Tag Archives: Americana

Various Artist: Cold and Bitter Tears – The Songs of Ted Hawkins

Various_ColdAndBitterTearsRemembering the songs of Ted Hawkins

Ted Hawkins was the perfect college radio artist: articulate, soulful, emotionally powerful and most importantly, an outsider. His hardscrabble life simultaneously limited the commercial growth of his career and defined the authenticity upon which his art rested. What made him a particularly interesting fit for college radio was that his music wasn’t outwardly challenging. It wasn’t discordant noise or expletive-filled speedcore; it was soulful folk music, made with guitars and keyboards, and sung in a style that threaded easily with more commercially popular blues and soul. But that was just the musical surface, and beneath the performance were songs unlike those written in Memphis or Detroit or New York, or even Hawkins’ adopted home of Los Angeles.

With his passing in 1995, his singing voice was silenced, but in the tradition of folk music, the songs he left behind continue to speak his truth. This first ever tribute to Hawkins gathers fifteen performers to sing Hawkins originals, and adds a bonus demo of Hawkins singing an a cappella demo of the otherwise unrecorded “Great New Year.” The performers include many well-known names, including James McMurtry, Kacey Chambers and Mary Gauthier, and like all tribute albums, the magic is in selecting the material, matching it to the right performers and finding interpretations that honor the original while adding the covering artist’s stamp. Co-producers Kevin “Shinyribs” Russell, Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson have done an admirable job on all three counts.

The collection’s most well-known title, “Sorry You’re Sick,” found a sympathetic voice in Gauthier, whose own battle with addiction conjures a first-hand understanding of the song’s protagonists. Kasey and Bill Chambers give the title track a Hank Williams-sized helpings of anguish and loneliness, and McMurtry’s leadoff “Big Things” is more resolute in its melancholy than Hawkins’ original. The latter includes the lyric “Now I’ve got a song here to write, I stay up most every night, creating with hope they’ll live on forever,” a dream that comes true exactly as McMurtry sings it. While Hawkins’ original performances hinted at twang, his lyrics of longing and loneliness are easily fit to full-blown country arrangements, such as the two-stepping barroom infidelity of Sunny Sweeney’s “Happy Hour.”

Hawkins’ songs were surprisingly hopeful and good humored in the face of loss and unfulfilled desire. Tim Easton chases an end to loneliness in “One Hundred Miles,” Evan Felker seeks “Peace and Happiness,” and facing the greatest loss imaginable, Shinyribs remains funky fresh as he asks “Who Got My Natural Comb?” Hawkins’ widow, Elizabeth, and daughter Tina-Marie reach back to the songwriter’s earliest commercial release for a soulful rendition of the 1966 single “Baby,” expanding the musical essay to a time before Hawkins was “discovered” busking at Venice Beach. As with all tribute albums, these covers don’t substitute for Hawkins’ originals, but highlight his songwriter’s pen, and weave his memory into the folk tradition. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Michael Rank and Stag: Horsehair

MichaeRankAndStag_HorsehairPowerful, tightly-crafted down-tempo Americana

Punk rockers make great roots music. Well, ex-punk rockers, at least. Having blazed through their 20s and 30s, they have a special appreciation for music that’s slower, quieter and more internal. Michael Rank is one such ex, having released a half-dozen indie albums with Snatches of Pink, and a pair as Clarissa, Rank’s rock years finally ended with 2007’s Love is Dead. It was a fitting title to segue into Rank’s solo career, which would be preoccupied with the end of a long-term relationship. Rank works with a shifting group of North Carolina musical compatriots known as Stag, and self–releases his albums.

His solo work quickly gained fiddle, mandolin and steel, slowly turned down the volume, moved the electric guitars from center stage, and dropped the drums on some tracks. As the arrangements got more sparse, Rank adjusted to the extra room, singing more to himself than trying to muscle his way past the instruments. The results have been increasingly confessional, and by this fifth solo release, almost lost in thought. Rank sings of romantic wounds that haven’t healed, and his downtrodden mood is amplified beautifully by the harmony vocals of Mount Moriah’s Heather McEntire.

