nuggets

2024 nuggets

as i mentioned in my previous post, last year was easily my least productive year in regards to writing to my blog. but that does not mean i was not listening to or going out to see music. i just could not find the time to share it with all of you. so here are a few items i have gone back and selected. there is no rhyme or reason here, and they are in no particular order. just a few things i felt needed to be talked about.

decemberists ‘as it ever was, so it will be again’

starbucks used to sell music at the counter when you were ordering your coffee, and i would usually pick up something maybe once or twice a month if it caught my eye. it has been nearly twenty years since i took a flyer on a band i had never heard of – the decemberists. the album was ‘the crane wife’, and after a spin or two, i was hooked. i have followed them ever since, and have bought pretty much everything they have put out. but i still think that is their best. i had actually been a little disappointed over the last decade or so, until now. this release might not be as good, but it comes close. they had taken a break for a while (or, more accurately, their chief songwriter had), and it seems to have rejuvenated them. a very interesting and diverse collection of songs, as usual. maybe the most unusual is the final piece, called ‘joan in the garden’ which is nearly twenty minutes long. very experimental and sometimes dream like, it ends with a rocking outro that brings it all home. it may take you a few times to digest the whole thing, but it does grow on you.

ray lamontagne ‘long way home’

a similar story here, as i was an early adopter to ray’s stuff, and coincidentally his first album ‘trouble’ came out about the same time as ‘crane wife’. again, i have followed him ever since. my initial draw to him was his 70’s retro sound – somewhat of a hybrid of van morrison, cat stevens, james taylor, etc.

he started to veer away from that after a few successful albums and went a lot heavier and edgier, usually not to the good. but over his last few albums he has come back around and found his groove again. this is a great overall album and served me well over the summer.

billy strings ‘highway prayers’

i know i keep writing about him, but he just keeps pumping out new music and i am just trying to keep up. this album gives us twenty tracks of originals delivered in more traditional bluegrass and country settings, again returning back to the form that made him famous to begin with. (as you can see there is a bit of a theme here).solid playing, and solid songwriting. solid, solid, solid.

johnny blue skies ‘passage du desir’

never heard of johnny blue skies? that’s ok, nobody else had before the release of this album. his real name is sturgill simpson, and you may have heard of him. apparently he had made a promise not to make more than five studio albums at some point, and so adapted this moniker. again, a return to his unique musical stylings and superb songwriting, and this album is one of his best. repeated listenings will be rewarded.

justin townes earle ‘all in – unreleased and rarities (the new west years)’

long time readers of mine will know the love i have for this man’s work, and someone we lost way too early. this is a posthumous collection of material he had recorded but not released from his years with the new west record label. what a songwriter. i hesitated to provide a sample of the material below by choosing his cover of the fleetwood mac hit, but he does it well and i think the video captures him in a beautiful way.

dave alvin and jimmie dale gilmore ‘texicali’

these two veterans of….actually, i am not sure how to describe them. dave alvin made his mark in the l.a. punk/country scene in the 80’s in a band he founded called the blasters. jimmie dale gilmore is from west texas and is maybe best known as one of the members of the flatlanders in the seventies – an early contributor to what would later be dubbed ‘alt-country’, whatever that means.

the two teamed up for an album in 2018 called ‘downey to lubbock’ (their two hometowns), and they have been pretty much touring together ever since. i did buy that album when it came out, and i can recommend as well. this one got stuck in the cd player for a while. good stuff, if you like this sort of thing. and i do.

wyatt flores ‘half life’

here is a fairly new artist that i picked up on the sirius xm ‘outlaw country’ station. wyatt hails from the red dirt country in oklahoma, where so many great artists have blossomed from over the last 15-20 years. this is an ep, so only about 8 songs with a running time of about 25 minutes. but please give him a listen. another theme of all of my selections here was that i played them a lot, because they all deserved that kind of attention. this one is no different. latch on to him now before anyone else does, so you can say you heard him when.

paul simon, ‘the rhythm of the saints’

‘i know the reason

i feel so blessed

my heart still splashes

inside my chest’

(from ‘she moves on’)

due to some recent health issues, i have been spending a lot of time on a treadmill lately. i have to get some daily cardio exercises in, and during these winter months, it is often infeasible to get that done outside. being on a treadmill is pretty boring, and instead of watching a tv like many do, i put on one of my more upbeat itunes playlists and listen to music. i have been building my playlists for a very long time, i have a lot of music in my library, and in order for a song to get selected for any of them, especially this one, it has to be pretty damn good.

in listening to this particular list, i start noticing some patterns. one in particular is realizing that some artists keep popping up more than others. the other is that many of the selections are what i refer to as ‘perfect songs’ – they are timeless and iconic. it was about a week ago that it came to my attention that my paul simon selections intersected both categories.

