Rolling Country 2022

Notes on Morgan Wade's Reckless: Yes, that is the album title, above blonde hair floating in the light a little, suggestion of a halo, face playing peek-a-boo with fingers, not unlike jail bars, if those had tattoos and tiny marks that might add up to coded sentences--and there is a song of that title, obligingly enough, but if this is a country Lolita, as might be, she's far down the path, maybe the self-supporting-by-dishwashing phase (in the novel), while watching and waiting and listening and speaking to all the options, relationship-wise.
Getting "Reckless" again, is one of the things she considers, wishes for sometimes, as the music moves around her---alt rock as the younger sort of potentially tops-of-the-pops country, young enough to take the 90s and early 00s over older artists' fascination with Petty and F.Mac: its an extension and reinforcement of Wade's own electrical tuning systems, under all those tats, flexing, always ready to go, as far as she and the guy she's talking to or around will take things--yes, and frequently it's to the limit, one more time, as stimulating prospect, because usually they have a history, and she certainly does, with and without him, alluded to with a sense of wonder, like can she beleeeve she did and was all whut---at one point recalls, maybe from the night they met, "Ah spoke mah truth, and yew got so upset"(oh the voice keeps it country, like the weight of personal relationship history, one tight-jawed syllable measuring itself out at a time).
Welp--he['s gotta get over it if they do try again---may be the guy she's out on an actual date with, as the music sounds atypically sedate, dinner-y, in the opening track: she's on her best behavior, sweetly murmuring, while observing, describing, thinking, "Ah wish Ah's known you in your wilder days." Probably, undertones of voice and lyrics and accompiment soon suggest, she'd feel like they had more in common back then---but, having heard all the songs and coming back to this one, seems like nostalgia for what might have been, the yen for a safe yet hot fantasy, which is so Morgan now, ditto the way she leans into wondering what his secret is---gotta have one; he's so Normal he must be nuts too, maybe in a program like her---maybe she'll peel back a few layers--
Soon it's "Matches and Metaphors," down the line with this guy or another, a booty call: "It's raining at my house, is it raining at yores?" But then "To hell with metaphors," she requests the comfort of his body, wonders if it will help, thinks it might, mentions a letter he wrote her, starts writing out loud her response, her script for how it might all work out for them after all---then back to the body ask, that's what it all comes back to, 'til she finally starts over, like a recording replayed, low-key intense, not gonna stop (digital not tape).
Of the very solid and vibrant original ten set, number 9, "Northern Air," is just okay, in this context--could be a high point elsewhere---about somebody who's stuck down here, in sordid Southern boredom, while he's up there---but the closer, "Met You"--not "Meet You," o hail naw, gotta be a history---is that comparatively rare kind of sequel that improves: it's her GodFather 2
The Jan. 2022 Deluxe Edition does more of that, takes it all deeper and darker, on a longer, more exciting chain-chain-chain, getting wrapped around and stretched. It's not all together doomie, or not in a depresso sense---also, even visions of flight are never too florid, because she is wised up, she has been down this lane before, in her head and elsewhere. But even the mellowest, "Through Your Eyes," which is where she wishes she could see---said kid, age three, has said "I want to be like you," which doesn't spook her a bit (as it does me, knowing her now as I kinda do), but touches her and makes her even wonder "if I should pray to you," as she moves from physical grace of the child to possible spiritual grace, also conflating "innocence" with "wild thoughts."
Another one has has her on the road from Tombstone, "holdin' hands with the band, six feet under," and something about "like Johnny and June": dead and loving it? Anyway rolling along, at least until "When The Dirt" all settles---meanwhile, there's "The Night," when she's hoping "the pills will work better this time," like the doctor says he thinks---I usually draw back from this kind of song, but she draws me in---eventually, there's the sole cover, providing a second of relief--something from the outside world--but it's "We're caught in a trap/I can't walk out"---yet, as in EP's original, still kind of a sense, in the verses, of feeling around, talking lower, see it feels like this, don't it, is it possible they could, like, work it or something out after all, one more shot---all surging along towards something, of course--so Morgan.

under all those tats: can't unsee the videos, where she looks concerned, careful, with vines snakes skank jailhouse roadmaps crawling out of the fabrics, arms sometimes seeming to pulse with power and infection. But that's her truth, and I may just have been not around young people in too long (covid alibi in a not very vaxxed red state).

New Willie, some new originals, covers aren't really oldies either, far as I know---track list, credits incl. here, also an advance track:
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/willie-nelson-to-release-new-original-album-a-beautiful-time/
Release date April 29, his 89th bday.

New Cactus Blossoms is pleasant. They seem to be trying to move further away from the Everly Brothers pastiche but the result is they are sounding a lot like later-period Calexico. Which I guess is fine?

Rodney Crowell, on FB talking about that Willie single:

It was nearly thirty-five years ago that my band and I performed at a Minneapolis rock club called the Cabooze. After the show, I chanced upon a young woman with whom I fell instantly in love. (I mean that sincerely.) We spoke briefly and I invited her on the bus where I learned that she lived somewhere up on the iron range, made jewelry and ran a small catering business. Although, at the time, I was happily married to a well known singer/songwriter, I could clearly imagine spending the rest of my life with this person. But alas the roadies finished packing and it was time to say goodbye. The encounter lasted no more than thirty minutes, but I sensed the experience would last forever . . . or at least until I made it into a song. Even after Claudia Church became my life’s partner, I continued to tinker with the notion that the girl from the iron range deserved a song. Over the years I conjured the title and a couple of verse ideas, but never fully committed to the job of bringing them to life. And then, a couple of years back, Chris Stapleton dropped by the house to see if we could write a song together. He listened patiently as I explained how I’d always wanted to write this one particular song. When I finished telling him the story, he summed the whole thing up in these few words: “so it’s all about thirty minutes thirty years ago.” After that, we had I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die finished in less than an hour. No doubt the song was waiting for Chris to show up. And, of course, for Willie Nelson to sing it.

That is so Rodney, thanks---several more of his songs that I hope Willie gets around to, old and new.

New notes for soon-forthcoming imaginary country ballot & comments, to be blogged (most of it on RC 2021):

The perfect capper, nightcapper, to Joshua Ray Walker’s See You Next Time is its hello-goodbye title, before and after another loop, another spin, in his beeyoutiful music machine—celebrating, while light and bright enough to leave excess me-discover-beer yeeeha self-congratulation in the dust—as for instance “I Feel Sexy After Dark” exchanges and slides through highest frequencies’ goosebump skins of voice x instruments, among many other close encounters, well-timed, even or especially when making close skid mark calls on and in the honky tonk, also closed circuit eeevents on screen, which will dissolve for a while when it should, the better to savor more nocturnal air and midnight electric suns, also sons and daughters, waving—but it’s not all fun and games, though perspective on and refreshed enjoyment of such seems to have something to do with “Flash Paper,” which came from a cigar box left to him by his late father, with items of personal significance to them both, mostly paper, also a flash drive: Walker has since said that he’s still coming to understand the song and its contents, so that’s part of the spin and loop as well, the after-dark brightness that already seemed almost mystical? Like we’re going by the Liminal Lounge a few times—was the impression before I read his bio w comments on all this: turns about to be last installment of a trilogy, following Wish You Were Here and Glad You Made It: all three titles addressed in part to his Dad, maybe? As well as the rest of us, seems like. (His comments here: http://www.joshuaraywalker.com/bio)

10 songs, 33 minutes, and that's all he needs:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lhyY4SX9Sw4QRk-paHHqeQT9h8ww3XPtg

More picks from 2021, blog-bound:

