Category Archives: Articles

A Note of Thanks to Lucinda Williams

Had I stuck to my plan, you’d likely be reading about the emergence of cowboy hats in roots music, after the genre enjoyed a brief fling with the fedora. Coupled with prairie couture, this year has seen a subtle shift in fashion and style among the younger set in particular, and it seemed to be a topic of interest that I am admittedly and imminently unprepared and unqualified to speak of. While I was nevertheless going to regale you with the history of the Stetson and bring in scientific theory as to why the ten-gallon hat holds only three quarts of liquid, a postscript to this year’s award show at the Americana Music Festival felt like it should take precedent.

I’m sure some of you already have heard that Lucinda Williams, along with her co-producers Tom Overby and Greg Leisz, received the album of the year honors for Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, her sprawling and sparkling collection of 20 songs that clocks in at 135 minutes or thereabouts. It’s an album that has received much praise from music writers and bloggers on websites such as this, as well as in daily newspapers and monthly magazines. In his review that was published last year in The New York Times, Ben Ratliff wrote:

She’s pithy and penetrating, bruised but steadfast, proud of the grain and drawl of her voice. Her music places itself in a vanishing, idealized Southland where country, soul, blues and gospel all share a common spirit and a vocabulary of twang, and where life lessons can be delivered by a bar band.

Her new songs are full of advice, empathy and testimony to obstacles that have been overcome, or will be.

Fred Mills at Blurt described the album as “a snapshot — or feature-length film, take your pick — of a 61-year old woman fully renewed and at the height of her creative powers.” And Andy Gill at The Independent said that it “may be the best work of her career, a compelling survey of love and life to challenge the bitter insights of West and World without Tears.”

As these reviews mirrored my own listening experience, it pleased me to hear the news of this recognition. Williams is a beloved outlier who I connected with through her self-titled Rough Trade cassette, and Overby is an old friend. Admittedly I don’t usually pay close attention to polls and awards, and the concept that there is just one song, one album, or one artist that is better than the rest sort of gnaws at me.

There was a time in my life where I could argue for hours about the merits of one album over another. I was very opinionated about what I felt was good or bad, to the point where speaking or writing in a condescending tone was my default position. Somewhere along the line, I became agnostic in my relationship toward music. In other words, its all good. Or, an even better way to say it: it’s all respected.

It never ceases to astonish me that a series or pattern of notes, words, and/or beats can create a highly individualized emotional and physical experience. This past year, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone took me exactly to the space that the title promised. You can figure out for yourself if you think it was the best or not. For me, it’s just another reason why I love music. And while I’ve got no trophy to hand out, this will have to serve as my own thank you note for a job well done.

This was originally published at No Depression dot com, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

On America, Xenophobia and Los Lobos: Dream In Blue

Today in America, there is a demagogue who spends much of his time whipping pale-faced crowds into a frenzy of fear and hate with xenophobic speeches that have been designed to distort reality. That reality is that we are a nation of many colors that has nourished and embraced multi-cultural influences and diversity for generations. Against a backdrop of nonstop news-tainment that assaults our senses on a daily basis and fogs the political landscape with opinions and analyses from pundits that create much ado about nothing comes a new book about a band of musicians who have spent over four decades making music that has helped to break down the walls between us. Like a pin stuck in a balloon that releases a rush of hot air, Los Lobos: Dream In Blue by Chris Morris is a riveting historical narrative that speaks as much to the American experience as it does to the music.

Morris is a respected journalist, disc jockey, and ethnomusicologist whom I’ve known since the mid-’80s, when he was covering the independent music beat for Billboard magazine. He is an eyewitness to Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles’ early journey into the Hollywood club scene, and the music highways and byways that they’ve travelled down through the years. Using their recording career as his lantern, Morris lets the story of this band be told in their own words, with the inclusion of interviews from collaborators and his own insightful observations and memories. Published this month by the University of Texas Press, it should be of interest to many that Dream In Blue is from the American Music Series whose editors are David Menconi and No Depression co-founder Peter Blackstock.

Earlier this summer, on the banks of the Hudson River an hour north of Manhattan, I stood in a steady rain by the side of the stage and felt an incredible energy that Los Lobos unleashed with their afternoon set at the Clearwater Festival. It was impossible to keep still as my feet and body joined those around me in a 45-minute tribal dance of both young and old. The music they create is a language we can all speak and understand, and like using the phrase “rooted and rocked” when I describe them to the uninitiated. If you’ve seen them live, you already know they rock. But if you don’t know their story, you miss the roots.

