People mean well. They offer thoughts and prayers, best wishes and Bible verses, but they don’t understand. Sometimes their good intentions end up as judgments.
This social consternation is at the heart of local singer-songwriter Annie Wells’ newest single, “Devil’s Gonna Get You,” released in March. The bluesy number was inspired, Wells writes in the song’s Bandcamp description, by “a dearly loved friend who said my family member suffering from illness would be healed if she rejected the devil.”
Wells sublimates that unpleasant experience into a clear musical villain: a “Holy Roller in blue jeans” who thinks he’s delivering divine help but winds up lonely in the wind.
Musically, she constructs this with the kind of strutting, confident piano progression she also displayed on previous single “True Blue Boy” as well as others from her newest LP, “Pictures of a Heart.” But piece by piece, Wells adds dimension.
Coy guitar lines from Phil Marshall. Otherworldly waves from Margaret Explosion and Wren Cove cellist Melissa Davies. And a tight, understated rhythm courtesy of bassist Ken Frank and drummer Roy Marshall.
“Devil’s Gonna Get You,” the sum of these parts, comes across as both uneasy — thanks to its subject matter — and completely sure-footed in its execution, a neat trick to pull off. Much credit goes to Wells, an evocative but never showy singer who sounds right at home on a track brushing up against coffeehouse folk, jazz and foundational blues.
Indeed, the song channels the long fascination of the blues with the devil, from Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” to the 1928 Bessie Smith song with which Wells’ composition nearly shares a name.
The difference here? Wells’ antagonist ends up being the devil you know.