so i started going down a paul simon rabbithole. not a complete career review, but really just a revisit of what i consider to be his best one two punch – ‘graceland’ and ‘the rhythm of the saints’.

now, ‘graceland’ gets most of the attention, and maybe rightly so. it was innovative in so many ways, it revived his floundering career and personal life, and it introduced the world to the musicians of south africa. the recordings were made in 1985 during a time when there was supposed to be a cultural boycott of apartheid, and so the album was controversial at the time. but its tremendous commercial success and paul’s insistence on bringing many of the artists on a worldwide tour brought a lot of attention to the struggles in south africa. there are a couple of trailers below that provide an excellent background to all of this, if you care to dig further.

but being a contrarian by nature, i want to focus instead on what was his eventual follow up to that album, ‘the rhythm of the saints’, which was released four years later. while the first album utilized african musicians, ‘rhythm’ used many of the guitarists that he had found in johannesburg, but then also used vocalists and percussionists from eastern south america, especially brazil. like its predecessor, this album introduced some of these artists to a new and wider audience. names like milton nascimento and nana vasconcelos were huge stars in brazil, but this and david byrne’s brazilian albums from about the same time showcased just how good these artists were.

but it is simon’s ability to fuse all of these elements together and arrange them to his lyrics that makes the thing timeless and addicting. i mentioned ‘perfect songs’ before, but i could argue that this album nears perfection as a complete piece. there is a lot of river imagery here, both in the lyrics and the flow of the rhythms. there is a continual and bubbling slow moving pulse throughout, and each song seems to move gracefully to the next. it just takes you to another place, and i never tire of it. he hasn’t released anything like this since.

the album sold pretty well, but it never had any hits that got much airplay. but if i have a choice of deciding to listen to one of the two albums, i tend to put on the latter. so if you are not that familiar with it, take some time when you can relax with a cold one and play it from start to finish. i hope by the end that you may agree with me.

here is my favorite track:

road trip chronicles: woodstock, ny

if you are a huge music fan like i am, there are certain areas of our country that are associated with the creation of your passion. be it new orleans, new york city, nashville, austin, laurel canyon, etc., there is not a list does that not usually include woodstock. it has always been on my list of places i needed to go see, and i finally made my trip this weekend.

the occasion was a richard thompson two night stand at levon helm’s barn in woodstock. when thinking of a woodstock trip, it was always going to include a show at his barn/studio. artists and music lovers make the pilgrimage to this venue to both honor the legend of levon helm and to support the community that thrives around it. and i can tell you, if you can find a musician you like on their calendar, you should consider making the trip. it is a really cool place and the intimacy and quality of the stage is something you will never forget. i don’t know the actual capacity, but it can’t be more than a couple hundred folks.

richard thompson was great both nights. all of my traveling partners were huge fans of him, and we all commented that none of us had ever seen a bad show by him. it was a perfect venue for his acoustic sets and his typical between song banter. his opening act of tift merritt was solid both nights. i have been a big fan of hers since i bought her ‘tambourine’ album in 2004. she has faded from the scene for a while now, and this was her first public performance in a number of years, but she nailed it.

we stayed in an old farmhouse just outside of town that the owner said was built in 1749. it was a great staging ground for our forays over to the the barn (about a mile away) and downtown woodstock, maybe a few miles at most.

saturday was spent exploring the area. it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this site that i am a big fan of dylan and the band, two of the most famous residents of this small town. so one of my must do items on my list was to find ‘big pink’, the rental house that some the members of the band lived in, and where all of the ‘basement tapes’ was recorded. we discovered that it was about a 15 minute drive from our place. after about ten minutes it became abundantly clear that it was on a private one lane road that backed up into the hills. there were plenty of no trespassing signs, but we were so close and when we found it we jumped out of the car and took a few pictures and then got our asses out of there.

then we went down to bearsville, which is a small village just west of woodstock, where dylan and robbie robertson lived near their manager, al grossman. grossman invested much of his money he made in the business into the surrounding area, including the bearsville studio and the bearsville theater.

the former is now closed, but we stopped at the latter for some live music and some bbq. the theater is also a music studio now, and the band recorded their third album – ‘stage fright’ – there. they recently released an expanded version of that album upon it’s 50th anniversary, and it has a great second disc with a live show from royal albert music hall in 1971. i highly recommend it.

as far as the actual town of woodstock goes, it is likely to be what you would expect. is there a large contingent of hippies now eligible for medicare? yes. are there a lot of restaurants with creative and healthy menu items? yes. is it hard to find a tie dye t-shirt? no.

