Trapped by a Thing Called Love

Denise LaSalle recorded this at a moment when Southern soul was at its most inventive — 1971, Westbound Records, a Detroit label that understood both funk and country-inflected soul — and the result is a record that sits in the gap between those two worlds with complete ease. The production is warm and enveloping without being soft: there's a guitar figure that loops through the track like a recurring thought, a rhythm section that breathes rather than pounds, horns that arrive in exactly the right places without ever crowding the vocal. LaSalle's voice is one of the more distinctive instruments in this tradition — alto-grounded, with a rougher grain than many of her contemporaries, which gives the emotional content an immediate credibility. The predicament she describes is specific and universal at once: the person who does not treat you well but has somehow become necessary, the attachment that defies logic and self-interest. What makes her performance compelling is the absence of self-pity — she is not lamenting the situation so much as examining it with clear eyes and a kind of rueful acceptance. LaSalle had already been living and writing about adult life before she was signed nationally, and that experience shows in how she inhabits the lyric. This is not a young person's song about young-person feelings. It lives best on a long drive through flat country, or in any moment of quiet reflection where you're being honest about a feeling you haven't quite admitted to anyone else yet.