From the moment she wrote her first hit single with Bobby Braddock, “Fakin’ Love” by Karen Brooks and T.G. Shepherd, Matraca Berg was well on her way to a hugely successful songwriting career that saw her have hits recorded by Reba McEntire and cuts by Ray Price, Marie Osmond, Sweethearts of the Rodeo, Randy Travis and Michelle Wright before she signed her first record deal RCA Records as a 25/26 year old.  While success on the country charts as a singer would prove elusive through the 1990s, Matraca recorded three records in Lyin’ To The Moon, The Speed of Grace, and 1997’s artistic tour-de-force Sunday Morning To Saturday Night which was highlighted by the beautiful “Back When We Were Beautiful” and the CMA Awards performance of the same song.  From there to now, Matraca has been primarily a songwriter behind the scenes winning Best Country Song Grammy for Deana Carter’s hit “Strawberry Wine” along with the CMA Song of the Year.  Other hits like “Wrong Side of Memphis,” “Everybody Knows” and “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)” for Trisha Yearwood, “Hey Cinderella” for Suzy Bogguss, “Wild Angles” from Martina McBride and “You And Tequila,” the current radio single for Kenny Chesney.  This string of hits helped Matraca Berg join the Country Music Songwriter Hall of Fame as its youngest member and brings us to this album her first record in 15 years. 

Self-produced by Matraca Berg herself, The Dreaming Fields is a beautiful song cycle that finds Berg exploring the human condition open and honestly.  “If I Had Wings” finds Matraca Berg singing over a percussive low rumble and tremolo guitar-paced melody about a woman who decides to take her empty abusive relationship into her own hands.  This is a stark way to open an album and flies in the face of Nashville album making by starting with such a downer of a song, which is then juxtaposed right away with her own version of “You And Tequila,” a song that once appeared on an album from co-writer Deana Carter along with being a key track on Kenny Chesney’s Hemingway’s Whiskey. The song is beautiful in how it compares a relationship with Tequila and the havoc each can have on the narrator’s life. 

Matraca powerfully cuts through the pain of loss and loneliness on “Racing The Angels.” Co-written with Gretchen Peters and Suzy Bogguss, the song is about as hopeful as a song about loss can get. Meanwhile, “Silver and Glass” serves as a tragic story of a woman so beautiful that she could stop a train and how she puts all of her value into her appearance (“you put all of your hope into something so easily broken…silver and glass, but mirrors they shatter and crack, even for the fairest of ‘em all”).  It’s a reminder that girls shouldn’t base their worth on something so fleeting as the opinion of the public (which the mirror serves as a metaphor for).  “Clouds” is a fantastic song that equates depression to clouds and it finds Matraca pleading to her partner to allow the pain out so that the depression can go away.  Once recorded by Trisha Yearwood, the title track “The Dreaming Fields” serves as a beautiful eulogy to the death of the independent farms. 

“Oh Cumberland” is a tale about the power that the mighty river running through Nashville has on a travelin’ soul and how it keeps them grounded while “Your Husband’s Cheatin’ On Us” finds the ‘other woman’ plotting revenge with a filanderin’ man’s wife over the bad deed he’s done (cheating on both of ‘em).  It’s a smoky, bluesy little story song that gets better with each listen.  “Fall Again” finds the narrator hoping and praying to fall back in love with her husband next to her in the bed.  There are plenty of fantastic lines and the song just begs to be played on repeat over and over again. 

“South Of Heaven” is a song that would’ve been perfect for a memorial day soundtrack and it certainly would apply for Veterans Day too or for any gone too soon soul.  Suzy Bogguss and Gretchen Peters provide angelic harmony on the moody ballad while the album closer “A Cold, Rainy Morning In London In June” is a rumination about feeling lonely in a foreign country.  The cohesive eleven tracks that make up The Dreaming Fields leave you wanting more and while the record could certainly have used one obvious uptempo tune, this is an album that’s meant to be listened from track one to track eleven and it is most certainly one of 2011’s best records, in any genre.