Rank sounds beaten, like one of Chris Knight’s protagonists with the fight drained from him. But his glass can also be half full, as he finds the assets of a former relationship living in the son born of that union. Rank and McEntire’s vocals frame a moment of mutual realization on “Trails,” with James Wallace’s droning organ providing the suggestion of a flatlining heart monitor. The duo’s vocals blend seamlessly on “Horseman,” there’s a Stones influence on the rustic “Mexico,” and the closer suggests Neil Young’s “Helpless.” This is a beautifully balanced album with natural vocals and downbeat tempos that let the anguish bloom. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Michael Rank’s Home Page

Kinky Friedman: The Loneliest Man I Ever Met

KinkyFriedman_TheLonliestManKinky Friedman returns to the studio, but not to songwriting

For rock music fans of the 1970s, Kinky Friedman was the oddest of guilty pleasures. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen had drawn many to roots music with “Hot Rod Lincoln,” and then burrowed into the stonersphere with “Seeds and Stems (Again).” This led many listeners to country and folk, and with Friedman’s 1973 debut, Sold American, humor, satire and pathos, often at the same time. Even the names – “Kinky” and “Texas Jewboys” – implied a level of irreverence that didn’t prepare listeners for Friedman’s perceptiveness. His broad, comic approach often obscured the deeper layers on first pass, but his resolutions always turned out to be parable rather than punch line.

Following a trio of 1970s albums, Friedman released a 1983 solo effort, Under the Double Ego, and then turned to novel writing (with sides of politics and distilling) as his main occupation. He still performed, released a few live sets, and dropped in on his own tribute album, but it’s been 32 years since his last full studio collection. Other than the previously unrecorded title track (co-written with Tim Hoover, and dedicated to Tompall Glaser), the song list is all covers, selecting songs with special resonance from the catalogs of Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Lerner & Loewe. The latter, “Wand’rin Star,” was originally written for the stage musical Paint Your Wagon, and turned into a surprise UK hit single by film actor Lee Marvin!

At 70, Friedman’s voice sounds more aged than the decade-older Nelson’s as they duet on the opening “Bloody Mary Morning.” But that same weathering conveys a lifetime of wisdom gathered between Friedman’s 1970s originals of “Lady Yesterday” and “Wild Man From Borneo” and today’s covers. Friedman cannily interprets “A Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis” more as a hushed confession than Tom Waits’ Satchmo-inflected original, and he returns Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up” from its mortal ending to the lyrics’ original lamentation of aging. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica adds a mournful sound to several tracks, including a properly haggard rendition of “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.”

These quieter, low-key performances offer an uninterrupted helping of Friedman’s introspective and empathetic sides, and the song selections – particularly the closing pairing of a show tune and a popular standard – reveal a streak of nostalgic sentimentalism. An album of covers provides insight into a songwriter’s tastes and influences, but it’s not a substitute for fresh reflections on today – and today’s society could really use a helping of Friedman’s audacious wit. Hopefully, this studio project will have been sufficiently enjoyable to spark a new round of songwriting. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Kinky Friedman’s Home Page

Continental Drifters: Drifted – In the Beginning & Beyond

ContinentalDrifters_DriftedNot so odd odds ‘n’ sods from superb Americana collective

The Continental Drifters publicity often hung on the renown of the Bangles’ Vicki Peterson, the Cowsills’ Susan Cowsill and the dB’s Peter Holsapple, but the music and musicianship of this collective was deeper and broader than its three most famous members. Among its riches were multiple lead vocalists, stellar instrumentalists, the contributions of multiple songwriters and the forge of collective musical sensibility. The group’s formation in Los Angeles and relocation to New Orleans magnified that rich bounty of talent in a confluence that drew both from West Coast and Southern roots.

Omnivore’s two-CD set offers a wealth of rare material that will gratify the band’s many fans. Disc 1 features early material, including from their import-only debut, demos and alternate mixes. At times, the group’s early recordings sound like the Band plugging Little Feat’s instruments into Buffalo Springfield’s amps in a Los Angeles club built in Mississippi. But you can also hear the melodic echoes of the Bangles and Cowsills in Susan Cowsill’s mesmerizing “The Rain Song,” deep soul in Carlo Nuccio’s organ-lined “Here I Am,” and heart-wrenching balladry in Ray Ganucheau’s “I Didn’t Want To Lie.” This was a band with no shortage of excellent original material or musical imagination.

