The self-produced Teeth Marks is a sharp and thoughtful distillation of these modern American small-town complexities. It is apt that Kentucky novelist Silas House penned a recent magazine profile of Goodman she knows the truth of her home but also eternally reimagines its future, epitomizing our shared New South dreams. She sings not just of a progressive South but of shrugging off capitalism at large, of dismantling the systems that still make the place so difficult.
“ Space and Time,” the first song on her 2020 debut, even read like her farewell to the world. In a region where being gay can mark you for ostracization or damnation, coming out nearly killed her. From a lineage of sharecroppers, she talks in interviews about cavorting in creeks and gigging for gar, then sings of her complicated love for the dollar-store economy and her adoration of Spanish moss sanctuaries. She is 33 and from a small Mississippi River town so emblematic of rural America its slumping population statistics betray a war of economic attrition. Goodman, though, requires no fabulists to be compelling. The South loves to make heroes and legends of its own kind, to spin the tales of rather ordinary people until they acquire a kind of mythic permanence.
