“It’s funny how one always wants to play their favorite records for friends, and they never listen properly, never understand them,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1943. Many of us have albums like that, orphaned ones we shyly push on others to little or no avail. We blink back tears while playing the tracks; they wish to flee the room.
Primary among these, for me, is Maggie & Terre Roche’s little-known 1975 album “Seductive Reasoning.” It appeared 50 years ago this month, which seems like an occasion to speak up about it. It’s a misfit of a record, and it fizzled commercially: People lined up not to buy copies.
“Seductive Reasoning” was such a non-hit that it drove Maggie and Terre, sisters from Park Ridge, N.J., out of the music business — at least until 1979, when they emerged with their younger sister, Suzzy, as the Roches and released their eponymously titled first LP to ecstatic reviews. That album, “The Roches,” deserves its reputation. If you don’t know “Hammond Song,” well, your homework, and a portable slice of bliss, awaits you.
Nothing the three Roche sisters did together, for me, tops the sparer and earthier and wilier (it’s a little stupid on purpose) pleasures of “Seductive Reasoning.” It’s been in the shadows for too long.
“Seductive Reasoning” is a young person’s record, a product of overlapping propinquities, made by a college dropout (Maggie) and a high school dropout (Terre) who possessed swooping blood harmonies, a novelistic deftness with language and a whole raft of intense perceptions and inchoate longings to draw upon.
That the record was made in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with members of those first-call session musicians known as the Swampers, and with Paul Simon, who’d met the sisters when they barged their way into his songwriting class at New York University, and with a cameo by the Oak Ridge Boys, only adds to this record’s peculiarities.
The sonic palette is in constant flux — swelling strings here, a big farting bass line there — in a frazzled manner that I find appealing and searching and true to its moment. Best of all was that all these musicians knew when to simply get out of the sisters’ way. This album’s acoustic songs and piano ballads are destroyers.
Maggie, who died in 2023, was the primary songwriter. Her unexpected rhymes (Jack and Jill and “contraceptive pill”; “clear to ya” and “cafeteria”) spilled out of her pockets like seeds. When she writes in one song that, for a young woman out there alone, “there ought to be something to fall back on,” you’re not surprised when the options are “like a knife, or a career.”
So many of the songs on “Seductive Reasoning” are about leaving home. “I come funny and dumb with spending money from Jersey,” the sisters sing on “The Mountain People,” rhyming dumb with “suckin’ on my thumb.” It becomes a song about heartbreak and missed connections. The narrator was accepted to a school in the mountains, but her secret shame was that “I failed the mountain people. / Surely I failed the mountain people.”
Innocence is bartered for experience in these songs; the playfulness is sometimes mock playfulness; there is a constant fine line between hilarity and pain. In the album’s rollicking opener, they sing:
Good men want a virgin
So don’t you give yourself too soon
‘Cept in an emergency
Like underneath the moon.
Maggie and Terre knew they were scrutinized. “You had one eye on my dungarees and another on my reviews,” they sing in “If You Empty Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change.” They refused to bend to a music world that wanted to get them out of their thrift store clothes and tease their hair. When no door was opened to them, they jumped out the window.
The albums’s quieter songs are the ones that pull the rug out from under you: “Down the Dream” (“George is colored and I’m white / and George could go for me”), “Jill of All Trades” (“there’s chances on the edge of town / Blowin’ by in eastbound cars”), and especially “West Virginia,” a piano ballad rendered triply moving by the fact that you can hear the piano’s pedals moving beneath the song, and because Terre, with her opaline voice, delivers one of the great, rising vocal performances of the decade — the sound of a blister breaking.
On the page, “West Virginia” reads like a language poem. It begins:
Nineteen
Charleston
Mescaline
He said he was a genius
B-plus average
In civil engineering
His rearing
Was Catholic
Political leanings
And a talent for stealing things.
The song gets darker than you can imagine.
“Seductive Reasoning” wasn’t completely ignored by the music press. In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave the record a B+ in a capsule review. But he added: “last time a women’s sensibility this assured, relaxed, and reflective made it to vinyl was Joy of Cooking.” If you know how much Christgau thought of the band Joy of Cooking, this is higher praise than it initially seemed.
In her book “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic,” Jessica Hopper asked, “When you are past that youthful period when your whole identity is tied up in a faith affirmed by music, when the mortal aspects of life start to catch up with you — how do you orient yourself?” It’s a sentence I’ve thought about a lot in terms of “Seductive Reasoning,” because it’s been with me for so long.
I first bought this melancholy and satirical album on vinyl 45 years ago, because of something I’d read. Forty years ago I replaced that with a cassette; 35 years ago I bought the compact disc; 25 years ago a friend illegally downloaded it for me from LimeWire; 15 years ago I began sending Spotify a check every month to assure that it was kept on tap and available to me in times of need, which is all the time.
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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