Dream in Blue takes you back into time, until the light turns on inside your head and you understand that Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, and Steve Berlin are not simply outliers from La Raza, East of Los Angeles (though Berlin grew up in Philadelphia, as did I), but that the music they make is influenced by the same baby boomer FM radio shows and TV shows, like Ed Sullivanand Shindig, that many of us grew up with. Both Rosas and Hildalgo are quoted about what they were listening to as teens, and it mirrors my own East Coast, white-bred exposure. The Stones, the Beatles, Presley, Hendrix, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Aretha, Sam and Dave, James Brown, Canned Heat, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band. It’s an alphabetical musical soup, the diversion — with my own Deadhead path — occurs in the early ’70s when they tapped into their Hispanic lineage at the height of the Chicano renaissance in Los Angeles and started playing folk music with traditional instruments at parties, weddings, and restaurants.

How Los Lobos navigated the move to performing electric in front of the Mohawk-hair generation, enjoyed success with the soundtrack from La Bamba, dealt with music business missteps and never stopped experimenting and collaborating is a fascinating tale. The book was a fast read for me; I was unable to put it down. Morris excels at keeping the storyline moving with equal measures of factlets and anecdotes.

The book was also successful in getting me to do something I’ve been putting off for too long: taking the time to listen to Los Lobos’ catalog again — including their new album, Gates of Gold — and watching their videos. Perhaps more important, Dream in Blue brings into sharper focus a truer narrative of what growing up and being successful in America looks like. And it sure ain’t about building walls.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Angela Easterling and My No Depression Friends

From the Angela Easterling Facebook Page

This was originally published at No Depression dot com, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column. Although many fans of the roots music/Americana/alt-country or whatever other genre you want to call it remember the magazine of the same name, it ceased publication back in 2008 and was replaced by an online entity. Shortly after it started up I began to submit articles, reviews, observations and ramblins’. Back then, everything on the website was community content…meaning it was submitted by and for like-minded (sometimes) music fans. In time things changed; the original publisher sold it to FreshGrass and it’s gone through significant transition of design elements, paid content (like my Broadside column) and that old-timey community feel where people of common interests met and exchanged ideas. Angela Easterling is one of those people.

This week many of us will open our mailboxes and receiving the first print edition of No Depression in seven years. And while it may not necessarily replicate the same experience that longtime readers of the magazine’s previous print run had back in the day, I anticipate that it’s likely to be the best reasonable facsimile that one could ever hope for. And when the accolades to all of the people who worked hard to put words back onto paper fades out, and the complaints of “it ain’t the same thing as the old thing” go blowing into the wind, it might be best to stand back for a moment and marvel at the house that Peter, Grant, and Kyla built. For it’s neither simply the ink on paper nor words on a computer screen that have been sown from the seeds of ND’s two decades of existence, but a new generation of musicians, fans, pundits, critics, archivists, writers, readers, videographers, composers, lyricists, creators, aggregators, and networkers that have created a cultural community that seems to endure and thrive.

I met Angela Easterling on this website shortly after it launched in early 2009. Back then there seemed to be just a few hundred of us post-print, zombie-like survivors who bothered to log on, read whatever there was to read, watch videos, post content, and hope that something would come out of it. Peter and Grant were both submitting articles in the beginning, Kyla was focused on building advertising revenue from the embers of a scorched music retail landscape, and Kim Ruehl (who’s now the editor of ND) was scouting for articles and reviews by encouraging both professional writers and amateur hacks such as myself to contribute. Unlike the “letters to the editor” that the old school magazines printed in each edition, these new online articles had a comments section that allowed for immediate feedback, which included expansion of original thoughts, corrections and arguments, raging controversies and, ultimately, friendships. Instant karma.

Angela had recently moved back to South Carolina after spending time in the Los Angeles area attending school, and I think she had already put out her first album in 2007. We had conversations in the comment sections, and when I began to post articles, we connected on Facebook and got to know each other beyond just our musical interests. She was one of the first people to send me a CD (BlackTop Road) and ask if I might like to write about it it, but Michael Bialas beat me to the punch and posted his review in August of 2009.

For the next few years, I watched Angela personify the DIY spirit by traveling on the road from gig to gig, recording and releasing her albums without benefit of a record label or distribution team, competing at festivals, knocking down radio station doors, and using social media to not only gain fans but make friends. When I posted a story in April 2011 about independent musicians and the difficult times they faced while they tried to make a living, she set me straight:

I get a bit tired of people who want to commiserate with me and try to tell me how terrible my life is because I’m an indie musician. ‘Oh it’s sooo hard, you work so long and for so little money etc., etc.’, they say. Yes, it is a lot of work, there are parts of it that aren’t always fun and I’m not always thrilled with the progress I’m making and/or my finances. Rest assured, you are not informing me of something I don’t already know. But nobody tied me down and made me do this. I absolutely love what I do and I feel so lucky and blessed to be living this life.

