Anytime Anywhere

"I'm an older woman now," announces veteran singer/songwriter Tret Fure at the outset on the title song of her 2005 CD, Anytime Anywhere. The tune is a statement of purpose as well as an optimistic love song about the continuance of a relationship that "only gets better/And it only gets smarter/It's sweet and sexy/It's softer and harder." And so the primary themes are set for the album, on which a mature artist considers love and aging. All is not sweetness and light, by any means, not in the world in general and not even inside the singer's own psyche. "I've got a mean streak," she admits in the beginning of "Let the Goodness In," which is a self-advice song: in addition to letting the goodness in, she wants to "let the devil out." This is not so easy in people's personal lives, as she describes in "End of Glory," a story-song about a man named Curtis who died — "They said it was pneumonia/But I think it was the blues" — after failing to recognize the signs that "his wife of over 15 years" was about to leave him. And it isn't easy in the world of social concerns ("Eyes of God") where, "There are solutions clear and possible," Fure says, "But politics decide." "All Things Come Apart" is a reflection on the crash of the space shuttle Columbia which uses that tragedy to ask a more general question, "Why do all things come apart?" It's a question any mature artist, more concerned with preserving existing love than finding new love, more worried about the approach of death than delighting in the wonder of youth, is likely to ponder. Fure does so as she travels across the landscape — like most professional musicians, she clearly is in transit most of the time, and the songs on Anytime Anywhere are full of the conveyances of movement. When the singer isn't on a bus or a train ("When the Wind Blows"), she's on a plane ("Grace"), driving ("Drivin'," "Grace," "Home to You"), or merely on foot ("Further," "Let the Goodness In"). (No wonder a spaceship that disintegrated in midair is a potent symbol for her!) But her constant journeying gives her a perspective that those who stay in one place might not have; she sees the world going by and changing, and resolves to maintain her love and, as the album's closing song put it, "Spread It Around." That tune has a Cajun flavor, and elsewhere Fure, an accomplished guitarist, finds attractive folk-rock textures to support her conversational alto in these literate songs, which should be welcomed by her existing following and discovered beyond it by anyone who appreciates thoughtful singer/songwriters.