Month: November 2025

marcus king band – ‘darling blue’

as i have probably mentioned before, my process for vetting new music is thus: once i have found something i think i may like and have burned it to my collection, i will listen to it all the way through at least once, usually in my drive to and from work. one round trip usually takes care of the length of most new releases these days. if it intrigues me (or if i am too lazy to find something else), i usually give most a second chance. i then start to ponder whether this is something i want to write about and share. i would say less than 20% ever make it to a full post.

but every once in a while there will be a new offering that i just find damn near impossible to get out of the rotation and out of my head.

this is one of them.

so if you are a regular reader of mine then we likely move in the same musical circles and i feel confident that it may have the same effect on you. just get it.

now, a fair warning is due. if you are familiar with marcus, then you are probably thinking this will be a blues guitar dominated collection, with meaty guitar licks throughout. but you really don’t get that here.

what you do get is a tremendous variety of genres and vocal styles, and some really catchy lyrics and harmonies. all fourteen songs are completely different. i can’t say i have a favorite, but i can tell you that there isn’t one that i can point to and say maybe that should have been left off.

he has a few friends help out, including jamey johnson, kaitlin butts, billy strings and noah cyrus.

for a little background, he has conquered some demons that had threatened his life and career, and there are numerous references to that throughout. he has also found a new true love and several songs seem to be inspired by that. ‘darling blue’ refers to the blue ridge mountains where he is from, and so that is also a common theme.

i have added a few sample videos below, just to give you a flavor of the variety.

this next one reminds me a bit of jason isbell.

mrs. redeyegin also loves this album, and we both like the motown sounding ‘carolina honey’. that video is well done but maybe not suitable for a family audience. just sayin’.

‘deliver me from nowhere’ – warren zanes

this is the book that the current movie by the same name showing in theaters around the country is based on. the movie looked interesting and my friend who suggested the book to me only a week or two before the movie was debuting assured me that it was a pretty quick but very good read. he was right on both accounts.

the premise of the book is to do a deep dive into the making of his album ‘nebraska’. it doesn’t spend a great deal of ink on the rest of his career – there are plenty of other books that can help you there. the author is of the impression that this is his most important work in many ways, and makes a very good case throughout the book. bruce had just had his biggest commercial success so far in 1980 with ‘the river’, and was under some pressure after the tour promoting the album to follow up with another release.

but as the book and the movie make clear, bruce was exhausted from the tour, and on top of that was beginning to deal with some inner demons. he rented a place in a small town in new jersey with the idea that he would buckle down and start writing some songs. his roadie set him up with a fairly new tape machine that could add four track recording onto a standard cassette tape you could buy in a drug store at the time.

the solitude led to an outpouring of creativity but also a wellspring of emotions revolving around his troubled childhood in freehold, new jersey, which was just down the road. i will let the book and the movie flesh out more of the details here, but the songs that he was writing here were starting to break down into two categories – a handful of tunes that were more on the possible commercial side (and many would eventually show up on the the ‘born in the u.s.a’ album), but then at least a dozen that were much darker in material and characters.

it is this latter batch of songs that would eventually be the basis for the ‘nebraska’ album. and the album would eventually use the tracks he made on that cassette tape in the bedroom of that rental, crude as they were. against great market pressure, bruce was adamant to release it as is with no marketing, tour, or press.

i am not the biggest bruce fan around – i was into him quite a bit early on, but started to lose interest in the late eighties. but i do think that ‘nebraska’ is certainly one of my favorites, and so the story was very compelling to me.

i finished the book this morning, and went to see the movie in the local theater this afternoon. i was glad i read the book first, but also glad to see the movie. i think that it also helped that i relistened to the album all the way through about three times while reading the book. the book helped to prepare me for a lot of the material and topics in the movie. i think that the movie was well done – emotional and well acted. obviously there is a lot in the book that did not make it to the big screen, and there are parts in the movie that are not in the book (probably the biggest one being a focus on his relationship to a local waitress at a diner in town). i don’t think you need to read the book to appreciate the movie. but if you enjoy the latter, maybe you might be interested enough to circle back on the book.

hat tip to kevin for the suggestion.

donna jean godchaux 1947-2025

the grateful dead family lost another one yesterday, as donna lost a long battle with cancer in nashville. she was one of the vocalists in the band during some of their peak times. her husband keith joined the band in late 1971, and she started singing with them right before their famous european tour in 1972. so her tenure included that tour, their high musical peak of 1973 (in my opinion), the wall of sound year of 1974, the monster year of 1977 and then early 1978. donna and keith both got caught up in the hard core living on the road, and by late 1978 the wheels started to come off. they left by mutual decision with the band in very early 1979.

she got her start in the music business as an in demand session singer in muscle shoals, alabama. during the sixties she sang on many well known records with famous artists. she contributed to percy sledge’s ‘when a man loves a woman’ as well as elvis’ ‘ suspicious minds’ and ‘in the ghetto’. other artists she worked for included duane allman, cher, neil diamond, and boz scaggs.

in 1970 her and keith headed out west and settled in california, specifically san francisco. they became fans of the dead after seeing them a few times. the story goes that they went to see a jerry garcia band show as well, where she approached jerry and said “this is your new keyboardist” (current keyboardist pigpen’s health had been failing). jerry seemed intrigued and gave her his number. soon he gave keith tapes of recent shows for him to take home so he could learn them for an eventual tryout. and the rest is history.

after leaving the grateful dead her and keith released an album together, and were making more plans when keith died in a car accident in 1980. she remarried and kept her musical career going well into her sixties with various bands and guest appearances on various side projects with members of the grateful dead.

there are those who felt that her vocal style in live shows sometimes went off the rails (and i don’t necessarily disagree with that notion). but my take is that she was essentially a studio musician whose pipes were not really meant for loud live music. she had to compete with a band that had a propensity to ratchet it up, and her range wasn’t really suited for that.

but overall i think she did great duets with bobby and especially jerry. if you want to hear her at her best with them, i would have you go and listen to the shows they did in the summer of 1976, after they came off their nearly two year hiatus. her voice sounds fresh and comfortable with the surroundings.