new releases

the main purpose of this site – letting you know about albums i have discovered that need attention

robert earl keen ‘happy prisoner’

i have been listening to rek for about twenty years. hailing from texas, he has been recording since the mid eighties and is generally regarded as another in a long list of great singer songwriters from that state. to get a good taste of his work, i would recommend ‘gringo honeymoon’ from 1994. this is an interesting departure for him, as he puts down the pen and does all covers, and paints them all with a serious bluegrass tint. not really known as a bluegrass musician, he does a great job of putting together a solid lineup to help him seek his desire to create this project, including lyle lovett, sara watkins, natalie maines, and peter rowan. from a rolling stone review:

“I wanted to show the nuance in bluegrass. It’s not just all in G, playing as fast as you can,” Keen says, motioning his hand up and down as if he were quick strumming the guitar. “And I also wanted people to hear how cool bluegrass music is. I didn’t want to be the torchbearer for it because I’ve never thought of myself as a great singer, certainly not a bluegrass singer, but I really did want to have some kind of rebirth and put it out there so people would go, ‘Yeah, this is great music.'”

he certainly wasn’t worried about catering to the “grassholes” or bluegrass purists when he started to put together Happy Prisoner, but he did want to show the breadth of a genre to people who mistakenly think it’s all about one specific sound. or to those who think bluegrass is something akin to mumford and sons. there’s flatt & scruggs and bill monroe on the lp, sure, but there’s also contemporary songs like richard thompson’s “1952 vincent black lightning,” all picked to show a dynamic spectrum that isn’t often given a spotlight.

jason isbell ‘something more than free’

one of the biggest challenges jason faced, i am sure, when making this album, was living up to his extraordinary previous release, southeastern. my first run through of this disc encountered the same challenge, namely that i was comparing it, and it wasn’t as good. but with each new listen, it begins to stand on it’s own, and it is a fine piece of work. he has added one more addition to his portfolio that cements his reputation out there as one of the finer singer/songwriters in the field today. each song here is a story, maybe sometimes autobiographical, but always well crafted and heartfelt. he can create characters and situations and emotions like nobody’s business. same producer as ‘southeastern’, and for the most part his road band, along with lovely wife amanda shires on vocal and fiddle.

‘speed trap town’ could easily be a cut on springsteen’s ‘nebraska’, and ‘hudson commodore’ is an uplifting tale of a single woman making her way in roosevelt’s south. ‘to a band i loved’ ,and possibly ‘how to forget’, are probably about his time with drive by truckers, and his first marriage to shonna tucker. i just saw him at the house of blues a couple of months back. he has been relentlessly touring, and is worth a visit if he comes to your town. probably my favorite artist out there right now that fits into the category of ‘bands you haven’t heard of’. that is becoming less of a truism with every new release. he is building a solid career, and this is worth your consideration.

“I’m kind of picky about songwriters, you know,” says John Prine. “But when I heard Southeastern, it just killed me. I loved it. I like songs that are clean and don’t have much fat on them — every line is direct, and all people can relate to it. That’s what I try to do, and that’s what Jason does. I really haven’t heard anybody that different in probably 30 years.”

basement tapes ‘raw’

The recordings known as ‘The Basement Tapes’ have been released, officially and unofficially, in many different forms. The series of events that led up to the recordings, and the eventual influence the songs had on the musical world, are legendary, and some very good books have been written on the subject. Essentially put on tape by Dylan and members of the Band during a ‘down’ time in his career after allegedly suffering a major injury from a motorcycle accident, the recordings are rough sketches of material being worked on for various reasons. There are also multiple covers that the group seems to be using to just get some work in. Contrary to most accounts, the tapes were made in various locations around Woodstock/West Saugerties area, not just the ‘Big Pink’ house. The sessions lasted about 6 months, from May to October 1967, and a fourteen song demo was copyrighted and sent to various artists who were known to be interested in covering new Dylan material. Almost all of them were picked by someone with varied success. In 1969 a bootleg called ‘The Great White Wonder’ appeared on the scene, with original cuts from the sessions included with other Dylan material. Eventually over a hundred cuts from the sessions were shown the light of day by various bootlegs. Eventually Dylan saw fit to make an official release of some sorts, and in 1975 Robbie Robertson was given the responsibility of putting it together. Selected cuts were remixed and overdubbed, and some original work from The Band was also added (recorded at a different period).