Alan Jackson’s mild-mannered, measured vocals are especially appealing in contrast-combo with novelty songs, as I consider the masterfully melancholy, meta-appeal to trad country (please come home, darlin’) title opener of Where Have You Gone, and the boot-scootin', equally historical rallying cry, “Andy on the TeeVee, lovin’ on Aint Bee”--- “Back” also has prayer, prom queens, ice cream, and, I think, blue jeans in there, but also, though, as a listener, I don’t believe he’s ever imbibed anything stronger than a wine cooler, his meta-drinking tropes understand well enough, so the silver plattered “I can be your whiskey” ( but one of several discreetly confident suggestions in “I Can Be The That Something”) is startling as well; dang, he’s always got the cred. Ditto chiaroscuro x firm beat of econo-delivered “Ah don’t wanta know/What’s in your head,” before she goes, just apply lipstick to mirror, leave it “Written in Red.” He got The Bluegrass Album out of his system, except not quite: still (sparingly now) applies just the right tropes, a held note here, rope bridge of plot turn there, a touch of darkness, to his idea of well-preserved mainstream country, as does Rhonda Vincent on Music Is What I See (though she also ends w with a couple of big bg per se tracks). Even one of the wedding songs to his daughter is arresting in a good way, with fresh, non-soppy, concise phrases and sentiments (The opener of his Happy Valentine's Day EP I thought at first was yet another wedding song to one of his several daughters, yeesh—but no, it’s just presumptuous “gallantry” as come on—another one opens with mention of a young-sounding gal, among others included in his self-congratulatory, broad-minded attractions to otherwise utterly standard-sounding, video-suitable, country broads. But some other tracks are cool/acceptable).
Where Have You Been is long, with a few duds, like self-sentimental “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” aggh puke, so with not quite the tighter appeal ofAngels and Alcohol, which I Top Tenned in my 2015 country round-up, and may well be best place to start with him, though I’m still no AJ expert:
Alan Jackson, Angels and Alcohol: Starts with less than half-hearted best wishes/empathy for one leaving the nest---"Everybody's gotta live a little, before they die," and he can barely get the words out---then wheels around into a hearty chorus of reassurance, 'bout how you can always come home to big ol' generic slabs of bacon and gravy or whutever.
However, the overall theme of this set, convincingly expressed (tastefully, incl. with tasty details) is a healthy hats-off-and-on to the Uncertainty Principle and our need for same. Incl. in the title track, when it comes to "sooner or later you got to face what's hidin' in your mind", and the randy honky tonk encounters of "You Never Know," fender bender cum two daiquiri hookups and all. He and hitchhiking Jack Kerouac salute each other (along the alternative-lifestyles interstate of dreams, but still). They aren't too far apart in some ways:
stay-at-home AJ finally gets a bellyful of his wife with the flattening iron and the curlers and that little dog and "that damn perfume"--she's sick of his shit too, so good riddance, he'll just keep partying with "Jim and Jack and Hank"--which rhymes with "So take your black Mercedes, full of stuff for ladies, to me you're just a total blank"---damn, that's pretty hardcore, especially for Mr. Mellow Melancholy Blond Mustache. Spoiler: he doesn't cave! Thought surely he would, what with the cartoon-country-Stones tone of the thing, and he does eventually have misgivings, by the end is invoking more and more of his male musical inspirations, "cleanin' out my closet."
And this right after a pensive sensitive cocktail reverie, but he's not just flipping scripts, because he's still competing with, while trying to imagine, "The One You're Waiting On": must be an awesome guy, considering this awesome woman, who keeps drinking and waving guys away, checking her phone...wtf, darlin…(quietly, intensely focused, so considerate a bit creepy)
He also celebrates "Flaws": "Everybody's got 'em/The ones you came with and you caused/Scars and tattoos gone rotten...all the little things that make her unique...the pieces of the puzzle that is me."
I'm hardly an Alan Jackson expert, but, while this set doesn't have
any tracks with the downer power of "Monday Morning Church" or "The Little Man," it sort of doesn't need them: they've been done, and this hasn't, not by him, not this consistently (as far as I know).

The first Sierra Ferrell thumbnail I saw, I thought this was going to be some Days n Daze folk-punk thing but damn she's got a great voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDhbp7YWMg

that face tat threw ya

95% accurate, the other 5% was that she was dressed like a 1930s hobo in the first video of hers I watched.

This has that jazzy country feel too, from RC 2021:
Melissa Carper's Daddy's Country Gold: title in part re her sonic sense of humor about her retrophilia,I take it---music folds and flexes bits of western swing, freight train boogie, bluesy inflections, in what is, yes, still trad country gold: tight, but didn't know there were drums 'til saw credits--steel and pedal steel are most prominent, answered by fiddle---no banjo, no uke, no horns (though accordion and guitar can fill in for those, passing through), occasional piano and/or organ, moving right along, following the boss's cute-enough, slightly worn little voice---some Texas dust in the pipes, Appalachian hardness at ends of lines, sometimes: it's a tad more simple-subtle than Sierra Ferrell, but one for her fans (and she contributes harmonies).

This album has gotten stuck in my head---another from the blog round-up:

Connie Smith’s The Cry of The Heart is named for her definition of and specialty in country music, the kind of relentlessly cyclical treks- on-gilded-splinters-of-the-heart trad, sometimes funereal, that I tend to resist, as seen below in comments on Lucinda’s urn ov same (wine-and-lipstick-stained butts incl., OK). Nevertheless, she picks songs about being knowing, struggling with being stuck inside a mobile, turning like a vane of dislocation in layers of strangely familiar, the stranger for it, weather: apologizes to her heart for being about to take another chance on prospect they both know better than; later, “I just don’t believe me any more—I wouldn’t trust my own eyes, if I saw him walking through the door,” and gets to overview, “There are three s-i-i-i-des, to ev-ery sto-ry: his side, her side, and the truth”: tricky, could get to truthie, jesting Pilate, sense of futility, reckless, even: interesting cusp—also, that chorus reminds me of “Love Is Strange,” including a possible cross-influence with proto-reggae, and my other favorites here also have that out of the box, 60s crossover appeal that her accompanists, mainly Mary Stuart & his Superlatives, are so good at—-another starts with an acoustic country suggestion of “Pinball Wizard”—also “A-l-l-l, The Time” could be Orbison singing Jimmy Webb or himself, likewise omg yall fave is “Here Comes My Baby Back Again,” with a kettledrum hook, even, also her voice, now reputedly shy of a few top notes of her 60s-70s commercial heyday, especially mighty and booming from the gut here, w/o overdoing it. This song rec also to Everly Bros., and eerie observational “Jesus Take A Hold” for Mavis (who will be doing some shows w Bonnie Raitt this summer btw). But some of the other, more generically constrained trad country ballads, are ballast, for sure, keeping whole thing bubbling just under my Top Ten. So far!