Disc 2 focuses entirely on the band’s way with cover tunes, collecting tracks from tribute albums (including their entire Listen Listen EP tribute to Sandy Denny And Richard Thompson), European imports and live recordings. Their taste in covers was both exquisite and broad, including material from obvious sources like Gram Parsons, Lucinda Williams and Neil Young, and less obvious sources, like Tommy James (Alive and Kicking’s 1970 hit “Tighter, Tighter”), Brian Wilson (Surfin USA’s brilliant, bittersweet album track, “Farmer’s Daughter”), and William Bell (a country-harmony arrangement of Otis Redding’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water”). Their multi-vocalist arrangements of “Dedicated to the One I Love” and “I Can’t Let Go” are dreamy and joyous.

Even in compilation form, with material drawn from across time, geography, lineups and projects, there’s a unity of purpose that holds this all together. It’s a testament to both the band and the collection’s producers, Pat Thomas and Cheryl Pawalski, that the group’s disparate musical interests fit together so easily and remain so timeless. The inclusion of live and cover material shows how the group’s versatility turned their shows from a mere recitation of studio material into a dynamic revue. This two-hour ten-minute collection includes a twenty-page booklet highlighted by fresh notes from the band members and detailed discographical data. This is an essential bookend to the group’s previously released albums. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Continental Drifters’ Home Page

Elana James: Black Beauty

ElanaJames_BlackBeautyA fiddler’s longing and guilty pleasures

James has made a name writing, singing and playing a unique combination of hot jazz and Western Swing with Austin’s Hot Club of Cowtown. Though known primarily for her virtuosity as a fiddler, her voice, much like fellow instrumental prodigy Alison Krauss, has always held special qualities. Her self-titled 2007 solo album combined the same talents she’d leveraged in Hot Club – fiddle, voice and songwriting – but in a wider context that glimpsed her influences through the selection of cover songs. Eight years later, her second album expands on the same premise, weaving together originals, instrumentals (“Eva’s Dance” and “Waltz of the Animals”), and a selection of covers that spans jazz (“All I Need is You”), folk (“Hobo’s Lullaby”), counterculture classics (“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Ripple”), ‘70s novelty (“Telephone Man”) and even ‘80s synthpop (“Only You”).

Impressively, James brings this wide range of material under one tent. Her plucked violin opens the album in place of Vince Clark’s synthesizer for Yazoo’s “Only You,” with a double-tracked vocal that’s lighter than Alison Moyet’s original. The song’s mood of longing is a fitting introduction to James’ originals, which include the unbreakable hold of “High Upon the Mountains” and the second-thoughts of “Reunion (Livin’ Your Dream).” The latter might have been the album’s most poignant moment, had James not turned a letter from a U.S. soldier into the eulogy “Hey Beautiful: Last Letter from Iraq.” Setting the words of Staff Sgt. Juan Campos to music, James evinces a longing for home that’s beyond homesickness, and in it’s true-to-life source, beyond the craft of lyric writing. It’s a touching complement to James’ original songs and the revelations she offers through her selection of covers. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Elana James’ Home Page

James McMurtry: Complicated Game

JamesMcMurtry_ComplicatedGameA welcome return of McMurtry’s experience and imagination

It’s been seven years since singer-songwriter James McMurtry offered up an album of new material. His last release, 2009’s Live in Europe, recontextualized McMurtry’s societal observations in front of a European audience, and though the songs took on new shades in front of a foreign audience, the CD was still more of a tour memento than a new statement. Which leaves 2008’s Just Us Kids as his last full thesis. At the time, McMurtry’s observation fell upon broad social issues of political disorder, social isolation, economic disruption and ecological destruction. Seven years later, his concerns haven’t abated, but his songs narrow their focus to witness these larger issues at human scale.

The album’s opening track, “Copper Canteen,” finds its aging protagonists struggling to hang on to their small town life. The big box stores on the bypass loom over them, reframing broad questions about mass-scale marketing to personal issues of an individual town’s demise. Their fears find salve in nostalgic thoughts and the hope that they can hold on to retirement, as they remain fatalistic rather than desperate or bitter. Nostalgia threads through many of McMurtry’s new songs, with wanderers looking back to see where they lost the trail and community totems memorialized by those who remember. The portraits of hard-working fishermen, hard-luck ranchers and unemployed veterans are both inspiring and heartbreaking, and blend easily into songs of depression and escape.

