Album of the Year, 1981: Joan Armatrading, Walk Under Ladders

When I get it right, will you tell me please

Album of the Year is a recurring column that examines one album from each year of my lifetime and digs into what it means to me and others, whether it's a well-known popular favorite or a half-remembered niche obscurity. This installation concerns the question of how an artist represents themselves when they refuse to limit themselves.

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For the first four installations of this column, I've examined bands whose popularity and renown seem like a settled matter: a famous-yet-cultish group whose current reputation is either glowing or nauseating depending on who you ask, an incredibly influential ensemble cast of innovators who are almost universally beloved, another incredibly influential experimental band whose reach wasn't as vast but who are still revered to this day by the niche of people who know of them, and a band that went from subcultural faves to blockbuster superstars while still keeping their edge of pop-art weirdness. Not all music heads know what Can's whole deal is, but the ones who do recognize their place in history and advocate for them with enthusiasm, and even casual music fans -- at least, those of a certain age -- will probably have some sense of where they stand on Steely Dan, P-Funk, and Blondie. As far as those bands are concerned, I pretty much just weighed in on some already existing narratives there.

But sometimes I'll look through my collection and pull up the work of someone who I recognize and have at least some investment in, and wonder exactly what their place is in the wider historical conversation. If an artist's considered neither canonical enough for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nor worthy enough of a "Losing My Edge"-style record-geek namecheck, and yet they still have a meaningful body of work and a high enough profile that made them seem like they were a substantial presence at their peak, what is there that keeps them from being sufficiently recognized in either context? I ask this because the album this installation covers has felt like a part of my music-fan DNA for most of my pushing-50 life, but in a way that almost seems like a mutation. Would I have ever sought out the music of Joan Armatrading, or even been even kind of aware of her at all, if it hadn't been introduced to me by a member of my family?

My mom had a few Joan Armatrading albums in her collection that she played around the house on a regular basis when I was a kid. I enjoyed it, at least on a casual oh this is nice kind of level -- I seem to recall her early '80s best-of being in rotation -- but it wasn't music I'd ever remember hearing outside that context. Mom first heard Armatrading back in the '70s, likely around the breakthrough of her '76 self-titled, which had made rotation on the Twin Cities rock station KQRS back when they were still relatively freeform. I find this pretty staggering, considering that by the time I started listening to KQ in the late '80s it had calcified into the narrowcasted version of "classic rock" that reduced everything cool about that period of music into a cordoned-off and constricted Cavalcade of White Dudes* (*and Also Hendrix). I would not ever hear Joan Armatrading on that incarnation of the station in a million years. But I would also not hear her on Top 40 pop radio or see her on MTV, at least not that I can recall. 

She was a bigger deal in the UK, granted; she'd have Top 40 singles and Top 10 albums and win industry awards and a couple of those big-deal Order of the British Empire hono(u)rs. And she's never really shown any signs of stepping back from her craft, notwithstanding a brief lull between studio albums in the late '90s/early '00s. But even when she was profiled in the New York Times last year she was positioned as an artist who still hadn't gotten all of her due, an idea backed up by the 2021 Guardian piece it cites. And in terms that echo the Times and Guardian reader comments, doing a casual trawl of forums and discussions dredged up a number of posts that leaned on the term underrated to describe her. I've largely given up on using "underrated"/"overrated" framing to engage with the relationship between an artist's popularity and the qualities of their music, but Armatrading's case seems like a pretty stark example of why it can still feel like a useful metric. When I wrote about Blondie I wondered if people younger than me even recognized if they were a big deal in their time; with Armatrading I don't feel like I need to speculate.