Here Comes My Baby Back Again (Official Music Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KFyguNe4Lc

full album playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZNM_kt9jwY

And speaking of Lucinda:
Lucinda Williams, Lu’s Jukebox Volume 4: Funny How Time Slips Away: A Night of 60s Country Classics: more like Classicks. Rips the thrift store brand substitute for a Band-Aid off, opening with a dingy little dirge, “Apartment #9”(“where the sun never shines”), a dump for the dumped to sit waiting and not waiting, hoping against hope, perversely enough, for you to come back, So don’t suggest subletting, or bloodletting: the austere pleasures of this track, complete with Lu’s generic not-Kleenex tones and her equally familiar quaver, which here is somehow as solid as her fire escape, if she has one, which I doubt, also the futile commiseration of the steel guitar and discreet timekeeping of the stick and struck thing–brave, dented, stalwart little tin soldiers of the heart, as Lu and crew are on so many of these tracks, somehow make this one better than it deserves to be: that’s art!
So is the immediate follow-up with another dirge, pretty much: this version of “Together Again” is the saddest reunion song…ever—”and nothing else matters” sounds like too much does, it really does. Ah, but then, “Make The World Go Away” slips into a dreamy dirge, a shuffle really, like so much else here, like Fats Domino might be playing, swaying not too far away—Jukebox Lu’s from Louisiana, come to think of it, like her other personae—sweeping up and around on the title phrase, a handful of stardust, wistful come-hither is her breadcrumb trail. I will try to make the world go away, yes Ma’am. “Night Life” bounces the shuffle and stroll a little, with its well-aimed, switchy tail, but then “Long Black Limousine, “ bringing you back to her, only dead, from some old wreck out on the highway, is the first dirge too far—whiplash back to “Fist City,” finally an uptempo bullseye yowl, could be on her Stones volume (which zig-zag cuts the roadmap, and a lovely “Moonlight Mile” of it too).
“I Want To Go With You” is a turgid dirge travesty rip of “Make The World Go Away”’s pattern, at least; c’mon! “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” just as boring, but “Gentle On My Mind” perks her up, even has her rushing the beat, while sounding worn—it’s a road song testimonial, soldier of love now bumping her comandeered bike wheels off road. “The End of the World” back on foot, shuffling, now almost majestically, and I’d never liked this song at all. “I’m Movin’ On” back on board, “Funny How Time Slips Away” the poignant, perfectly balanced unexpected encounter riposte, of mixed emotions and free-enough associations, but not too much of either, or of time. “Take Time For The Tears” (“Let them fall where they may”) could be good closing advice, but slogs way on here. So, although she’s one of my all-time favorites, this set isn’t quite top tier (I don’t always have much of a reason or motivation enough to work it up, but with her I do [compliment]).

full album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrR6s3S-L48

I don’t always have much of a reason or motivation enough to work *such a long non-Top-Ten report* up, that is.

Didn't know about her songwriting, did semi-recall that she and then-Bruce co-starred in a musical, Little Abner (he: Abner, she: Daisy Mae), Birmingham, https://www.al.com/entertainment/2015/04/bruce_jenner_on_stage_before_t.html (this from 2015, so no mention of Caitlyn). My friend's sister was in it, remembers Linda as gregarious, him as shy, but "stuck his head in the door, 'Hey, I'm Bruce.' ")

Linda also co-subject of this TV movie, which I thought was pretty good:
Elvis and the Beauty Queen

Memphis beauty queen Linda Thompson (Stephanie Zimbalist) recalls her five-year romance with Elvis Presley (Don Johnson).
Initial release: March 1, 1981
Director: Gus Trikonis
Starring: Don Johnson; Stephanie Zimbalist; Ann Dusenberry; Rick Lenz
Music by: Allyn Ferguson
Distributed by: NBC, Sony Pictures Television

Speaking of director Gus Trikois, He began his career as an actor and dancer, notably appearing in the hugely successful 1961 film West Side Story as Indio, one of the "Sharks",[1] as well as dancing with Debbie Reynolds and Grover Dale to the frantic "He's My Friend" in 1964's The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
...Trikonis was married to actress Goldie Hawn from 1969 to 1976; he was her first husband and they have the same birthday. His sister is Gina Trikonis, an actress who also appeared in West Side Story, as Graziella, Riff's girlfriend.[3] Way to go, Gus! (Hope he wasn't too bad, Goldie.)

Sorry, that was meant for ILE thread re marriages of directors and actors!

So here's what would have been my Nashville Scene ballot, expanded, as always
(posted w comments here, though lots are from prev and current RC, also some artist threads and Country Funk thread---it's called "Changed The Lox," cos so much Lucinda, incl. her Pettys cover set: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2022/03/changed-lox-country-etc-lists-comments.html

Thanxx In Front To Edd Hurt For Turning Me On To Jon Byrd, Paul Niehaus, and Loney Hutchins

Also To Ilxor.com's Rolling Country 2021 Riders Who Issued American Aquarium etc. etc. etc. ect. Advisories

(Most of these are on Bandcamp and/or YouTube)

My Strictly Personal Subjective As Hell But Whut Isn't Top Ten Country Albums Of 2021

American Aquarium, Slappers, Bangers & Certified Twangers, Volume One

Eric Church, Soul

Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall, The Marfa Tapes

Jon Byrd (feat. Paul Niehaus), Me and Paul EP

Joshua Ray Walker, See You Next Time

Kalie Shorr, Open Book Unabridged (Dec. 4, 2020)

Lainey Wilson, Sayin' What I'm Thinkin'

Mickey Guyton, Remember Her Name

Melissa Carper, Daddy's Country Gold

Morgan Wade, Reckless Deluxe Edition (Jan. 28, 2022)

Vincent Neil Emerson, s/t

More Good 'Uns

Alan Jackson, Where Have You Gone

Connie Smith, The Cry of the Heart

Flatlanders, Treasure of Love

Loretta Lynn, Still Woman Enough

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 4: Funny How Time Slips Away: A Night of 60's Country Classics

Natalie Hemby, Pins and Needles

Rhonda Vincent, Music is What I See

Sierra Ferrell, Long Time Coming

Willie Nelson, The Willie Nelson Family

For Further Study (everything here, but especially this)

Pony Bradshaw, Calico Jim

Fave New (To Me) Country Faces of 2021

Charlie Marie, Ramble On

Emily Scott Robinson, American Siren

Tom Williams, Glasshouse Children

Fave Country *Reissues/**Prev. Unreleased

**Billy Joe Shaver & Kinky Friedman, Live From Down Under

*Johnny Cash—Forever Words (Expanded Edition) (Various Artists)

*Jon Byrd, Byrd's Auto Parts

**Loney Hutchins,Buried Loot: Demos From the House of Cash & "Outlaw" Era '73-'78

Fave Country/Related Seasonal

Lori McKenna, Christmas Is Right Here EP

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol 5: Have Yourself A Rockin' Little Christmas With Lucinda Williams

Pistol Annies, Hell of a Holiday

Country Seasonal Semi-Honorable Mention

Alan Jackson, Happy Valentine's Day EP

Country Semi-Honorable Probationary Mention

Morgan Wallen, Dangerous

Country About Half Good (60-45%)

Carly Pearce, 29—-Written in Stone

Country Headscratcher

Steve Earle & the Dukes, JT

Fave Countryoid, Americana, Roots, Related

Allison Russell, Outside Child

Ashley Monroe, Rosegold

Brandi Carlile, In These Silent Days

Chrissie Hynde, Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan

James McMurtry, The Horses and The Hounds

Jason Isbell & 400 Unit: Georgia Blue

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 2: Southern Soul: From Memphis To Muscle Shoals

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 3: Bob's Back Pages: A Night of Bob Dylan Songs

Peter Stampfel, Peter Stampfel's 20th Century

Robert Plant & Allison Krauss, Raise the Roof

Rosali, No Medium

Tom Jones, Surrounded By Time (Hourglass Edition)

Valerie June,The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers

Willie Nelson, That's Life

Related Hon. Mention

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Barn

Rodney Crowell, Triage

More Keepers From Lu's Jukebox

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol 1: Runnin' Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty Lu's Jukebox Vol. 6: You Are Cordially Invited...A Tribute To The Rolling Stones

Related Less Than Half Good

Barry Gibb & Friends, Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers' Songbook Vol. 1 (Keepers: BG with: Brandi Carlile, "Run To Me," Sheryl Crow, "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart," Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, "Butterfly," maybe more)

