This country elder isn’t letting a sudden ‘wonky’ voice slow her down

Kathy Mattea felt quite at home when she hit 60 last summer. A winner of two Grammy Awards (one of which was for her career defining 1989 hit “Where’ve You Been”) and one of the most heralded country stylists of the ‘80s and ‘90s, she found herself busier than ever in 2019.

Aside from a full touring calendar, she served as occasional guest host for the West Virginia-based public radio program Mountain Stage, taught classes for the Berklee College of Music and the University of West Virginia where she shared experiences from her 35-plus year recording career and served as consultant and on-screen interviewee for Ken Burns’ critically lauded “Country Music” series. Not bad for a country elder reared on folk, Celtic music and bluegrass.

But something else entered the picture as Mattea approached her sixth decade. Her voice changed. Notes she used to reach with ease began to elude her. The singer described her vocal ability as suddenly “wonky.”

“I won’t even say this was disconcerting,” said Mattea, who returns to Lexington for a Jan. 12 acoustic concert where she will be accompanied by longtime guitarist Bill Cooley. “It freaked me out.

“I would go for a note I thought I had been singing for decades and it wouldn’t come out right. It would be tight or flat. I knew what to do, but it wouldn’t happen. I think it was a by-product of menopause, actually. I’ve talked with lots of women and they said this is pretty common. There are just changes that your whole body goes through and the voice is no exception.”

In addressing the shifts in her vocal reach, Mattea remembered a conversation she had years earlier with an artist who knew a few things about maintaining a potent vocal command as he aged. His name was Tony Bennett.

“We were at an event and just broke off into a corner. I was getting out of the fray and found him there, so I picked his brain. I just said, ‘How do you sing like that at your age? How do still sing this well?’ He said, ‘Well, my voice isn’t what it once was, but it’s a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago because I found a good teacher and I started working at it again.”

With that in mind, Mattea got to work herself, enlisted a vocal teacher she met with weekly and started to diversify her repertoire to include songs she “didn’t know how to sing.”

“We would play songs we know, songs we don’t know. I was like, ‘I need to get to know my voice again through songs I don’t know how to sing already, songs that are maybe a little different. So I just started throwing out crazy, wacky songs. These are the songs that opened me up, that kept me singing and helped me get to know my voice in a new way. So when it was time to make a record, I was like, ‘What am I going to do? Go find 10 arbitrary songs? So I went for the songs that had been my companions as I was singing them in my living room.”

The result was a 2018 album called “Pretty Bird,” and among the living room repertoire she drew from for the record were songs by such disparate artists as blues/soul groove merchants The Wood Brothers, folk/bluegrass empress Hazel Dickens, Scottish songster Dougie MacLean and Kentucky-born pop stylist Joan Osborne. Topping it all was a cover the classic 1967 Bobby Gentry ballad “Ode to Billie Joe” that Mattea confessed she hadn’t even thought about for ages. Longtime pal and veteran bluegrass/Americana journeyman Tim O’Brien served as producer.

“Some songs, I needed to change the key. I had to bring them down a half step. Some songs stayed exactly where they’ve always been. It was a fascinating process, but I also had to let go of a layer of my ego that said, ‘If you can’t do it exactly like you did when you were 25 years old, it’s not good.’

“Over the course of the process, I realized that my voice hadn’t necessarily diminished, it was just different. There’s this low end that came in, one that’s warm and rich. I don’t think I would have ever really appreciated that had I not spent hours and hours going, ‘What is my instrument like these days? What do I have here?’ Sometimes just letting go was really emotional. I couldn’t really find what is special about my voice today until I let go of this idea of who I used to be.

“I had one friend who looked at me and said, ‘Kathy, your face is 60. Your hair is gray. You’ve completely embraced this process. Why can’t you do that with your voice.’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I love my gray hair. I love all my little wrinkles. Maybe this is just the vocal version of that.’ Really, I’ve been all about leaning into that and reveling in it. It just took me awhile to let go.”

Kathy Mattea

When: 6:30 p.m. Jan. 12

Where: Kentucky Castle, 230 Pisgah Pike

Tickets: $35, $95

Call: 859-256-0322

Online: thekentuckycastle.com, mattea.com