‘One For Jackie’ Review: Rett Madison Turns Private Tragedy Into Universal Catharsis

Just as it flits between reality and fantasy, between the physical world and the spirit world, and between grief and hope, One For Jackie is, in the hands of Madison and a studio team that includes producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Chester (Jackson Browne, Blake Mills, Christina Aguilera), a shape-shifting album on which each song assumes its own distinct form.

On How It All Began, Madison introduces the story of her mother’s fall into addiction over gospel organ that hints at the singer’s roots in the church – a community she has since left, but not without taking her own deeply personal spirituality with her. Elsewhere, on St Luke’s, brooding piano, ominous clangs and haunting vocals soundtrack a what-if encounter with her mother’s abuser (“He’s named after a saint, but yet he pins the blame on a kid too young to know what to do”), while perhaps the album’s most modern touch – a sparse drum machine pattern and looping bassline that makes for an almost Gorillaz-like groove – is reserved for Lipstick, a song in which Madison marvels at an unexpected romance blossoming when she needed it most (“Two months after you had gone/I couldn’t believe that’s when I finally met someone”) while lamenting a lack of the same in Jacqueline’s life (“Now that I’m falling in love/I can only think of how you weren’t treated right”).

“I want these songs to find people who have been in this situation and need to be reminded that it’s not their fault”

While communing with her mother in song, Madison also sought another way of connecting, via a medium. What may have started as a frivolous endeavour (“Sat with a psychic/Just for fun,” she sings on Fortune Teller) came to have deeper repercussions, as explored in Mediums, Therapists, And Sheriffs, in which encounters with different sorts of authority figures lead Madison to the knowledge that her mother was wearing leopard print on the day she died. The revelation belatedly clarifies the material’s significance in an earlier song, Flea Market, while also enriching our understanding of an artist who is determined to reach through the scrim that separates the known from the unknown.

Like grief itself, One For Jackie is not linear; but after raking over circuitous emotional terrain, Madison has turned up a deeply personal work that has universal resonance. “I want these songs to find people who have been in this situation and need to be reminded that it’s not their fault, and it’s normal to have conflicting feelings,” she says of the album. “I was heartbroken, guilt-ridden, but I was also angry, and that rage comes through on this album, too.”

There is also love on One For Jackie. It runs like a thread throughout, binding Madison to her mother, to her partner and to the life she is living. It’s a bundle that cannot be easily unpacked – and nor should it. As Madison acknowledges in her songs, life is messy but it is precious. Light can shine unexpectedly in the darkness. Contradictions, no matter how extreme, can be held.

Madison has shouldered her burdens. That she has chosen to share them on an album such as this is a gift to be thankful for.

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