Related Blast From The Future Is Here

Contract Group, Varnished Suffrages (March 5 2022)

Fave Related Top *Reissues/**Previously Unreleased

**Alex Chilton & Hi Rhythm Section, Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street

*Country Funk Volume 3 1975-1982 (Various Artists)

*Dusty Springfield, The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971

**Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, Both Ways (The Great Lost 2017 Double-Album)

**Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Way Down In The Rust Bucket

dammit--that should be The *Contact* Group, Edd's very fun songdog troupe, which you can hear here: https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/releases

Did not know most of this:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/05/entertainment/lgbtq-country-music-orville-peck-patrick-haggerty-lavender-cec/index.html

New album Palomino out April 29
My new album Palomino takes you on a journey through songs. I hope y’all are ready to travel with us wandering spirits and meet some cool characters with great stories. – Miranda
"Strange" out now
https://ml.lnk.to/palomino

Good on Bobbie: knew about her husband's band, which incl. her & Wille, but not the aftermath, ongoing consequences; also, I've got her rollin' Audiobiography (Willie and Johnny Bush show up some), and one of the duet sets w W, the remarkable December Day, but will have to check these earlier albums, also still need the joint memoir:https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1086000679/bobbie-nelson-a-country-music-pioneer-and-willie-nelsons-sister-dies-at-age-91

Hank: I’m Gonna Sing: The Mother’s Best Gospel Radio Recordings contains rare performances of 40 gospel songs culled from these radio shows; many of which he never officially recorded.
Looks good: https://annecarlini.com/ex_cd.php?id=4187

https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2022/03/11/the-ernest-tubb-record-shop-a-downtown-nashville-landmark-is-closing-its-doors-after-71-years/

is there a catchall country thread? this is such a jam but from Cauthen's 2019 album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm5UZ0Ov9O0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ihKjq2iM5w like this tune from the new Hailey Whitters album, Raised

i don't know why this bothers me so much but it does, i hate how she undermines the rhyme in the chorus by stressing the first syllable instead of the second in "hometown."

new maren morris is about a billion times better than her last

i continue to be surprised that we don't have a thread for her

make one. i will stan

There's been a lot about her on previous Rolling Countrys, haven't heard the new album yet.
is there a catchall country thread?
O hell yes corrs, you've come to the right place.

Under xpost New (To Me) Country Faces on my imaginary 2021 Scene ballot upthread, I should have listed *Sam* Williams, not Tom (was I thinking of Thomas Lainer Williams AKA Tennessee? Or just a brainfart, more likely). And his mother just died---she was in the video for one of the fine tracks on his Glasshouse Children, where maybe he was discreetly alluding to their mutual(ly agreed on?) need for rehab. He's talented and insightful/talks a good game, reminding me of early Justin Townes Earle; here's hoping he does last as least as long.

catching up w email---excerpts from Maren press release:
Maren will perform on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” tonight, with appearances on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Howard Stern Show” to follow on March 28.
...Humble Quest features the much-lauded “Nervous,” “Background Music” and “Circles Around This Town,” which broke Amazon Music’s record for most streams for a country song debut by a female artist and is currently Top 20 and climbing at country airplay charts.
Humble Quest is receiving widespread critical acclaim…stupid blurbs follow, then:
Maren began writing the songs on Humble Quest in the beginning of the pandemic as a series of major life changes unfolded—new motherhood, an upended career, the death of beloved friend and collaborator Michael Busbee and more, further compounded by lockdown. She felt control over life quickly slipping until she had an epiphany—she was never in control in the first place. This inspired her to reckon with the concept of humility as she thought about how the goal of appearing humble puts artists, especially women, in a box with unrealistic demands. Humble Quest documents Maren’s journey to redefining humility on her own terms as a grounded state of understanding one’s own truth rather than the capacity to appear authentic to others.
Produced by frequent collaborator Greg Kurstin (Adele, Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters) and written alongside her husband Ryan Hurd, Julia Michaels, Jimmy Robbins, Natalie Hemby, Laura Veltz and Jon Green on Busbee’s piano, Humble Quest is Maren’s most genuine collection of songs, tracing her journey to embrace the imperfections in her life through snapshots of her rises and falls, overshares, lullabies, wine-soaked conversations with one old friend and a final goodbye to another one.
MAREN MORRIS LIVE doesn't look write in paste, see https://www.marenmorris.com/#tour Would most like to see one of those Midwestern shows w Hemby.

I look forward to listening to it, but man is Humble Quest a bad album title.

New Wilder Blue is great

March 28, 2022—10x GRAMMY-nominee Brandy Clark will embark on her international “The Art of the Storyteller Tour” this summer with headline dates in the U.S., Canada and Europe. See below for complete itinerary. Pre-sale tickets for the upcoming dates go on-sale this Tuesday, March 29 at 10:00am local time. Details for how to access the pre-sale can be found at www.brandyclarkmusic.com/tour. Tickets will go on-sale to the general public this Thursday, March 31 (UK/Europe) and Friday, April 1 (US/CAN).
Clark will also perform as part of “CMT Crossroads: LeAnn Rimes & Friends,” airing April 14 at 8:00pm ET/7:00pmCT in celebration of Rimes’ 25th career anniversary. In addition to Clark and Rimes, the all-female event lineup will also feature Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce and Mickey Guyton performing songs from throughout Rimes’ career.
The upcoming performances add to a landmark year for Clark, who is nominated for two awards at the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards: Song of the Year (“A Beautiful Noise” performed by Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile) and Best American Roots Performance (“Same Devil” featuring Carlile). The live awards ceremony will be broadcast Sunday, April 3 at 8:00pm ET/7:00pm CT on CBS.

“THE ART OF THE STORYTELLER TOUR”
June 17—Montgomery, NY—City Winery
June 18—Holyoke, MA—Race Street Live
June 20—Homer, NY—Center for the Arts Homer
June 21—Toronto, ON—Great Hall
June 23—Ann Arbor, MI—The Ark
June 24—Gary, IN—Hard Rock Casino
June 25—Minneapolis, MN—Dakota Jazz Club
August 28—Lutterworth, UK—The Long Road Festival
August 29—Bristol, UK—St. George’s
August 31—London, UK—Indigo at the O2
September 1—Manchester, UK—RNCM Concert Hall
September 3—Dublin, Ireland—Whelan’s
September 4—Glasgow, UK—Old Fruitmarket
September 6—Sunderland, UK—The Fire Station
September 8—Amsterdam, Netherlands—Melkweg Upstairs
September 9—Hamburg, Germany—Nochtwache
September 10—Copenhagen, Denmark—Vega Small Hall
September 12—Oslo, Norway—Parkteatret
September 13—Stockholm, Sweden—Bryggarsalen
www.brandyclarkmusic.com
For more information, please contact
asha.goodman at sacksco.com
catherine.snead at sackso.com
carla at sacksco.com

will definitely catch that, thanks!

Out May 6th on Paradise of Bachelors: the reissues of Terry Allen and The Panhandle Mystery Band's early 80s albums, Smokin' the Dummy and Bloodlines.

Smokin' The Dummy
Terry Allen, in a 1981 letter to H.C. Westermann

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title:

MY KID BUKKA GOT A CHARLIE MCCARTHY DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR WHEN HE MADE UP HIS MIND HE WAS GOING TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST. HE IMMEDIATELY PAINTED IT UP TO LOOK LIKE A VAMPIRE ... AND I JUST AS IMMEDIATELY PUT ON A PAIR OF JO HARVEY'S SUNGLASSES AND THE SLEAZIEST JACKET I COULD FIND (western slime) AND SAT FOR FAMILY PHOTOS ... ANYWAY, I BLEW RINGS OF SMOKE ON THE DUMMY AND BUKKA SAID I WAS SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

I GUESS IT RANG SOME KIND OF DEMENTED BELL …

Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.”