Still, I'm glad Jenn Pelly made a strong case for her a few years back with her Pitchfork Sunday Review of that '76 self-titled. It's a strong overview of what made Armatrading stand out as an artist and a personality and a public figure, and how all those things intertwined, and it helped clarify and corroborate my earlier surface impressions of her. She was more dedicated to her own expression than anyone else's demands on her image, but was also given to experiment with style in ways that toyed with trends of the moment. Her lyrics were often on the brink of feeling confessional even when they were deliberately evasive or channeled through someone else's perspective. She spent a lot of time reinforcing her own autonomy over herself and her identity, even if she opted to keep some of the deepest aspects of it quiet in public -- particularly her queerness, which, like much about her personal life, she considers a private matter (as is her right). But she also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made other people tick, and that dichotomy -- being shy and uneasy about feeling seen, but having a deep interest in other peoples' inner lives -- meant she used her powers of observation to make her songs feel deeply empathetic. This all gave her the kind of insight that manifested in a combination of emotional sincerity and sharp wit that often cut both ways. Combine that with a singing voice that could use its lower-register weight to convey both aching sorrow and arch humor to its fullest, and you have the kind of artist that could be a go-to archetype for fearless creative independence. Why she isn't more renowned as that archetype, you could probably guess; she set out to have a career on her own terms more than three decades before Moya Bailey even coined the term misogynoir. And while I'm loath to resort too often to the idea of Rate Your Music as Cultural Barometer, it still seems like her rep among that corner of the general music-geek populace is lukewarm at best; the most she can hope for from those users is the consensus that Show Some Emotion is (as of now) the 222nd best album of 1977.

But this was all information that I didn't have when I first heard her music. Literally everything I could comprehend about her life and career back then was bound entirely to the records my mom owned, so all I had was the music -- the words, the instrumentation, the performance -- and when that's all you have, often times you have to wind up forming your own narrative. And sometimes things get complicated when that narrative is tied to an album that you now consider instantly recognizable and memorable and permanently embedded in your formative personal canon, but is also an album that's generally treated like an afterthought in the greater critical scheme of things. It can create this odd feeling of simultaneously having a deep emotional connection to a record while also wondering if you don't entirely Get It at some fundamental level or another. I've made reference before to what could be called the Daft Punk Discovery Principle, based on Thomas Bangalter's statements about the heart of the album being based on the kind of childhood perspective that values curiosity over judgment. ("When you're a child you don't judge or analyze music. You just like it because you like it. You're not concerned with whether it's cool or not.") But at some point you have to wonder what you heard as a child that other people didn't.

And the Joan Armatrading I wound up attaching myself to was not the singer-songwriter phenom Joan Armatrading of 1976, or the Greatest Hits distillation that made her increasingly eclectic singles of the late '70s and early '80s seem like bulletproof classics. It was Joan Armatrading, New Wave Enigma. Even now, some four decades after I'd spend an hour or so on a mid '80s summer weekend puzzling over its lyric sheet and immersing myself in the sound of its 35 ½ minutes of synth-and-sax gloss, Walk Under Ladders strikes me as a deeply strange and affectingly ambitious record. It's too successful in its integrity to be a trend-chasing cash-in, too off-kilter to sound like a potential popular favorite, and too much of a detour from what made her famous to sound properly definitive. Its of-the-moment sound -- a wild yet logically progressive amalgam of synthpop, reggae, art rock, and R&B that sounded extremely 1981 but in a way that rendered genre segregation utterly pointless -- was hinted at the year before on Me Myself I. And while that's an excellent crossover-bid record in itself, Walk Under Ladders took it all to a level that seems startling. 

Some people pin this on Steve Lillywhite, the producer behind the boards on this album and its 1983 follow-up The Key. Armatrading initially envisioned Walk Under Ladders as a one-artist-does-it-all sort of thing a'la Prince's early records, but that didn't pan out and so the Psychedelic Furs / Peter Gabriel / XTC producer was brought in to oversee things with a bunch of far-flung guests and session players in tow. I'll single out one of them as the most notable: not long after he laced Foreigner's "Urgent" with an atmospheric glow, Thomas Dolby absolutely drenched Walk Under Ladders in some of the showiest, most outlandish synth sounds conceivable. And even after all the contemporaneous synth-heavy albums I've heard by The Cars and Gary Numan and New Order and Human League, there is still something otherworldly about Dolby's contributions that haunt me in their own unique way. The first thing we hear on the album is this riff on "I'm Lucky" that, while likely played on the near-ubiquitous Yamaha CS-80, still sounds utterly alien because of how it bends and melts around a melody that plays up that (now retro)futuristic sound's potential for graceful euphoria. (But while I'm at it, shouts out to Alchemist for finding just the right way to make its tone sound diabolical as fuck with his sample flip.) There are other highlights in that department -- the increasingly untethered melodic ascension that spars with the churning riffs on "When I Get it Right," the electronic chimes that punctuate the power-pop drive of "I Wanna Hold You," the gelatinous, almost surreal cartoon menace of the tone on "Eating the Bear" -- but when everything's stripped down to spacious minimalist atmospherics on closer "Only One," that's what really gets me; it provides chills and warmth at the same time.

