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The following article courtesy of Julene Snyder at: http://www.well.com/~julene/recrev/jocarol.html
JO CAROL PIERCE
Bad Girls Upset By The Truth (Monkey Hill)
Lubbock, Texas, mental illness, rampant bed-hopping, the Blessed Virgin Mary, suicide, UFOs, doomed marriages, Tourette's Syndrome, fast cars, Jesus, true love and attentive prairie dogs all meld together into a blur of twangy, poignant hilarity as personified by Austin songwriter Jo Carol Pierce.
A mixture of spoken word and music, "Bad Girls Upset By The Truth" is a long-winded tale that involves all of the above elements in answering a few of Jo Carol's burning questions. First and foremost among these is, "What are these boys *for* and what am I supposed to do with them?" What Jo Carol does with them is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination, but her good-hearted quest for some sort of real answer makes this sonic journey well worth taking.
The tone of "Bad Girls" is set by her opening dedication: "I need to send this song out to all you guys out in the world who have not had the courtesy to fall in love with the bad girls yet, because y'all really bother me -- although not as much as the ones who did." While one-liners abound ("Isn't there some other girl out there somewhere that you could never call?"), it's the whole cloth of Jo Carol's crazy quilt of mixed metaphors that sticks to the ribs like a plate of sausage biscuits and gravy.
Songs like "I Blame God" find Jo Carol trying to dig herself out of yet another sticky situation by ascribing her actions to a higher power who's determined to ruin her fun. The tex-mex feel of "Borderline Tango" is enhanced by Jo Carol's throwaway comment, "One of the real odd things about the borderline tango is that it is a waltz." A former boyfriend's lament, "Loose Diamonds," aptly describes the exact feeling of heartache: "You were like broken glass embedded in my flesh."
It's that kind of knack for a turn of phrase that's made Jo Carol Pierce one of the darlings of the Austin music scene, winning her 1993's Songwriter of the Year Award, and a previous record, "Across the Great Divide," Album of the Year honors. There's even talk about taking "Bad Girls," rewritten as a full-length musical, off-Broadway.
The world makes no sense a good portion of the time, but at least we've got company along the way. As the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) tells Jo Carol, "Y'all are not alone, these are very tough times for gendered creatures."
Amen.
By Julene Snyder
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