it is a charming little city set in the foots of the catskill mountains and has a rich musical and artistic history that very much predates the 60’s. before it became famous for the musical scene in the mid sixties, it was a fairly conservative populace that kept things simple there. for a long time there was a dissonance between the local townfolk and the musicians who would bubble up from new york on the weekends. one of the more concrete examples of that was the planning for the famous woodstock concert of 1969. originally planned to be on the outskirts of town, the local leaders put their foot down and resisted the organizers. so much so that it was relocated to a farm about a 90 minute drive away in bethel, ny.

it was a wholly (holy?) satisfying trip, and i am so glad we went. would i go again? if just to see woodstock, i would say no. but i could justify it to get to levon’s place again, if someone comes up on the bill that would be perfect for the venue.

thanks to my traveling buddies – kevin, john, and chuck. we have some stories, don’t we?

nuggets, volume three: gregg allman, ‘laid back’

‘laid back’ was gregg allman’s first solo album, and arguably his best. he admitted as much himself over forty years later in his autobiography, ‘my cross to bear’. in 1972 he was still struggling with losing his brother duane in a motorcycle accident the previous october. playing music with the allman brothers band didn’t seem to be helping, and he was drinking a lot. they were beginning work on their album ‘brothers and sisters’ when gregg approached them with a song he had been working on for a while called ‘queen of hearts’. the band turned him down, telling him ‘because that song just ain’t saying nothing’. rebuked, he began to explore doing a solo album instead and started putting together a team of musicians who matched the material. one of those was 20 year old keyboardist chuck leavell, who had played with dr. john previously and opened for the allman brothers. he would also come to do some session work on the aforementioned ‘brothers and sisters’, and eventually joined that band as well. once that album was finished, gregg headed into the studio in march of 1973, and things progressed rapidly. the whole process proved to be cathartic for gregg, and all witnesses to the sessions remember that he was in a happy place while recording. the overall groove was different than the abb sound. he told his producer that he wanted it to sound ‘real swampy, with the image of moss hanging off the trees, alligators and fog, darkness, witches and shit’. the first cut is a different take on his tune ‘midnight rider’, and that set the tone for the whole thing. that was followed by ‘queen of hearts’ and its unique time signatures. a few songs later he covers jackson browne’s ‘these days’, maybe my favorite song on the album. it certainly has one of my favorite lyrics of all time when he pleads at the end ‘please don’t confront me with my failures, i’m aware of them’. that line doesn’t work on mrs. redeyegin, unfortunately, but not for lack of trying. it ends with a funky version of the traditional ‘will the circle be unbroken’, accompanied by local gospel singers and virtually the entire staff at capricorn studios as backup singers.

originally released in october of 1973, it went gold almost immediately. the allman family just did a rerelease in august, remastering the original eight songs, adding alternate versions of those same songs, and then adding a second disc of 18 offerings – various outtakes, demos, and live performances. the liner notes are fantastic and provide significant context to the recordings. if you are not familiar with the original, or if you are familiar and wanted to explore more of the history about it, i can highly recommend picking this up.

jim lauderdale, ‘time flies’

i first started paying attention to jim lauderdale about two years ago, and i’m sorry that it took me so long to catch up with him. it is now clear to me that he is one of the more prodigious artists out there, especially in the americana genre. i really loved his album from last year, ‘london southern’, but i think i like his newest even more. ‘time flies’ is a hodge podge of musical styles, incorporating western swing (‘while you’re hoping’, ‘wild on me fast’), psychodelia (‘it blows my mind’), soul jazz (‘wearing out your cool’), and roots country stylings (‘when i held the cards’, ‘if the world’s still here tomorrow’). eleven tracks spanning 38 minutes and each offering sounds completely different and fresh.

the production and accompaniment is flawless. it was recorded at blackbird academy studios, basically a school in nashville that teaches students the ins and outs of how to record and produce music. what a great collaboration.

he also simultaneously released some recently unearthed material that would have essentially been his first album, had he gotten a record deal for it (he didn’t). he had set out to nashville in 1979 to take a stab at meeting mandolinist roland white and make a foray into the world of bluegrass. recorded in earl scruggs’s basement, the tracks that make up ‘jim lauderdale and roland white’ were recently discovered on a reel found in a box by roland’s wife. if you like late seventies bluegrass, then you should check this out. just a couple of lauderdale originals, but an interesting mix of covers, notably donovan’s ‘try and catch the wind’ and gordon lighfoot’s ‘(that’s what you get) for loving me’.

lauderdale is well known in the country and bluegrass writing circles, having written songs for popular artists such as george strait, dixie chicks, george jones, rodney crowell, blake shelton and many more. in addition, he hosts ‘the buddy and jim show’ with buddy miller on my second favorite sirius station, ‘outlaw country’. give him a try.