Pam Ross’s “Lost in Heaven,” out September 11th, opens with a shout that isn’t really about volume at all — “SINGING LOUD, TURNING UP THE VOLUME” — and you understand right away that this is a song about permission, about a woman deciding that the night belongs to her before anyone else gets to say otherwise. It’s a country song, or it’s dressed like one, faded jeans and a full moon and pine trees standing in for whatever discretion used to mean in these songs, but underneath the fiddle-ready surface there’s something older and stranger going on, the way there always is when a singer starts talking about heaven and means something closer to the body.
That’s the trick of the title, and it’s not a small one. “Lost in Heaven” could be a hymn’s title, could be stitched onto a church fan next to a picture of clasped hands, and Ross knows it. She takes that vocabulary — angels, prayers, mercy, the whole apparatus of Sunday morning — and walks it out behind the building, into the dark where “no one’s around so no one will know.” “Good Lord, have mercy” isn’t blasphemy here, it’s confession dressed as celebration, the oldest American trick: you sing the sin in the language of the sermon, and the two rub against each other until you can’t tell if you’re being saved or ruined, and it turns out that’s the same feeling.
What she’s really singing about is a threshold — that’s the pines, that’s the moonlight, that’s “this night is open.” Not open like a door, open like a question nobody’s required to answer by daylight. And that’s where “Lost in Heaven” earns its title rather than just wearing it: heaven, in this song, isn’t an afterlife, it’s an after-hours. It’s temporary. It’s the specific hour before Sunday morning shows up and puts your clothes back on you. “When Sunday morning sees you lying next to me” — that line does more work than anything else on the record, because it admits the whole thing has a shelf life, that grace here is Saturday-night grace, borrowed, and due back.
There’s a lineage for this — Dolly knew it, Lucinda Williams built a whole career on it, the gospel churches down every dirt road these singers grew up two pews from — the idea that desire and devotion use the same throat, the same breath, sometimes the same three chords. Ross doesn’t reinvent that lineage. She doesn’t need to. She just steps into it, plainly, unashamedly, “angels are singing right on cue and blushing from the view,” which is either the corniest line on the record or the most honest one, and maybe both, because that’s usually where the truth in a song like this lives — not above embarrassment but right through the middle of it.
“Lost in Heaven” won’t change anybody’s life. It doesn’t try to. But for three and a half minutes it makes the case that a faded pair of jeans and a patch of pine-shadowed grass are as close to transcendence as most of us are going to get, and that on the right night, in the right arms, that’s not a consolation prize. That’s the whole promise.
–Marc Greyson
