Obscured by her intoxicating good cheer and reputation as a wholesome if sometimes tacky entertainer, Dolly’s markedly melancholic view of love is easy to miss. Even within country music’s tradition of tragic romances as the only ones worth singing about, her romantic despair is because her lovers are not dying valiantly but vanishing casually. Lovers routinely abandon Dolly, and when they don’t, she lives in fear of their doing so, as she famously described in “Jolene.” She begs Jolene not to steal her man, in the forgivable delusion that it is women who steal away men rather than men who relinquish themselves readily. “I have cradled your head on my pillow / Quenched your thirst from my sweet loving cup I have bowed to your needs like a willow Now you’ve gone in the prime of our love,” she mourns on “Prime of Our Love.” One gets the sense that it was not Jolene who was the problem after all. Dolly is hopelessly dependent on love, declaring, “I am only happy when you are by my side How precious is this love we share How very precious, sweet and rare,” in “Love Is Like a Butterfly.” She has only one source of happiness, and among its defining characteristics is its scarcity. “Do you ever wake up lonely in the middle of the night Because you miss me, do you darling Oh, and do your memories ever take / You back into another place in time,” she asks in “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind,” a song that reads like a thinly veiled confession that he is certainly crossing hers in the ways she describes. Dolly’s religious piety may be real, but her obsession with finding the approval of men lingers at the border of worship.
Lana, on the other hand, is more single-minded in her devotions. She is the most dangerous kind of blasphemer, not a denier of God but a creator of her own. “When things get bad enough, your only resort is to lie in bed and start praying. I dunno about congregating once a week in a church and all that, but when I heard there is a divine power you can call on, I did. I suppose my approach to religion is like my approach to music—I take what I want and leave the rest,” Lana said in an interview.3 “Take what you want and leave the rest” is a slogan frequently used in Alcoholics Anonymous, alongside its more strict cousin, “Take what you need and leave the rest.” Lana has mentioned in passing her involvement in 12-step recovery, and as a former member of this group myself, I can attest to the slogan’s value in resisting stringent codes that are not conducive to sobriety. I can also attest to how useful it is when eschewing the hard work required of facing the reality that such codes might have some value or purpose. It is also not unlike her old buddy Thomas Paine’s remarks in The Age of Reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
But while Paine’s apostasy is one that goes beyond self-reliance into self-worship, Lana does herself no such favors. There is no apparent solace at the altars of the men she worships. There is only more longing. “When I’m down on my knees, you’re how I pray,” she sings on “Religion,” from her album Honeymoon.
On Fiona’s sophomore album, When the Pawn…, she is noticeably less repentant than on her debut. She is hardened by a music industry that very publicly shamed her for having the audacity to speak human truths, and particularly female truths, on public stages. In the first track, “On the Bound,” she sings, “You’re all I need,” and takes a pause before realizing her real need: “and maybe some faith would do me good.” But the difference between Lana and Fiona is that Lana long ago determined that her faith was doing her no good. Fiona grasps at it continually, singing on “Paper Bag,” “But then the dove of hope began its downward slope / And I believed for a moment that my chances Were approaching to be grabbed But as it came down near, so did a weary tear / I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag.” All the divine signs turn out to be the detritus of the world, but Fiona grasps onto it in the vain hope that the next might be something holy.
When Fiona can no longer grasp for the signs of God’s love, she accepts an alternative role: the role of the martyrs absorbing the sins of others into her flesh. “And I will pretend / That I don’t know of your sins Until you are ready to confess But all the time, all the time / I’ll know, I’ll know / And you can use my skin / To bury your secrets in,” she sings in “I Know.” Even when she is at last confident that she is not the sinner herself, she sees it her bounden duty to take on the sins of other men, internalizing their wickedness as punishment for the sin of loving them.
But Apple’s 2005 album, Extraordinary Machine, represents a marked shift away from the hold—and zeros in on the destructive men who cannot appreciate her love. “Oh what a cold and common old way to go / I was feeding on the need for you to know me Devastated at the rate you fell below me What wasted unconditional love / On somebody who doesn’t believe in the stuff / Oh well,” she sings on 2005’s “Oh Well.” She begins to call out men directly for their transgressions against her, for their failures to love her in return. There is still something of the guilt-ridden girl in her self-professed culpability for allowing such men into her life, but there is effort to move away from it. “But I’m not being fair / ’Cause I chose to listen to that filthy mouth,” she confesses on “Not About Love,” but she makes an effort to turn away from it. “But I’d like to choose right / Take all the things that I’ve said that he stole / Put ’em in a sack / Swing ’em over my shoulder Turn on my heels Step out of this sight / Try to live in a lovelier light.” There is an intentional shift in her tone, an ambition to do more than suffer under men’s indifference toward her love. It would be seven more years before she released another album.
A 2012 profile of Fiona in New York magazine is considered among the best of its kind and so, too, is the album Fiona released that year, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. Dan P. Lee’s storytelling and descriptions are artful indeed, but his extraordinary subject does much of the heavy lifting. Her eyes are like “mint chocolate chip when it melts” and she “was odd-looking in the way most beautiful people are as children.” She gets his name wrong constantly, calls him at all hours of the night, and speaks of “mirror neurons” and childhood superpowers.4 But what was more telling than what Fiona actually did during the profile was the fact that she was doing anything at all: Fiona had made herself so scarce in the twenty-first century that even small peeks into her life would have been revelatory. The great feat of Fiona is her disappearance from the public eye, leaving us to wonder often if she found the redemption and love she sought for so long.