestingly tasty music amidst the more standard soul motions that give the album what continuity it has.

What if Joplin had firmed up and further developed the fusion of her increasing vocal maturity with the off-center compositional creativity that I've always wished she'd had more time and opportunity to indulge? What adventures and experiments might we have been privy to?

Maybe she would have come out with an album like Melissa Reaves's "Sentimental Anthem," with songs probably too experimental to be hit material yet still speaking a musical language comfortably familiar to blues-rock and soul fans. Would she have adopted elements of funk as Reaves and many of today's neo-soul singers do? Alternatively, what if Reaves's music had come out in the 70s? "Sentimental Anthem" might have sold a million copies. Buy "Sentimental Anthem" here - I don't think you'll be sorry.