Peeking through the darker scenes, there are a few glimmers of sunshine. The everyday details of “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” are rattled off in a monologue whose agitation reveals the narrator’s unspoken feelings, and the portraiture of “Things I’ve Come to Know” stems from the sort of intimacy that is born of time and devotion. On its surface, the album feels less overtly political than Just Us Kids, but the incisiveness of the lyrics turns these individuals’ stories into social commentary. McMurtry labels himself a writer of fiction, but the details he captures in songs like “Carlisle’s Haul” are too visceral to have been read in a book. He may fictionalize, but the people, places and language are as much experience as they are imagination.

Co-produced by CC Adcock (Lafayette Maquise, Lil’ Band O’ Gold) and engineer Mike Napoutiano, the guitar-bass-and-drums are augmented by well-placed touches of banjo and violin, and given added dimension from Hammond B3 (courtesy of Benmont Tench), moog bass (courtesy of Ivan Neville), Uilleann pipes, and various electric guitar sounds. The longer songs give the band a chance to play into the grooves, but the productions never lose sight of the vocals. McMurtry is a singer who tells stories, and a storyteller who sings melodies. At times he sounds like a more-melodic Lou Reed, with a half-spoken, half-sung style whose medium and message are inseparable. Seven years is a long time to wait for a new album, but in addition to McMurtry’s busy road schedule, songs this finely observed spring from experience rather than demand. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

James McMurtry’s Home Page

Gurf Morlix: Eatin’ at Me

GurfMorlix_EatinAtMeCircumstance, disappointment and nostalgia yield unexpected insights

Two years ago, Gurf Morlix’s Finds the Present Tense, found the singer-songwriter contending with noir-like inevitability and consequences. His protagonists were hung-up in the here-and-now, at intersections whose resolutions were one-way streets to the future. His new collection shifts the timeframe, looking back at a gritty childhood whose future was surprisingly open-ended. Unlike the fixed destinies of his fictional protagonists, Morlix’s own future was not set in stone by earlier events. The disappointments of “50 Years” yields surprises, and the smoke-filled air of “Born in Lackawana” didn’t obscure the choice between life in the steel mill and roads that led out of town. Morlix’s nostalgia is colored by the melancholy of time, and the distortions of his rear-view mirror leaves the temptations of “Dirty Old Buffalo” barely visible beneath the city’s newly polished exterior.

Morlix’s gruff tone and deliberate tempos are a piece with his songs of despondency, loneliness and exhaustion. But these emotional crucibles also produce resolve, such as that underpinning “Grab the Wheel,” and lifelines that remain visible in even the darkest of places. Redemption isn’t always at hand, however, and self-awareness isn’t necessarily a saving grace; some setbacks can only be moderated, and invitations, such as the bar in “Elephant’s Graveyard,” can turn out to be a trap. Morlix picks at the details of missed opportunities as if they’re a scab protecting healing flesh; but at the same time he’s searching for kernels of truth, such as found in a canine’s view of “A Dog’s Life,” or penetrating human insights, as essayed in the closing “Blue Smoke.” The search may be eatin’ at him, but it’s a fulfilling emotional and intellectual meal. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Gurf Morlix’s Home Page

Butchers Blind: Destination Blues

coverThe disillusions of age in twangy alt.country time

Long Island-based Butchers Blind has developed an impressive catalog of original country-rock over the past five years. Over that time, the band’s playing, arrangements and recordings have tightened up, and vocalist Pete Mancini’s songwriting has deepened. His latest collection meditates in large part on the disillusioning realizations that come with age, including disaffection from work, the banality of static relationships, the recognition of one’s own selfishness, and perhaps worst of all, the inability to sustain the passions of youth. You can hear the hoarse, reedy tone of Jeff Tweedy in Mancini’s voice, but there’s a thread of lament that provides the album’s dominant mood. Fans of Wilco, Son Volt and the Jayhawks will quickly cotton to Butchers Blind, and they’ll be pleased to find the band’s music stands on the shoulders of alt.country giants rather than follows blindly in their footsteps. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

Butchers Blind’s Home Page

Amy McCarley: Jet Engines

AmyMcCarley_JetEnginesWant, desire and a dose of pragmatic pessimism

It’s little surprise that singer-songwriter Amy McCarley developed an early affection for co-producer Kenny Vaughan’s work with Lucinda Williams. She writes from a similar emotional place as Williams, and her vocals evidence the same sort of moaning world-weariness. She’s at once resigned to and responsible for the outcomes of her decisions, whether it’s a painful morning-after or even more painful personal realization. But even with a history filled with signposts, her tiptoeing gives way to wading and headlong dives, and she often finds herself tangled in others’ webs of emotion and deceit.

