Allison Moorer Blood LP

Acclaimed singer/songwriter Allison Moorer releases Blood (Autotelic Records / Thirty Tigers), the first solo album in four years from the Academy, Grammy, Americana and Academy of Country Music award nominated artist. Blood is not only Moorer's most personal and revealing work to date, but also her finest and most important. Blood stands on its own as a complete work, but the album serves as a companion piece to her autobiography, Blood: A Memoir, released through Da Capo Press, an imprint of Hachette Books.

Blood: A Memoir is a detailed account of Moorer and her sister's (Grammy Award winner Shelby Lynne) childhood growing up in a troubled home in Southern Alabama, which ended with the well-documented murder-suicide of her parents in 1986. Much of what the public has known about the tragic event begins and ends there. For years Moorer had avoided going into the traumatic details of the abuse, alcoholism, intimidation, poverty and neglect that existed prior to the deaths, and for good reasons which she addresses in the memoir. Moorer also addresses the fact that there was so much more to her family than tragedy, darkness and what people thought they knew. There was love, there was a protective mother, there was the bond of sisterhood and there was music. There was always music.

The album Blood serves as a song cycle featuring ten tracks that directly connect to the people, emotions, trauma and state of mind that are all detailed so eloquently in the memoir.

"It's taken a lifetime," says Moorer. "I am 47 years old. But I also know you keep telling the story until the story is told. For whatever reason, maybe this one is too big for one art form. Maybe I need the music, the lyric and what's not said and the book form to understand what happened, to show those things that aren't easily revealed. This isn't only a companion piece. It stands alone in its own way, shows and says things beyond words. To me, it's all part of it, and it's also unto itself. It took a long time to get here, but now, it's told."

From the moody, minor-keyed opener "Bad Weather", which finds a grown Moorer wrestling a familiar misgiving, she melts time to return to the reportage of "Cold, Cold Earth" (originally released as a secret track on her 2000 album The Hardest Part). Also included is "I'm The One To Blame", which contains lyrics written by her father which were discovered in a suitcase after his death and put to music by Shelby Lynne. For an album that's as much a reckoning with ghosts as it is an awakening of self-compassion, Blood offers insight for us all.

Economical, ethereal, yet firmly on the ground, Blood is hopeful in its starkness and shines light on the darkness. Having spent a career finding places to hide in the spotlight, she emerges without armor, stronger and freer than ever.

An aching, moving testimony, beautifully realised.

Blood is an irrefutable masterpiece.