The South loves to make heroes and legends of its own kind, to spin the tales of rather ordinary people until they acquire a kind of mythic permanence. The Kentucky songwriter S.G. Goodman, though, requires no fabulists to be compelling. She is 33 and from a small Mississippi River town so emblematic of rural America its slumping population statistics betray a war of economic attrition. From a lineage of sharecroppers, she talks in interviews about cavorting in creeks and gigging for gar, then sings of her complicated love for the dollar-store economy and her adoration of Spanish moss sanctuaries. In a region where being gay can mark you for ostracization or damnation, coming out nearly killed her. “Space and Time,” the first song on her 2020 debut, even read like her farewell to the world. She sings not just of a progressive South but of shrugging off capitalism at large, of dismantling the systems that still make the place so difficult. It is apt that Kentucky novelist Silas House penned a recent magazine profile of Goodman; she knows the truth of her home but also eternally reimagines its future, epitomizing our shared New South dreams.
The self-produced Teeth Marks is a sharp and thoughtful distillation of these modern American small-town complexities. Religious hypocrisy, financial ruin, systemic addiction, ruinous love, devotion so intense it begins to burn like hatred: Goodman finds space for it all in these 11 tracks, which glide between breathtaking a cappella eulogies and dive-bar R&B, between gnarled rock and plaintive ballads. Goodman’s scenes are vivid and specific, like her nod to unswept floors or time marked by a procession of crinkled tin cans. Her conclusions, however, seem undecided and open, as if she holds too much hope for the characters and crises in her life to pass final judgment. Goodman takes care not to slip into diaristic voyeurism. She studies each stone carefully before she tosses it into the pond, watching the ripples scatter forever.
Much of Teeth Marks deals with complications of identity and existence—namely, the friction between your expectations for and the actuality of someone you love, like, or simply know. The broken waltz “Dead Soldiers” details a friend slowly losing a battle with alcoholism, steadily tumbling into a version of himself so damaged Goodman barely recognizes him. “Heart Swell” documents the disorienting effects of an unexpected breakup. “The cicada choir is my backing band,” she croons, sporting loneliness with a grudge, like wearing dirty laundry because it’s all that’s left.