Recorded at Caldwell Studios in Allen’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas during the summer of 1980, exactly two years after his masterpiece Lubbock (on everything) (released in 1979) manifested in the same jury-rigged room, the feral follow-up is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor. It’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. This was by design. The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory.

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers—co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie—and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume—he was deaf in one ear from a near-fatal car accident—were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.)

Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted obsessions—especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch—and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace. In an echo of “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” which opens Lubbock (on everything), “The Heart of California (for Lowell George),” another driving song and the first track of Dummy, is dedicated to Terry’s recently departed friend, the leader of Little Feat, who covered Allen’s “New Delhi Freight Train” before he died.

As on Lubbock, many other songs are older, culled from a decade and a half of songbooks, demos, and worktapes. Allen wrote “Red Bird,” a deceptively simple ditty that combines two longstanding fascinations—New Orleans and bird symbolism—as an art student in L.A. in 1964 and performed it on Shindig! the following year. He considered it his first “real” song worth keeping, and it rates as the personal favorite of many of his oldest friends, including Bruce Nauman. “Cocaine Cowboy,” composed in 1968, lent its title to a 1974 play by Allen’s colleague George Lewis, starring Terry’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey and featuring his own dada-inspired costume designs, including a giant Gogolesque ambulatory nose wearing a cowboy hat. “Roll Truck Roll” and “The Night Cafe,” a diptych of automotive dramas, with counterpoint perspectives on the labor cultures of trucking and food service, both date to 1969. (During this era, Allen was a great enthusiast and denizen of diners, particularly Denny’s, and Jo Harvey wrote and performed a play called Counter Angel, based on her oral histories with truckstop waitresses.) The glowering, bruised 1975 rodeo song “Helena Montana” was inspired by his friend Dave Hickey’s fine rodeo number “Calgary Snow” and Terry’s impending participation in The Great American Rodeo exhibition at Forth Worth Art Museum the following year.

The other four songs, like the aforementioned “The Heart of California,” were of more recent vintage. One of only two covers in Allen’s catalog (the other is David Byrne’s “Buck Naked”), “Whatever Happened to Jesus (and Maybeline)?” interpolates Chuck Berry’s automotive lament within a skewed gospel song of Allen’s own devising, a characteristic imbrication of sacred and profane gestures. Allen completed the furiously frayed album closer “The Lubbock Tornado (I don’t know),” about the devastating 1970 tornado (still a painful local memory ten years later), in a hot Texas Tech practice room during the recording sessions. It takes the American vernacular tradition of disaster ballads into sinister and hilarious spaces, implicating governmental, religious, and alien conspiracies—including the Lubbock Lights—as possible meteorological motivations. In 1980, as in 2022, we can rationalize any calamity with conspiracy theories.

In other words, this is deathless American music. Play it again.

Terry Allen and The Panhandle Mystery Band

Bloodlines

Paradise of Bachelors

6 May 2022

I’ve never heard such a consistent assortment of unpopular styles.

– Dave Hickey, to Terry Allen, regarding his album Bloodlines, 1983

Since 1970, when they met in Allen’s studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York-centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves—brothers in blood—and Hickey’s wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery of Bloodlines, the album Terry released in June of that year. Dave stood among the chorus of singers on the reprise of the title track that ends the record. Terry reprised the album cover concept, a detail of a painting of Jesus carrying a lamb that he found in the gutter outside a Lubbock botánica and manipulated, for Dave’s 1989 collection of youthful short stories, Prior Convictions—but with Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 bloody-bathtub painting “The Death of Marat” as a replacement savior. Hickey wrote the tour de force catalog essay for Allen’s 1983 solo exhibition Rooms and Stories, which featured, two months before the release of Bloodlines, the premiere of his theater piece Bleeder. Finally, there’s Hickey’s sardonic quip about the dim commercial prospects of Bloodlines. Buckets of blood and ink were spilled.

Hickey’s commercial doubts notwithstanding, critical recognition was not in short demand. In a 1984 review of Bloodlines, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen “one of the most compelling American songwriters working today … making the most unique art-pop of our time,” elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allen’s records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following—they weren’t easy to find in those days, so sometimes they existed only as a words-in-mouth—that began among fellow artists and within the rarefied air of the art world, and then, following the 1979 release of Lubbock (on everything), circulated farther afield, among musicians and fans of “outlaw country,” a loose (in all ways) subgenre and scene named in part for Hickey’s 1974 essay “In Defense of the Telecaster Cowboy Outlaws.” Allen’s early audiences included an outsized contingent of potters and bikers, due, respectively, to enthusiastic ceramicist friends and an unexpected endorsement of Smokin the Dummy (1980) in Easyriders magazine. The Rooms and Stories opening reception at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art was packed with leather-clad bikers.

On his manifold fourth album, Allen contemplates kinship—the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society—with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines, which compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical, is itself kin to its predecessor Smokin the Dummy (chronologically and in terms of its Panhandle Mystery Band personnel and its wide-ranging subjects) and to its descendant, 1993’s The Silent Majority (Terry Allen’s Greatest Missed Hits) (which similarly anthologizes stray and orphan songs). Recorded piecemeal at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, in sessions spanning August 1982 through January 1983, Terry self-released it, like all his previous records, on his own Fate Records imprint. Despite his frustration with the protracted timeline and some anxiety about the correspondingly higher budget, the production on Bloodlines—courtesy, once again, of master guitarist Lloyd Maines—is slicker, cleaner, and more dynamic than prior efforts, and it reached a broader audience than ever before. UK label Making Waves reissued it in 1985, facilitating semi-reliable European distribution for the first time as well as a 1986 UK tour, on which the great BJ Cole filled in for Lloyd on pedal steel.

Allen wrote two songs as themes for plays: the Pasadena idyll “Oh What a Dangerous Life” for Joan Hotchkiss’s 1982 play Bissie at the Baths and the gospel-coughing hymn “Hally Lou” for his wife and collaborator Jo Harvey Allen’s 1983 performance piece of the same name, in which she plays the titular revival preacher. Bloodlines is the first of several albums to revisit selections from Terry’s 1975 debut Juarez with full-band arrangements: a comic take on “Cantina Carlotta” that inhabits the tone-deaf tourist’s perspective of the hapless narrator, and a terrifying road-rage, burnt-rubber rendition of “There Oughta Be a Law About Sunny Southern California” featuring Jesse Taylor, in his final Panhandle Mystery Band recording, on “asphalt vendetta guitar” (Maines Brothers guitarist Cary Banks deftly handles lead guitar elsewhere). The irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely), in which Jesus steals the narrator’s car and beer for a joyride to the hereafter, remains a fan favorite. Terry wrote the final verses in a Texas Tech practice room the day they recorded it. “Manhattan Bluebird,” a surprisingly earnest (and unexpectedly moving) lament for the cultural insularity and provincialism of a New Yorker deluded by her own alleged cosmopolitanism, boasts one of Allen’s most beautiful minor-key melodies. On tour in Belfast in 1996, Allen’s tourmates feared “Ourland,” a thinly veiled satire of the IRA’s hypocrisy amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland, would incite a riot and urged him not to play it. Of course, he didn’t listen.

