Karen Dalton

Karen Dalton

In My Own Time (Light in the Attic)

On her second and last album, recorded in 1970-71 at Woodstock's Bearsville Studios with the production help of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan session man Harvey Brooks, the late Karen Dalton comes across detached but desperate. These 10 covers sound like the songs sought her out, and she crawled inside them to hide. A banjo player and 12-string guitarist whose voice found comparisons in Jean Ritchie's and Billie Holiday's, as well as admirers in Fred Neil and Nick Cave (and now Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom), the Oklahoma-born Dalton struggled with addictions and expectations. All of it, good and bad, catches up with her on kindred spirit Richard Manuel's "In a Station," a sweeping, keyed-up blues that Dalton sings carefully until providing her own coda: "Oh, save me, save me," she wails as the organ and piano slide off the bass' tracks, leaving her behind. It's a feeling she must have been used to. As sophisticated and striking a talent as she was, Dalton never approached the success of some Greenwich Village contemporaries. The traditional "Katie Cruel," embittered and unforgiving, is abandoned on the outskirts; Dalton sounds like she's been rehearsing the tune since she was a toddler, while her modest banjo is overshadowed by a mystic violin. It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best, predecessor to In My Own Time, is steadier and more authentic, but it was also recorded – or so the story goes – without the reluctant Dalton's knowledge. This is a singer's showcase: varied, polished, and seemingly a promise of more to come. That nothing did is cruel.