Alt-country barnburner

Kristi Guillory is known in southwest Louisiana as a precocious Cajun-French musician. She’s got formidable academic credentials and fronts Bonsoir, Catin, the leading female Cajun band to emerge in the past decade. She’s been writing Cajun-French tunes since childhood, and some are already becoming part of the traditional Cajun-French repertoire.

So when she releases her first solo album, you might expect a few of her favorite Cajun tunes, some original Cajun numbers and maybe a couple of honky-tonk chestnuts thrown in. Guess again. Broken Glass comes tearing out of the amplifiers riding an insistent snare-drum beat and alt-country guitar, powering through half a dozen of Guillory’s finely carved tracks.

While she forged a career playing Cajun music, Guillory never stopped writing what she calls her “American” songs—folk and country tunes written in English. Even though she formed a Cajun band in high school—and in 1995, at only 17, was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Cajun French Music Association—when she left the Cajun scene to study at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, she also began playing her “American” songs on the local coffeehouse circuit.

Marriage, motherhood and an academic career were soon followed by a longing to return to music, first with the Lafayette Rhythm Devils and then Bonsoir, Catin. But it was only with great reluctance that Guillory debuted her “American” songs. “There was definitely some insecurity there,” she admits.

Guillory needn’t have worried. The material’s debut at Jazz Fest this year proved her band’s ability to reproduce the rough-edged, sidewinder rock of Broken Glass. And with finely honed examinations of life’s more vexing experiences, all fiercely rendered from a female point of view, every original song on Broken Glass rings true.

Take “Jodi the Driller,” about the dangers of working the Gulf Coast oil rigs. Guillory’s father and two older brothers have all made livings in the oilfield, as has her geologist husband. “I remember lying awake nights wondering if Mike was, you know, going to make it home or not the next day,” Guillory confesses. Her skilled hands, unvarnished voice and vivid imagination have turned all the troubling experiences she writes about into carefully selected shards, some with razor-sharp edges, that nonetheless shine bright as gold in the light of day.