There are plenty of other notable players here, too. XTC's Andy Partridge plays staccato quasi-ska guitar on "Eating the Bear" and acoustic on the devastating, Melissa Etheridge-beloved "The Weakness in Me." Sly and Robbie helm the rhythm section of "I Can't Lie to Myself," one of the best reggae songs ever recorded by any artist to not be primarily associated with reggae, while the 2Tone-adjacent uptempo skank of "Romancers" features Dick Cuthell and Rico Rodriguez, who were contributing to the Specials' horn section at the time. Hugh Burns shows up on a few tracks, still riding the momentum of his searing solo on Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" while dueting on electric with Joan's nimble acoustic on "I Wanna Hold You." And Tony Levin plays bass on most tracks, including the notorious Chapman Stick on "Eating the Bear"; a month after the release of Walk Under Ladders King Crimson released Discipline, which benefited significantly from Levin's innovations on tracks like "Elephant Talk." It's a pretty interesting phenomenon being able to revisit a childhood album intermittently over the years, making all these new connections in my head after learning who these artists were and what they actually contributed to outside this little self-contained work I'd lose myself in. And from my current perspective, it feels like Walk Under Ladders holds up as this busy intersection of everything exciting and open-ended happening in UK pop at the turn of the '80s, right up there with the idea-surplus mania of the Clash's Sandinista! -- only it gets its point across in ten tracks instead of 36.

But this is still a singer-songwriter album. For all the outside input, Armatrading is a presence that makes Walk Under Ladders feel like her own autonomous statement, an ensemble effort in process but an auteurist vision in end result. And a lot of that comes down to the relationship between her voice and her words, and how the former brings some personalized specificity to the general relatability of the latter. Her range is impressive throughout her career but it's in top form here. She sounds brightly carefree on "I'm Lucky," at least during the outset, but as it goes on even its tersely-worded verses are sung with this nuanced but gradually heightened sense of strength, like she's shifting from realizing she's fortunate to reveling in the possibilities of what that good fortune can get her. She's anxiously insistent on "When I Get it Right" in a way that makes it clear how a sense of tensely stifled embattled vulnerability can explode into a frustration that sounds perfectly justifiable. When that frustration is left to simmer at a slower and more contemplative pace, like on "I Can't Lie to Myself," the sharpness of her delivery makes the frankness of her tough-love declarations ("You know you're a beautiful person/But just now you bother me") cut deep. And when that vulnerability is open-hearted and reflective -- over the pain beneath the temptation to cheat on a lover on "The Weakness in Me," or the possibility of finding paradise with them instead on "Only One" -- it's with this rare mixture of intimacy and openness that belies her shy public demeanor. It's not unprecedented to hear a voice like Armatrading's in pop; as she emerged she notched a few comparisons to Odetta, whose folk background and weathered, rangy depth could also lend itself to crossover success outside that world. Armatrading just makes it sound like it's a natural thing, a versatility that takes all the compromise out of crossover itself.

