Comprehensive career survey of the pioneering folk ar tist’s hardto-find work.

By Andrew Male.

Norma Tanega: determined and uncompromising, sensitive and enlightening.

Ralph Weiss

Norma Tanega

★★★★

I’m The Sky: Studio And Demo Recordings, 1964-1971

ANTHOLOGY RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP

NORMA TANEGA lived three lives. It’s how she saw herself and how her friends discuss her in Try To Tell A Fish About Water, a “biography of ref lections” released by Anthology Recordings to accompany this new collection. The music, taken from official studio albums, abandoned projects and home demos, covers her first life, which began when the classical scholar born to Filipino and Panamanian parents in Long Beach, California, moved to New York in 1963 and immersed herself in the Greenwich Village folk scene. The Tanega that emerges in Try To Tell… is determined and uncompromising but also sensitive and enlightening. That’s also the image given by the songs collected here. The first disc brings together Tanega’s studio recordings, taken from her 1966 debut Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, her impossible-tofind 1971 follow-up for RCA I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile, and a brace of previously unreleased tracks from an abandoned 1969 LP, Snow Cycles. For an artist whose recorded work is so elusive, it’s simultaneously thrilling and frustrating to hear this assembled overview. The opening tracks, 1966’s Jubilation and 1971’s Now Is The Time, are both declamatory numbers, the first about a freeing communal union of “One, two, three/You and I and us”, the second a near-cousin of The Youngbloods’ 1966 peace-and-love anthem, Get Together. Both are simultaneously strong willed and naive, and neither display Tanega at her best. Similarly, of the two versions of 1971’s What More In This World Could Anyone Be Living For, the compilers choose the anthemic, choir-backed arrangement over the vulnerable, introspective version. Yet it’s here where Tanega’s genius lies, in a lightness of touch and a sensitivity to detail, as displayed in her 1966 hit, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, but also 1971’s circulatory, poetic love song Elephants, Angels And Roses and 1966’s corrosively dark protest number You’re Dead. It’s frustrating that only two songs from the abandoned Snow Cycles are present: a basic guitar instrumental entitled No One (Instrumental), and the exquisite When It Touches You, A Snowf lake Dies. Written in the wake of her romance with Dusty Springfield, it’s a love song where cryptic lyrical intensity is married to an arrangement of simple yet intricate beauty.