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.
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.
it was about this time two years ago that derek trucks announced that he would no longer be playing with the allman brothers, presumably to concentrate his efforts on his own band. legend has it that his name is one of the inspirations for the band name derek and the dominoes (his uncle is a drummer for the allman brothers). his wife susan is simply one of the flat out best blues singers around today. this is their most recent effort. if you are already a fan of the band, then this is an easy decision. it is worth the pickup. spend the extra to get the bonus version, as it has an extra disc that is worth it for the three live songs at the end – specifically the tribute back to the ‘layla’ album he is named after. david hidalgo from los lobos joins the band for a ripping version of ‘keep on growing’ .
redeyegin 