Lloyd Maines wept when Terry first played him the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape, which sounds as ancient and eternal as a psalm. But that didn’t stop Lloyd from complaining about having too large a chorus on the album-closing extended version (he’s a notorious stickler for tuning and pitch). Twenty-five friends and family members packed the studio that day, including Dave Hickey, Joe and Sharon Ely, and Stubb of BBQ fame. “Bloodlines II” represents the recorded debuts of the Allens’ sons Bukka and Bale as well as Lloyd’s eight-year-old daughter Natalie Maines, later of the (Dixie) Chicks—a true testament to the power of blood. In 1998 Lucinda Williams covered it in a spookily spare version on Allen’s soundtrack for Jane Anderson’s film Baby Dance, starring Laura Dern and Stockard Channing. As the credits roll, the river runs through the mountains, under the moonlight. Hear the song.

Terry reprised the album cover concept, a detail of a painting of Jesus carrying a lamb that he found in the gutter outside a Lubbock botánica and manipulated, for Dave’s 1989 collection of youthful short stories, Prior Convictions—but with Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 bloody-bathtub painting “The Death of Marat” as a replacement savior.

Two advance singles ("The Heart of California (for Lowell George)" and "Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy") are out now on all DSPs and no additional singles will be released ahead of May 6th.

"The Heart of California (for Lowell George)" https://lnk.to/PoB65

http://lnk.to/PoB65

"Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy" https://lnk.to/PoB66

http://lnk.to/PoB66

Sorry, thought that would show the videos---follow these links for those, and for the audio streams on various services.

i meant to post this a week or two ago — Maren Morris covered Fiona Apple’s Criminal in her NYC showcase that aired on Amazon Prime, Twitch etc on March 26

this clip isnt the best quality but god she killed it

@MarenMorris covering #FionaApple Criminal is something I didn’t realize I needed in my life. What a cover! pic.twitter.com/FiuwfjXKW7

— Scott Rosen (@DaScottyMac) March 27, 2022

Thanks VG! Maybe Fiona will return the compliment.

Country-adjacent

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 14, 2022

AMERICANA RAILROAD, A COLLECTION OF SONGS CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF TRAINS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE VIA RENEW/BMG ON JUNE 17.

The album features tracks from John Fogerty, Dave Alvin, Rocky Burnette, Dom Flemons, Stephen McCarthy, Carla Olson and more.

Album promo video featuring multiple tracks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7GEf2fmg1Y

LOS ANGELES, CA -- The idea of a new album of traditional and contemporary railroad songs had been percolating for a decade or so before recording began for Americana Railroad. After talking about artists and songs and label partner possibilities every few years producers Carla Olson and Saul Davis decided to just begin and see what was possible.

The first artist asked was Stephen McCarthy (Dream Syndicate, Jayhawks, Long Ryders) to see if he would be interested in such a project, followed by Robert Rex Waller Jr (I See Hawks In L.A.), John York (Byrds), Dave Alvin, Rocky Burnette, Gary Myrick and James Intveld. Rock’n’roll, Rockabilly, Americana ~ the genre or category is for the listener to decide. The goal was simple – railroad songs performed by great expressive artists.

After recording the nine tracks that Carla produced, the thought turned to locating a record company partner.

Executive David Hirshland noted, “When Saul brought this to me for possible release by Renew / BMG it instantly made sense. There is such a deep history of trains in the American musical canon I felt that we should expand the project and get more artists on board. Every artist we subsequently approached was eager to join in.”

Since the overwhelming number of train songs requires hard choices, this anthology’s selections attempt to cover significant historical ground. Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight” Train is covered lovingly by A.J .Haynes in a style evocative of the ‘50’s in which it was written. Dom Flemons takes the true story of ex-slave and Pullman porter Nat Love (aka Deadwood Dick) and spins it into a narrative of spiritual survival and ultimately triumph via original track “Steel Pony Blues.” Steve Goodman’s epic “City of New Orleans,” a portrait of the disintegration of an entire way of life, is given added poignancy by John Fogerty’s vocals and Micky Raphael’s harmonica. Peter Case’s treatment of “This Train” echoes Woody Guthrie and the world of depression era America. Americana Railroad is thus meant to entertain and educate albeit subtly.


Prior to Americana Railroad’s June 17, 2022 CD and digital release, it was issued as a limited edition vinyl piece for Record Store Day in November 2021.

Producer/performer Carla Olson observed that “Growing up in Austin, Texas during the 1950s the fascination with trains was the stuff childhood dreams were made of. Walking home from school the temptation to put your ear to the track to hear if the train was close was a daily routine. We lived five blocks from the railway and heard the whistle of the trains well into the night. For some the call was a way to escape small town blues, for others thoughts of exotic destinations lured many to hop a freight and disappear over the horizon. The Americana Railroad album is a collection of both history and metaphor for your listening and thought provoking pleasure.”

Full track listing with songwriter credit notated in parenthesis and performers and special guests:

Here Comes That Train Again ~ (Stephen McCarthy)
Stephen McCarthy & Carla Olson

The Conductor Wore Black ~ (Chip Kinman, Tony Kinman)
Robert Rex Waller Jr with Chip Kinman on guitar

Mystery Train ~ (Herman Parker, Sam C. Philips) ~
Rocky Burnette with Barry Goldberg on piano

This Train ~ (traditional, arranged by Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
Peter Case

City Of New Orleans ~ (Steve Goodman) ~
John Fogerty with Mickey Raphael on harmonica

Marrakesh Express ~ (Graham Nash)
Dustbowl Revival

Train Leaves Here This Morning ~ (Gene Clark, Bernie Leadon)
Kai Clark with Byron Berline on fiddle

Train Kept A-Rollin’ ~ (Tiny Bradshaw, Howie Kay,
Sydney Nathan)
Gary Myrick

Southwest Chief ~ (Dave Alvin)
Dave Alvin


500 Miles ~ (Hedy West)
Alice Howe

People Get Ready ~ (Curtis Mayfield)
Deborah Poppink

Steel Pony Blues ~ (Dom Flemons)
Dom Flemons

Runaway Train ~ (John Stewart)
John York

Waiting For A Train ~ (Jimmie Rodgers)
Paul Burch & Fats Kaplin

Freight Train ~ (Elizabeth Cotton)
AJ Haynes of Seratones

Whiskey Train ~ (Keith Reid, Robin Trower)
Carla Olson & Brian Ray

Mystery Train ~ (Herman Parker, Sam C. Phillips)
James Intveld with Barry Goldberg on Hammond B3 organ

Midnight Rail ~ (Steve Young)
Robert Rex Waller Jr with Todd Wolfe on guitars

I Remember The Railroad ~ (Gene Clark)
Stephen McCarthy & Carla Olson

Chr*s Richards in Washington Post re new Jason Aldean: he kinda likes the album, while disliking Aldean.

Some excerpts--

This has to be the most handsome music of Aldean’s career. Hunched over some neon-drenched bar, the singer narrates a variety of pressing-the-bruise ballads with a lucidity that makes his previous signatures — the rock-tinted bluster of “Hicktown,” the halfhearted quasi-rapping on “Dirt Road Anthem” — feel teeny-tiny in the rearview. As a pair, “Macon” and “Georgia” don’t feel leaden and ponderous like a “mature” album might. They’re focused. So much so, that a rare glimpse of the outside world comes halfway through “Macon” during “Story for Another Glass,” when Aldean says he’s willing to make chitchat about “politics, religion — man, anything, I don’t care,” so long as he doesn’t have to talk about “why I’m here and why she ain’t.”
....There’s a tail-chasing poetry to someone who speaks out against mask mandates donating millions to a hospital — and that dissonance feels even sharper in the cool shadow of Aldean’s anodyne new music, let alone the slick pleasantries of country music writ large. Why does modern country music, a musical community that purportedly celebrates everyday American lives, not do more to protect those lives?....