Now Dylan has given the green light to go back and release the entire thing, unedited. With the help of Garth Hudson, the original member who actually engineered the recording, they have been offered up in two versions: ‘Complete’, which has 139 songs on 6 discs, and ‘Raw’, which selects 38 of them for a 2 CD release. I opted for the latter, but am still open to getting the bigger eventually. At a minimum, if you are a moderate Dylan fan and have an appreciation for the history of these recordings, you have to get ‘Raw’. It is totally different than the 1975 version, and the booklet that comes with it is a small novel on everything you need to know about this special event in music history. There are also plenty of pictures of them that I have never seen. Much of the dialogue in the booklet is offered up by Sid Griffin, who probably wrote the definitive book on the recordings, ‘Million Dollar Bash’. After getting ‘Raw’ I ordered the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. The songs are not polished, and most were not meant to see the light of day. But they certainly give us a glimpse into that transformative summer in Woodstock, when a group of guys were just playing in a basement for the hell of it, trying to create something new. And they did.

I would pay top dollar to be a fly on the wall of this basement for an afternoon.

Roger McGuinn selected this one for the Byrds:

This is the best version of this song I know:

a little Johnny Cash:

Mark Knopfler – ‘Tracker’

If you have heard a Dire Straits song lately and wondered whatever happened to them, then you may not be aware that their songwriter and main musical driver was Mark Knopfler, and that he has been still making great music for the past three decades. If you want to get reintroduced to his career, this is a great place to start. He always was a great songwriter, but he gets better with age. A collection of songs of real and imagined characters, riding on top of a musical bed utilizing his old Dire Straits building blocks, infused with celtic influences. A fairly eclectic mix of approaches, this album is like a well fitting sweater from your closet that never really goes out of style, always feels comfortable when you slip it on, and makes you appreciate it’s composition and simplicity. This is a good pickup for your summer playlist.

Here is a long form video where he walks through the construction of most of the tracks:

tell me this couldn’t have been mistaken for a track on the straits’ first three albums:

Ryan Bingham Fear and Saturday Night

Newest release from a solid songwriter from Texas.

When Ryan Bingham released his first album, Mescalito, at the age of 26, he already sang with the grizzled grit of someone twice his age. He’d spent the previous decade living in his truck, competing in a string of southwestern rodeos to help pay for gas. His parents were alcoholics. His friends were bull-riders. The whole thing sounded like a country song, which was one of the reasons Bingham’s biographical songs — which hitched themselves to mid-tempo grooves on Mescalito, then rocketed their way toward roadhouse-worthy rock & roll territory on his second release, Roadhouse Sun — packed such a natural, nuanced punch. He wasn’t some suburban kid dressed up in outlaw threads. Dude was the real deal.

Years later, Bingham — now a Grammy and Oscar-winning, thirty-something adult, with four studio albums and the critically adored Crazy Heart soundtrack under his belt — is prepping another release. Fear and Saturday Night hits stores on January 20, 2015. Bingham wrote most of the album’s 12 tracks alone in an airstream trailer, parked in the mountains of California without electricity or cell phones. The seclusion gave him creative clarity that resulted in songs inspired by an unstable childhood, and by the deaths of his mother to alcoholism and father to suicide.

Bingham recorded most of the album live, with a brand new band whose lineup includes two members of the blues-rock outfit Rose Hill Drive. Jim Scott, who engineered Tom Petty’sWildflowers and co-produced Wilco’s Wilco (The Album), produced the sessions.