Linda Thompson is best known as a singer and performer of someone else's songs. One particular other: Richard Thompson, her ex-husband, with whom she made some of the greatest British folk-rock albums ever as a duo in the 1970s and early '80s, giving decent balance to his tales of suffering and disputes. Linda made an album after they broke up and then began to struggle with a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which causes involuntary contractions of the larynx that can make singing or speaking difficult. She focused on family life and didn't release new music until the early 2000s, when botox treatment relaxed her vocal chords enough to make a cautious comeback. The three albums she's released since then are notable not only for the renewed power of her voice, but also for her emergence as a songwriter, a craft she developed when it looked like she'd never sing again.
Thompson's dissonance has worsened since then. Mediation music, as its title cheekily suggests, is a collection of songs she wrote for others to sing, subverting the composer-performer dynamic of her best-known work. With few exceptions, the music, largely co-written with her and Richard's son, Teddy Thompson, could fit on any of those classic '70s records, with striking acoustic instrumentation and melodies that they sound patient without fancy pop hooks. Her sensibility as a lyricist is informed by the folk tradition, and she often writes about the kind of sadness and regret that also characterized her songs with Richard.
But she's also funny—sharper and more ragged than ever as her ex's brooding mouthpiece. In “Or Nothing at All,” a piano ballad about unrequited affection tenderly performed by Martha Wainwright, Thompson describes the release of true love not in terms of lofty passion but absurd clinical precision: “A hundred men in their white coats /They would check you with their stethoscopes/And give you straight to me.'' “Shores of America,” sung by Dori Freeman from the perspective of a pioneer woman leaving a wretched partner behind in the old world, contains a jingle so good it's hard to believe no one has done it before: “And if it's true/That Only the good die young/Fortunate old you/'Cause you'll be around 'til kingdom come'.
Perhaps inspired by the unusual shape of the spinning singer or the years she spent speaking someone else's words and melodies with her own personality, Thompson is playful and explores notions of authorship and vocal authenticity that many other songwriters take for granted. She is particularly attuned to the gradations of perspective difference between a song's writer, its singer, and the constructed character of its narrator. Mediation music opens with “The Solitary Traveler,” an emotionally complex waltz whose lyrics, about an “evil” woman who has lost her voice and the love of her child's father, seem plucked from Thompson's biography. But they also gesture in the direction of a stock folk song role she was occasionally asked to play earlier in her career: the fallen woman, undone by her own bad choices, an object of both pity and scorn. By the end of the song, Thompson has subverted this misogynistic archetype. “I'm lonely now, you'd think I'd be sad,” sings Kami Thompson, Linda and Richard's daughter, brassy and confident. “No voice, no son, no man/Make mistakes like boys, I'm broke and free boys/All my problems are gone.”