He’s shrewd to let his wife, a tenacious Instagram influencer, do the heaviest lifting. Among the various T-shirts Brittany has peddled on Instagram, one reads, “THIS IS OUR F-ING COUNTRY.” Are we supposed to believe that these “Let’s go Brandon”-types mean what they’re saying when they’re too afraid to use the actual words? And who’s the “our” in that sentence? Even if the shirt weren’t a racist dog whistle, it still caters to the ugly idea that America belongs to some, not all.

And it clashes with Aldean’s tidy musical self-image, too. In a news release hyping the arrival of “Macon,” Aldean gave thanks for the musical influence of his multicultural hometown: “Growing up in an environment that was a crossroads between country music, Southern rock, blues and R&B, it was just natural to blend different sounds in my own way.” So inclusion is good for the Aldean family when they’re turning it into royalty money, but not so good when they’re trying to make merch money....

This music doesn’t necessarily sound hypocritical, though. It appears to have no ideology, no agenda, ...In his heartsick confusion, the song’s narrator is deflecting responsibility for what might happen next. I can’t decide whether it’s funny or sad how credible Aldean sounds singing these words.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/04/22/jason-aldean-album-review/

Enjoying the new Charley Crockett covers album

saw Charley recently and could not believe how many people were there, how far in advance it sold out, and how many people were online desperately seeking tickets.

my takeaway was that he is somehow a couple years away from playing theaters/amphitheaters?!

dude's traveling on a couple of sweet tour buses, too.

He is apparently going to be featured on CBS Saturday morning show tomorrow - pretty prominent national coverage! Funny that it's on the occasion of a covers album though.

Here’s that Charley Crockett profile - lots of details about his life I didn’t know. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/charley-crocketts-hard-times-inspire-soulful-genre-defying-music/

And I 'ppreciate that he doesn't blame other people more than himself--it's much less about brooding on a barstool than keep a-goin', one hand on the wheel, the other holding a drink (phone on in holder, so can record life's demos on the fly).

From Big Ears Festival newsletter:

Rarely do we find Big Ears Festival artists featured in year-end lists for best country albums. Adeem the Artist is an exception, landing on many end-of-year lists including Billboard Magazine staff picks for 2022 for their new record "White Trash Revelry." As a resident of Knoxville, Adeem's singular talent captured our attention a while back and now the whole world is catching on. A couple of weeks ago, Grayson Currin penned a wonderful profile for the New York Times.

xp+xxp, great posts! It's sprawl is a big part of its appeal for me. Unruly in the best sense of the word. Take its 12 best tracks, and it may not make my top ten of the year. As it stands, it'll definitely rank.

Wilson's 2021 album is one of the decade's best.

Who Wilson? Lainey Wilson? Or someone else I'm overlooking?

Lainey's 2021 album was def. in my Top Ten, as I think I listed and described way upthread. still gotta check this year's follow-up.
Also need to find my copy of this 2012 Top Ten pick, which got its Tenth Anniversary reissue this fall:

James Hand's Mighty Lonesome Man tracks the fine print white line of life's little ups and downs with mighty fine timing--unafraid to venture beyond deft wordplay into details that could easily keep him orbiting in mental and emotional rituals eternally--but 12 items, 34 minutes, as Windows Media Player sums up, hand him off, pass him along in the alone-together jukebox of honky tonk pop (where he can be alone-together with Billy Joe Shaver, for instance). Good in the background or foreground; I'm tempted to say he'll be there when you get there--he's a stand-up guy--but whatcha say James? "Let's do it now, before they use a plow, 'cause then I won't be no earthly good to you."

Oh yeah: came out Oct. 14, up to 15 tracks now, and he's also on this Johnny Cash trib, with Austin Lucas, Chuck D feat. Bob Log III, Left Lane Cruiser, Charlie Parr, and a bunch of people I never heard of, which isn't unusual for tribs:
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/johnny-cash-tribute-james-hand-reissue-coming-from-hillgrass-bluebilly/

Another one that works in the foreground and background (somewhut simultaneously, since headphones suddenly expired and I'm listening on tiny laptop speakers), is the new Lainey, whose voice thrives on rockin'-country/not country-rock sound designs, which also inform well-paced ballads, poignant enough despite titles like "Weak End"(with "leak in" and "bleed in" enhancing been-there tone), "You And Me and Jesus," and even "Heart Like a Truck."

Yeah, Lainey.

the new Lainey, whose voice thrives

Pony Bradshaw has an album coming out 1/27/23, will tour---more info, links here:
https://mailchi.mp/eca127076fe9/new-album-north-georgia-rounder-15596832?e=57613df00d
What I said last year, on the first annual not-ballot (since Himes fucked up)

For Further Study (everything here, but especially this)

Pony Bradshaw, Calico Jim: "I'm a time-traveling bush in a barrel of poo"? He could be singing that, in this context, but he doesn't sound worried about it, maybe because he's still traveling; he does mention "wrecked in a tireless life" a couple of times soon after, but doesn't say who's wrecked, though maybe he means it in a vehicular, not narcotic sense; one is likely as the other here, but he always sounds lucid, in a usually murmury way, but also like a more dynamic Jackson Browne, usually with toe-tapping, fingerpicking melodies (while insisting that the counterpoint under those "has to breathe": not hearing any in the usual sense, think he's thinking about a stubborn way of life, counterclockwise even to itself at times, it seems). Voice and arrangements can rise, grow drums, hard chords; steel and/or slide answers the call for a "Sawtooth Jerico." The people in these songs of shamelessly flamboyant Southern Gothic environments, seeing and raising expected themes and terms, try not to fall off of or slide down "Dope Mountain" 'til they want to, and it's a real place, with stolen copper wire stashed in the old mine, finally good for something again, and lots of vines and lines and lives to get tangled.

Spirituality is another common interest. A hillbilly preacher sucks poison from the ankle of the young widow, as their faces turn different colors—he's a snakehandler, and apparently prepared to do that in certain cases, although seems like it defeats the point in church? But they're on a date,, and I guess she just stepped where she shouldn't have been stepping (further study needed; all this precarious detail makes me want to be careful too).

Things get ecumenical in "Guru," where we start out bonded "in the bowels of a coma." Must be good stuff, also leaving room for (true-to-life)'billy self-awareness: "Stretch out your vowels, son, and show your pedigree." But soon enough, maybe by the next course, "We got high as Heaven, tweaked on God and crystal meth," oh yeth. Also mellow moments of romance, out under the North Georgia stars; "I ain't no shaman, " but bring it on babe. Hmm. So many lines, images rippling by, it seems impossible to bring up a satisfyingly representative dipper, so far.

I expect us to get burnt out on the road. I even welcome it. The edge is where we find truth. I always seem to be looking for a human/mankind truth more than a personal truth. Personal truths are shaped by our own ego, our own wants and needs, and I just don’t find myself that interesting or trustworthy. I hope to see y’all out on the road next year. We’ll be carving out these songlines across the country, singing our world into existence.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-country-americana-albums-2022-1234648516/kane-brown-different-man-1234648559/ A fairly wide-ranging round-up, and some of these I agree with, some I really really don't, several that I haven't yet heard seem implausible, based on previous offerings, but several more are intriguingly described, will check.

