the great merle haggard passed away yesterday, on his 79th birthday. i wrote this post a while back, and for whatever reason never got around to publishing it, but i feel compelled to share it now:
this is a fun joint venture between two crusty veterans. it is very clear throughout that merle and willie are great friends and enjoy performing together. the backup musicians are golden, and the songwriting is very good for the most part. this has a few too many mediocre tunes to be considered a great release, but i quibble. there are at least a half dozen songs that make this worth checking out if you have a country leaning. the title track is a tribute to some of the musicians that inspired these two to take up a guitar. ‘it’s all going to pot’ is a rave up that has a great horn section. included here is one of the best covers of dylan’s ‘don’t think twice, it’s all right’ i have heard.
lucinda has never been one to shy away from throwing the turmoils of her personal life into her songs, but this might be her most personal work ever. previously those stories were usually populated by the memoirs of failed romances, but this one is haunted by the ghosts of her family life. she lost her father to alzheimers last january. miller williams, a famed poet, was maybe the largest influence on her, both personally and from a songwriting standpoint. she ran all of her lyrics by him before recording them in the early stages of her career, until he finally told her to stop – she had ‘graduated’ (he was also a professor). several of the songs here are either directly or indirectly about him. ‘if there’s a heaven’, ‘if my love could kill’, and ‘dust’, which is actually a poem of his that she set to music. there is also ‘death came’ which was written about her mom, who passed away some time ago, and ‘place in my heart’ which is about her estranged brother.
the title track sets the theme for the whole album – inspired by a recent trip she made to macon, georgia – it is a reflection on a highway in the south where she grew up that tied together the cities her family traveled when she was young. she has said in interviews that she considers this a bookend to the album that first made her famous, ‘car wheels on a gravel road’. ‘louisiana story’ here is similar to ‘bus to baton rouge’ off of her ‘essence’ album.
‘house of earth’ is an adaptation of some woody guthrie lyrics, and she also covers springsteen’s ‘factory’. it closes with a 12 minute ‘faith and grace’, which i originally felt went on 6 minutes too long. but then i heard her explain that the original was 19 minutes long, and was just a jam they caught live in the studio. the drummer used to play for peter tosh, and was there on the day he was shot (also getting shot himself that day as well). so i listen to it a little differently now. bill frisell, the noted jazz guitarist, is featured throughout the album. he does amazing work here, and all the guitar play is worth paying attention to.
at 63, her voice is roughened up by decades on the road, but the emotions come through more clearly than ever. if you are not familiar with her work, i might not suggest starting here, as she is a bit of an acquired taste at this point in her career (‘car wheels’, mentioned above, is a good place to start). but if you are an avid fan like i am, owning pretty much everything she has made, i think this is a must have.
here lucinda gives a summary of every studio album she has ever made, plus more background on the making of this one:
i bought this on the strength of buddy miller’s name, plus the line up of artists he put together. i briefly remember some mention in the description about being recorded on a ship, but it wasn’t until i opened up the liner notes did i truly appreciate the story behind the creation of this recording. unbeknownst to me, there is a cruise ship that sets sail every year featuring a plethora of americana artists on a week long excursion into the caribbean.
apparently buddy has been involved for a while, and in the last two years has taken over one of the lounges and turned it into a studio to record material and broadcast to his sirius xm outlaw country program. here we have 11 tracks featuring recent cruise attendees. we have shawn colvin doing ‘wild horses’, lucinda williams doing gram parson’s ‘hickory wind’, and kris kristofferson doing his own ‘sunday morning coming down’. brandi carlisle and the lone bellow do prine’s ‘angel from montgomery’, kacey musgraves puts her own spin on buck owen’s ‘love’s gonna live here’, and richard thompson covers ‘wedding bells’. buddy duets on almost all of them, and the back up musicians are stellar. the next ship sails in january, and i put myself on the mailing list.
this is a greatly anticipated release from the group. it has been a favorite of the collectors for quite some time, but for whatever reason has never made it on the dave’s or dick’s picks release choices. perhaps because it is partially flawed on a couple of levels. the first clue is the mixing issues on the opening song, ‘bertha’. all issues were cleared up about two thirds through the song, and by the time they got to the second song (mexicali blues), they had it right. this is a story of a show in the middle of the ‘wall of sound’ 1974 tour, when the band was at a creative peak but also struggling with the pressure of their fame.there was also the additional stress of managing the massive crew that was necessary to put together the immense structure of their cutting edge sound system.
the recording quality is solid. phil was probably the member most enamored with the ‘wall of sound’, and he is on top of his game here. he is simply on fire for the whole show. to a large degree the same could be said for keith. they are both up in the mix, and rightly so. the first set, other than the previously mentioned bertha, is fairly flawless. the ‘deal’, highlighted below, is a good taste of the overall feel. an early ‘scarlet begonias’ has a garcia solo that is on another level. it ends with a long ‘playing in the band’ (maybe five minutes too long).
phil comes on with ned lagin in the intermission for an interesting ‘sea stones’.
and then we head to the second set, where it really starts to get special. it opens with a good batch of standards – ‘brown eyed women’, ‘me and my uncle’, jack straw’, and then eventually goes to another level heading into ‘weather report suite’. halfway through the latter, and while they segue into ‘spanish jam’, you will hear some of the more inspired dead improvisations. they are all admittedly jazz fans, and this showcases their trends towards that genre. one can hear chick corea laced jazz fusion elements, and bill’s drum work during this set is a keen example of why i have always believed he is one of the most underrated drummers, period. they string this over into’ eyes of the world’, and then bring it to a crashing halt for an exquisite’china doll’. the ballad is so stripped down that you can hear a beer bottle roll across the floor at the 3:30 mark. ‘one more saturday night’ ends the show.
good stuff. great show. not perfect, but then none of their shows are. it just goes with the territory with this band.
update: hat tip to boot for the heads up on the rolling beer bottle. please see the comments section below for his thoughts on this release, specifically the ‘spanish jam’ section.
i just love this album. do me a favor. order this. when you get it, put aside some time and get yourself a good bottle of bourbon. pour a healthy bit of that bourbon over ice in a tumbler, and then slip this album on in a room where you can listen up good. this girl can sing, and her band knows how to get behind her in a simplified but organically country way. there is not a mediocre cut on this album. check out ‘needle and thread’ below. i first got turned on to her stuff when i got her 2011 release ‘queen of the minor key’, and then quickly picked up her 2010 tribute to loretta lynn, ‘butcher holler’. she is coming to my favorite venue here on her current tour of this release, and i plan on being there.
“Needle and Thread” is about the mountain town where I spent a lot of time as a child: Idaho City, Idaho. It boasts a population of about 450 these days, though some maps list it as a ghost town.” “My family has some land up there. It’s mostly timber, dirt and rocks. Both Idaho City and the land around it have certainly seen better days. It was once the capitol of the Northwest — during the Gold Rush — but the miners took most of the gold out of it, and then it burned down twice. We love it though.
redeyegin 