It’s the best kind of magic when you think about it: Becky Warren transforms pain into art.
Across three remarkable solo albums (2016’s War Surplus, 2018’s Undesirable, 2020’s Sick Season), singer-songwriter Warren has brought to vivid life the experience of veterans coming home, homeless people struggling to survive, and her own long battle with depression.
Prior to going solo, Warren was frontwoman and songwriter for The Great Unknowns, a quartet that recorded their debut Presenting The Great Unknowns in the basement of Warren’s college dorm. The album, intended as a one-off for their families and friends, found its way into the hands of Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, who then issued it on her label in 2004. Eight years later, Warren reconvened the Great Unknowns for this powerful sophomore album.
Both an ending and a beginning, Homefront feels like the moment when Warren figured out what she wanted to do with her considerable gifts as a songwriter; its approach is much more of a precursor to Warren’s solo work than a successor to the Unknowns’ lovingly crafted but thematically diffuse debut. Interestingly, it reveals that her magnificent solo debut War Surplus was actually her second try at writing and recording a set of songs about her marriage to a military man who went to Iraq in 2005 and came home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a painful journey that ended in divorce.
Where War Surplus frames the story as a two-character play starring fictionalized versions of Warren and her ex, Homefront is more direct and confessional in its approach. The album features three-quarters of the original Great Unknowns lineup in Warren, bassist Altay Duvench and drummer Andy Eggers, this time joined by Avril Smith on guitar, along with many of the guests who helped fill out the band’s sound on their debut (notably Tyler Wood and Scott Roy, joined here by noted Nashville sideman Jon Carroll).
Leaning in to Warren’s patented “Lucinda Williams fronting The Heartbreakers” twangy guitar rock vibe, opener “Lexington” is a muscular, steady-rocking number about regret and self-deception, starting at the end of the story by declaring “I never think about you / I never wonder how you are” right before she proceeds to do exactly that.
Scott Roy features on banjo and Stefan Custodi and Smith on harmony vocals for “Dead River, Lake Country,” a country-rock rambler whose devastating opening lines say it all: “I've been lonelier than this before / Like every night I laid down beside you in your bed.” Oof. The Unknowns lock into a Memphis r&b groove for the swinging “A Bad Way,” embellished by Jon Natchez’ horns and Wood’s organ, an upbeat contrast to a lyric that’s pure gut-punch: “You know how to break a heart / And lay the blame / Twist it around / Say it’s all the same / Yeah, you got a way with words / But it’s a bad way.”
The twang quotient rises as “Wrong” adds pedal steel to a cantering rhythm while Warren absorbs hard lessons about how time and experience can alter your point of view. Then the title track delivers a punchy blues-rock jam as Warren surveys the situation from the perspective of the soldier returning home, his bleak outlook accentuated by Wood’s moody organ solo.
“By The Time You Get To Texas” and “Birmingham” offer two different approaches to a bluesy lament, the former languorous and brutal (“And if you keep saying I don’t really love you / One day, baby, it’s gonna turn out to be true”) and the latter a spare stunner: “When I think of you / With your blue jeans frayed / I see the girl I was / And wonder where she is today.”
The blues get chunkier on “I Wish I Was The Girl I Was” as Warren remembers the last time she saw an old friend and regrets that she isn’t that person any more; life moves on and it’s always a little bittersweet looking back. The one track here that feels like it strays outside of the album’s theme, the cheekily named “Love Song” is a danceable yet fatalistic rocker about not making it in the music business: “And we knew we would never write a love song / We knew we would never make the charts / We knew we would never write nothing that you’d know by heart”—the irony being, the song carries the stickiest melody and guitar riff on the album.
If you thought maybe things would get easier from there, you’d be wrong. “Long Way Home” is the album’s topic sentence, featuring beautiful mandolin work from Smith and a devastating lyric: “I know you’re not to blame / But my heart broke all the same / You came back to me a different man…. Oh, how I wish I’d taken one more look at your face / Because you’re a stranger to me now.” Then “I’m Gonna Get My Heart Broken” turns a steady midtempo number into an anthem powered by Carroll’s organ as Warren reclaims her independence: “Say what you will about me / Tell me I’m reckless or blind / But I know / Somewhere in this town’s the life I left behind.”
Closer “Army Corps Of Engineers” offers a eulogy for the relationship, a bluesy lament for all that they’ve both lost: “First April without you / I went down to the bridge / I gathered all my ghosts and threw them in... The day you left for Baghdad / We stood along the road / And you promised you’d come home in one piece / I know that you tried to make it true / But first I lost you / Then you lost me.”
The album is tough to find a physical copy of these days (for those of us who prefer to hold an album in their hands) but Warren has made it available on her Bandcamp page. And I’m glad for that, because Homefront is an important piece of Becky Warren’s ongoing story, a visceral, moving portrait of a relationship torn apart by war. That might sound like a bummer on paper, but The Great Unknowns make it feel like something approaching a celebration—of love and loss and pain and renewal, all the things that, in the end, give our lives substance, dimension and meaning.