Justin Townes Earle is almost the best thing about music nowadays. Good ol’ NPR First Listen has his forthcoming Harlem River Blues streaming up until the record actually drops on September 14. A few weeks ago, I wrote something about the title track here.
Gillian Welch goes outside to do the day’s work, when a rider with a blood-black gunshot wound crashes through the willows. The rider is her wayward son. After two verses, she repeats the whole song in two lines: “One morning, one morning/the boy of my breast/came to my arms, unable to rest/leaving me in the arms of death.” The banjo is the very sound of violence and terror and worry and sorrow. One of those perfect songs.
Sweetgrass is a really mesmerizing and—as the official description says—unsentimental documentary of Montana shepherds driving their flock into the wild, remote Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness for summer pasture. The last glimpse of something that is now gone.
“Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”
You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.“
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Stervenson →
My friend, the ruddy-livered Joshua Stevenson, co-inventor with me of the very delicious “progressive mint julep”. He podcasts his stuff, too.
This tight, brisk, 3-minutes-and-change song gets blown up into an 8-minute, widescreen epic for the people of Belgium. There’s a 5-minute version on this free recording from a show in Nuremburg.
“Calling it “neo-feudalism” is unfair, to feudalism.”
The Love Language: Libraries. →
Really, really, really excellent record. Comes in under 32 minutes total running time. First rule of rhetoric: leave ‘em wanting more.
Only problem with this site: it is a Flash-based monstrosity. Fortunately, you can also stream it on the Merge Records site… where you can also buy it.
I don’t really go in for the lovelorn, teen angst thing… but damn, these guys do it perfectly. A hormonally-gigantic sound, sharp songwriting, and flawless sequencing. I love albums.
This fellow, also. God bless the Library of Congress.
Bo Weevil, from Frank Fairfield’s Daytrotter Session. To paraphrase myself, it was recorded in 2010, but sounds like something from 1930.
Oh yeah. This. →
Damn, but doesn’t this photo just perfectly encapsulate what Bruce was doing with Darkness on the Edge of Town? A rocker leaning on the headlight of a hot car, a car parked in his old neighborhood, with crappy, crusty snow in all the gutters… and the whole thing kinda looking, you know, tossed-off. Just perfect.