A few more appealing possibilities I hadn't heard of, w reminders of others, and some I have heard: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1134907922/the-best-roots-music-of-2022

One of the Stone picks, Paul Cauthen's Coming Down Country. does have the "funk 'n' twang" arrangements, as promised, but these usually seem earthbound, keeping Cauthen's wobbly Waylonisms on a short leash, though he manages to sound out of breath anyway. 10 songs in 30 minutes usually seems like a good idea, though here it may be that the tracks aren't given enough time/pressure to develop--either that or they're mercifully brief. However, "Til The Day I Die" works as what I think of as International Country, with *kind of* a Romance Language 50s-60s phrasing brushing by, as written, but the short leash keeps it from being lavishly oversold, and Cauthen is poised here, in an unpretentious way---ditto on "Roll on By," with Elton-McCartney piano hooks, and "Country Coming Down" relaxes the Waylonism into warm, sing-along descending melody. But usually, he's fronting. "Country as Fuck" seems to work alright, though, wobbles in the trailer park-associated imagistic entrophy and all (he sounds old or worn here,but still got tattoos and whiskers by cracky.)

Have not heard the Crockett album at 2 on the RS list. Any good?

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/the-best-mainstream-country-albums-of-2022/

Have not heard the Crockett album at 2 on the RS list. Any good?

― Indexed, Wednesday, December 21, 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, it's good. Given how prolific he is I have other albums by him that I like a lot more, though it might just be that I heard them first and the novelty is beginning to wear off. I don't think the actual quality has dropped off at all.

Some of these lists are the EOY content I was most looking forward to. But they also are coming at a point where my ears might be a little too burned out on binging other lists to give any of it a fair shake.

xpost The Charley is very good in its way but yeah, I feel more detached from this particular set than I want to be, so far (will listen more). Variations on, maybe scenes from the fantasy life of someone who would kinda like to be The Red-Headed Stranger, but mainly he's thinking about heading to/through Texas (he's from Waco, but passing through Atlanta etc.?). with this Pioneer Days/rocking horse Western cadence (at one point singing about "Cowboy Candy"), and I like the way his gruff voice rolls around in his head, not that tight dry Texas thing, and sometimes he goes sideways into a 60s-type Black jazz-blues-folk groove like Oscar Brown Jr. meets terse Ramsey Lewis and makes it fit thematically---but the revenge-ish themey-ness is very persistent and something I have limited interest in to start with.

Although the protagonist's limited enthusiasm is entertaining and credible (in a mostly conceptual, limited way): sounds like he knows he reallly isn't gonna get any satisfaction from this relationship, even if he goes through with his plan of sorts

Well I scanned through the Rolling Stone and NPR lists and the one that's really jumped out at me is Anna Tivel, Outsiders, totally up my alley. She's got a lot of albums--this looks to be her fifth or sixth--but I've never heard of her before. Really enjoying it.

She is, indeed, great, but is best known in the Northwest, for sure.

Her significant other (unless things have changed) is Jeffrey Martin, who is also a terrific folk singer based in Portland. This is my favorite record of his, and the first track is (imo) a stunner: https://jeffreymartinportland.bandcamp.com/album/one-go-around

Listening to the Adeem record. Can't believe "Books & Records" isn't a Lori McKenna tune.

that is a terrific record ... good the first time, and growing on me, too.

Yeah, I wanna check Tivel too, thanks for the encouragememt!
Good point about McKenna, wonder if she's heard Akeem? The word is spreading among Akeem-inclined listeners, for sure.
Reminds me:the McKennaesque combo of kitchen sink realism x dynamics has been growing on me every time I listen to the Kaitlin Butts EP.
(Warning! Do not do this on a Windows 7 Dell laptop---go straight to the library and TURN IT UP on a Dell Windows 10 desktop. On the former, her voice sounds little and thin and crowded by the band.)

Properly heard (via new $30.00 Koss over-ear cans), she has no prob finding room, even when in the nasty, roiling, rippling regular guitar and steel guitar hallways of "Jackson." The band even saves the one substandard script, the title song, which is as static as the life it describes. The backing drone and guitar break of "She's Using Again" have a narcotic trace, and Butts esp. scores w mention of "getting straight," getting normie functional enough to do whatever you gotta do, esp. re: scoring again, and again. This not so much scolding or even complaining, just once again observing (to someone who really isn't listening) how you're doing this again: the observer, who seems to have a close connection (now changed) to the user, has to some extent become part of the routine, the normalization.
Which goes well with "Blood"'s "You're in my veins, " as the cyclic music rises, like xpost "So This is Christmas" ("And what have you done"), yes, and "Stewball" before it. This is the one where I also started hearing her as filling the Iris DeMent gap---suffering a little by comparison, since she doesn't have DeMent's somewhat impulsive way with phrasing, like she's thinking about driving the County Bookmobile somewhere way off---but Iris ain't here, so I'll take it, and would anyway.

Nevertheless, also can't help noticing, from the first minute of the first listen, that Ingrid Andress sounds like nobody I can think of but herself, while leaping from peak to peak on Good Person (she's suddenly struck by that phrase, even wheels around to ask somebody what that's like, and did they ever do anything bad [sounds like she's wondering if you can do that and what is it if you can also still be good, as considered by yourself and others: she does give you room and inclination to think about stuff like that, with breadcrumbs in the whirlwind).

Also bounces phrases off intractable and/or impassive love-hate objects (and even ones that ask wtf: well, since you've asked, she'll come out of her shell)(for instance busting a steady for cheating on her with her younger self), also bouncing them off intractability itself: "My parents have lived in the same house for almost 40 years now, and the only time they were ever on the same page, it was in their high school yearbook." Ha, good one, next (what are they gonna say to that? "No!" "I tried!" "Duh!" Anything?)

But the real test is, will the country pop sonic revelry (sorry, Akeem) turn to mush when she starts being breadcrumbed back to the new love experience? No. Although I won't say just how that goes (Merry Whatever, Happy New Year, and good luck to all concerned, as always).

This is the one where I also started hearing her as filling the Iris DeMent gap---suffering a little by comparison, since she doesn't have DeMent's somewhat impulsive way with phrasing, like she's thinking about driving the County Bookmobile somewhere way off---but Iris ain't here, so I'll take it, and would anyway.

Well I'll be..

Wow, yall right about Anna Tivel, damn. People at a crossroads, living there, wherever they go, incl. back to bed. Despite some small electric appliances with the finger-picking, sounds less like Americana per se than Oregon country: the rain, the city, timberland, desert, roads, schoolbook images of the Trail not too far away. Wondering if some songs will seem too similar, but so far I notice that each one has its own details, as written, performed (incl. by uncredited players), recorded. Bandcamp has the lyrics, which aren't strictly necessary--what a sound---but good to get more detail right away:
https://annativel.bandcamp.com/album/outsiders

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/zach-bryan-drops-live-album-titled-all-my-homies-hate-ticketmaster-while-vowing-to-find-ticketing-work-around-for-2023-tour/ar-AA15EJDi

No Dep Readers Poll:
https://www.nodepression.com/no-depression-readers-50-favorite-roots-music-album-of-2022/ 50! That's a lotta unpaid work.

Their Writers Poll:
https://www.nodepression.com/critics-poll-nd-writers-favorite-roots-music-albums-of-2022?utm_source=No+Depression+Newsletter&utm_campaign=212c25f0a4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_12_27_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_659325596f-212c25f0a4-226384157&mc_cid=212c25f0a4&mc_eid=b850f832a1

Hot on the heels of our annual Readers Poll, we checked in with No Depression’s staff and contributors to get their takes on the best roots music albums released in 2022.

As usually happens, there’s only a little overlap between the two polls, but the good news is everybody’s right, and everybody wins.

Put cursor over title, see vid:
https://folkalley.com/top-25-favorites-of-2022-listener-poll-results/

Heard Anna Tivel's "Heroes" on the Saving Country Music SOTY playlist -- truly excellent, and am excited to dig into the album.

Have spent more time with Adeem -- can't shake this feeling that a few of his tunes are straight Lori McKenna knock offs.