True Love Can Leave Traces. S.G. Goodman’s Detailed Songs Do, Too.
MURRAY, Ky. — S.G. Goodman was looking for the perfect sentence. Sitting in her midcentury-modern living room in this small college town and steadfastly ignoring the whines of her balding terrier, Howard, the singer-songwriter flipped through a copy of “My People’s Waltz,” the Pulitzer-nominated 1999 short-story collection by her mentor and friend Dale Ray Phillips. “All of his sentences are so beautiful and economical,” she said, failing to locate the one she had in mind. “He taught me that a really good way to understand what feelings you’re trying to capture is by reading something like a short story or a novel and really paying attention to the moments or images that make your stomach turn a little.” Goodman has put those lessons to good use, especially on her second album, “Teeth Marks,” out Friday.
She approaches her songs as though they were stories, emphasizing character and scene. Over a clutch of tender, twangy guitar notes on the LP’s title track, she sings, “When you left the bed, after you bit my arm.
A little souvenir, where your teeth left marks.” Her voice is an intimate whisper, her phrasing defined by her West Kentucky accent, and the image itself is both playful and painful.
Love — especially unrequited love — leaves a physical impact, an idea she explores throughout the album. With her sharp eye for character and scene and her arresting voice — which sounds like it could be emanating from a century-old 78 — Goodman, 33, is the latest in a wave of Kentucky artists who divine inspiration from their home state.