One unexpected twist here is that my research and casual web-trawling led me to an impression that Walk Under Ladders might have gained a rep as something of a lost classic when I wasn't looking. It at least seems to be a more esteemed record than my earlier experiences with Christgau mehs and AllMusic shrugs might've hinted at when I first looked up the critical response decades ago. When NPR assembled their 2017 list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women, it was Walk Under Ladders that Laura Sydell picked out to represent Armatrading -- even if it was in the context of a "shocking omission" from the original roster. Its prominence in her discography is also given some respect by Rob Sheffield in this 2021 career-advocating profile for Rolling Stone. So maybe my hunch about this album's place in history is a little off. But maybe there's something a bit more complicated at work here, too. The vagaries of canonization and popularity and cult-favorite status can all feel arbitrary and confusing even at the best of times, and it shifts unpredictably in an internet media landscape where a 1% monoculture can drown out the dynamics of the countless other rediscoveries and reassessments happening beneath the trending-topic surface. I keep thinking about this album as one that should be more esteemed, some obscurity I latched onto as a fascinating curio when I was young, and yet it's not hard to find other people making a case for it and for Armatrading's career on the whole.

And in trying to find the missing part of this equation, I got to thinking about how people engage with music, the different levels they approach it on when they realize they like it. There's the initial casual enjoyment that a lot of people often don't feel compelled to (or need to) dig deeper than; it's good music that can bring up resonant personal associations but it might not ever have to go further than that at all. That's how I heard Walk Under Ladders as a kid at first, but when I went from being a grade schooler rifling through my parents' record collection to a music fanatic developing my own tastes, that brought this album to the next level, that of fascinated interest -- how'd she do that, what's this really mean, what are the influences, and so forth, all that stuff that winds up shaping critics because a lot of us just start from the point of being fans who want to figure out how the thing we're fans of actually works. And sometimes, in a non-inconsequential yet still fairly low percentage of the time we get into a record, we hit that third level of finding a deep relatability in the music itself and the person or people who bring it to life. It's not just a resonant personal association, it's an album that tells us something -- about ourselves, about the people we see or know, about the places we live in or the places that we see curious glimpses of -- that we feel deep inside. Real this music changed my life stuff, beyond the fannish cliche of it all into the actual truth of the matter.

Which I bring up to suggest that this is one of the things about Armatrading in general, and this big polygenre pop move in particular, that really sticks with me. Nearly every profile I've read of her, whether recent or decades old, makes note of the fact that she's defiantly intent on maintaining her own narrative -- that only she can define herself, that it's hard for other people (especially men) to convince her to conform to someone else's standard, that she's aware of her intersectional cultural identities and seems unashamed of them but also seems uncomfortable about being pigeonholed by them. And reflecting off that wound up leading me to wonder: what do people even picture when you conjure up the idea of a "Joan Armatrading fan"? Who is this music "supposed" to be for? A 40-something beardo who thinks her poppiest album is her best one and ranks it alongside such RIYL-defying company as Wipers' Youth of America and The Replacements' Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash and Van Halen's Fair Warning for my faves of '81 -- a year I don't even personally remember experiencing clearly?

The fact that I even feel compelled to ask this question seems ridiculous the more I think about it, because that sense of relatability and artistic appreciation can and often should exist outside the parameters of identity politics or as something tied into a direct cultural affinity. In terms of pure demographics literally the only major commonalities I have with Armatrading is that we both speak English and have some experience with growing up working class; in terms of race, gender, sexuality, generation, nationality, and religion we'd be filed in different boxes entirely. And so fucking what? Because here I was in the '80s not even ten years old yet, finding a depth and pull and fascination in this music that I keep coming back to even as I age into further knowledge of how it all came to be. And it's not the usual flashy exoticism of the pop-star world, either, though the production definitely plays with that kind of appeal. It's that it feels like it comes from someone whose talents and vision and good luck gave her an opportunity to be a big name, but nonetheless still seems more like a regular person who just happened to sell a lot of records and fill a lot of venues and reached a bunch of different kinds of people because she just hit on a lot of musical ideas that resonated in insightful, unpretentious ways.

And I think that's what Armatrading, as a musician, represents to me and a lot of others who appreciate her. It's the idea, so often taken for granted, that an artist can succeed by staying true to their own vision and existing outside everyone else's expectations, and still wind up transcending everything. Even as she came up through some very specific perspectives -- ones that are traditionally undervalued by mainstream culture even now, and were even more significantly dismissed during her career's run-up to this album -- she knew she wanted to take as many different routes through her music as possible. And that inevitably means she winds up representing her own self at the same time she allows that her self, as a musician, can go anywhere she wants. She got it right.