McCarley explores the tension between the ties that bind and an urge to escape. She sings of running towards new experience in “Head Out of Town,” but subtly undermines her direction with a revelation in the last verse. She weighs the ache of losing against the emptiness of not playing, and on “Won’t Last Forever” she proves herself a pragmatic pessimist who enjoys the fruits of relationships before their inevitable rot. Like Williams, there’s desire and want in McCarley’s songs, but also a feisty thread of individuality; it’s the relief of the latter against the former that adds personal notes to themes that ring with universal appeal.

Producers Vaughan and George Bradfute draw out McCarley’s varied moods with mixtures of electric and acoustic guitars, bass and drums, ranging from rainy day introspection to upbeat Saturday night carousing. McCarley feeds off the collaboration, setting her vocals deeply into the pocket and letting the music give her lyrics a sympathetic frame. The twangy “Turn the Radio On” recalls the music of Albert Brumley’s gospel classic “Turn Your Radio On,” though its call-to-loving is on a different spiritual plane, and the album’s title track has a reggae undertow in its rhythm. McCarley’s self-titled debut showed that she had the songwriting goods, and with the help of Vaughan and Bradfute she’s found a new level of expression in the studio. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

Amy McCarley’s Home Page

Ronnie Fauss: Built to Break

RonnieFauss_BuiltToBreakLate-blooming Americana singer-songwriter brings punk-rock brio

Singer-songwriter Ronnie Fauss seemed to materialize from the ether with his 2012 label debut, I Am the Man You Know I’m Not. And though his public career as a musician started late, he’d been self-releasing EPs alongside a life that included both profession and parenthood. Like many late blooming artists, Fauss came to his craft with something more to express than the intense, but often callow emotions of youth. As a Texan and label mate of John Hiatt and Steve Earle, Fauss’ characters and stories are informed by the state’s songwriting heritage, but his music mixes a healthy dose of rock ‘n’ roll with its twang. He takes it down to acoustic guitars and fiddle for several tracks, but electric guitar, bass and drums form much of the album’s core, suggesting the Long Ryders, David Lindley and others who straddled the divide.

Fauss’ singing may remind you of Social Distortion’s Mike Ness, with a similar punk-rock brio fronting the wear of every day living. Fauss’ protagonists are long on enumerating their shortcomings, though often short-changed on remediation. The down-tempo “The Big Catch” offers a bleak picture of dysfunctional parenting echoing from one generation to the next, and “Never Gonna Last,” sung as a duet with Jenna Paulette, turns on the hook, “I ain’t never been more lonely / than the time I spent hanging around you.” His characters race one another to be the first out the door, leaving them oddly disappointed when they lose. The Old 97’s Rhett Miller guests on the trucking-themed “Eighteen Wheels,” supplemented by Chris Tuttle’s rousing piano, and a cover of Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” repatriates its opening nod to “Ring of Fire.”

Those with holiday depression may want to steer clear of “I’m Sorry Baby (That’s Just the Way it Goes),” in which Fauss relates an aging mother’s lonely Christmas. Whether the song is arch or callous is unclear, but it’s effective. There’s a note of remorse in “I Can’t Make You Happy,” but the tone is more fatigued surrender than prolonged sorrow. The closing “Come on Down” is a poignant lament whose siren’s call and working-class strength are underlined by Devin Malone’s sorrowful steel guitar. The song provides a thoughtful ending to an album that reflects on the realities of adulthood and their roots in (and on-going repercussions to) childhood trajectories. Those who enjoyed Jonny Two Bags recent Salvation Town will find a kindred musical spirit in Ronnie Fauss, and those who haven’t heard either should start right here. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

Ronnie Fauss’ Home Page