As the years have rolled on, I’ve watched as Angela fought to keep her family’s farm — where she lives today. I’ve put up with her Boston Red Sox and Mad Men fan-girl rants, read her intimate thoughts posted on Facebook about life, love and family, celebrated birthdays and career highlights, engaged in political and environmental discussions, listened to and loved her music, and got to share in her happiness when she and her guitarist Brandon Turner began a committed relationship. They now have a little boy they each adore, and last week they announced that she was expecting again. With her new album Common Law Wife getting strong airplay on Americana format radio and moving rapidly up the charts, as great reviews are coming in almost every day, I’m guessing that Angela must feel as if she’s won a double header against the Yankees.

I heard “Hammer” back in January 2015 and told Angela that I thought it was one of the best songs she’s ever written. By March, I had the complete album, and it immediately got lost in our apartment until the end of the month. By April I was playing it every day in the car and couldn’t wait to share it. But, considering its August release date, I held off. Over time, I moved on. Until this week. I’ve been thinking about her, the growing family, the music she’s been making and how she has moved through the years with dignity and grace. Like I mentioned, the reviews have been exceptional and with a couple of months of touring in front of her, it feels like it’s her time to break through to a wider audience.

When people think of No Depression, they often reminisce about the magazine and talk about the great articles, reviews, and graphics. They talk about the story of how a musically like-minded community came together for a period of time in the mid-’90s and held on tight for 13 years until the original magazine came to an end and morphed into … whatever this is. And while I am sitting on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the new print edition, its really been the people I’ve met along the way that makes this whole thing so special and unique for me. And my friend Angela Easterling is one of those people.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Pairing Tom Brosseau with Modern Art

The last time I went to an art museum by myself was probably never. I can recall middle school field trips, romantic dates on Sunday afternoons, and slouching through exhibitions in pack formation with my kids who were neither bored nor overly enchanted. With the youngest now off to college and my empty nest being the new norm, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on a hot summer night seemed in order.

Times have changed since my being-dragged-to-the-art-museum days, and I hadn’t anticipated a sea of selfie-stick-wielding tourists more interested in taking pictures than looking at them. For my part, it felt right to detach aurally by pumping Tom Brosseau’s music into my ears on a continuous loop, as soon as I walked through the door.

I’ve always suspected that I don’t behave properly at museums. Some people stand in front of a painting for what seems like an ungodly amount of time, staring at it until their eyeballs slither over their cheeks and onto the floor. Others like to read the little cards that have the name of the artist listed, when and where they were born and died, the name of the artwork and what they used to create it (“olive oil and burnt sienna sage on bleached linen with Albanian mud, lamb’s wool, and distilled gin”).

I, meawnhile, prefer a method of migratory motion and furtive glances, and Brosseau provided me with a soundtrack that served to enhance the visual experience by adding thoughtful lyricism, unexpected chord and rhythmic transitions, and shimmering under-production, all around a single microphone.

If you don’t know Brosseau, you should know that neither did I until I saw him at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, performing in a variety of configurations. He is a mainstay of John Reilly and Friends, which usually includes Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond on vocals and a bunch of other folks who slip in and out as they are able. At the Watkins Family Hour post-festival show, he performed solo and also did a few songs with Reilly. At some point Sean and Sara Watkins made it a quartet.

Looking in the window from far across the continent, I’m imagining that there is a strong alliance between both of the Friends and Family collectives with a cadre of Los Angeles-based players that appear on each other’s albums, perform together at shows, sing each other’s songs, are tapped into the art and film circles, and telegraph dotted lines of connectivity to other like-minded musical communities throughout the globe.

Brosseau is a California transplant originally from North Dakota, and trying to pin down an accurate discography proves to be a challenge. A friend has provided me with a make-believe digital box full of uncredited songs that come from several sources. There’s the Les Shelleys album on FatCat Records with partner Angela Correa, Brousseau’s seven-inch single of Delmore Brothers’ tunes with Reilly, the Grand Forks project produced by Gregory Page and John Doe, featuring Hilary Hahn on vocals, and his solo Grass Punks album, which Sean Watkins produced. I suppose I could leave you with lots of links, but I think it’s much more fulfilling to strike out on your own as if panning for gold.

Listening to Perfect Abandon while letting my eyes wander over a disconnected collection of modern artwork by artists ranging from Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol, turned out to be a perfect union. This is music rooted in the traditional, yet pushed beyond the borders to allow something new to bubble up. With Brosseau’s album, my ears heard the footfalls of both Woody Guthrie and Lou Reed; the lone prairie met the metropolis. It was a wonderful choice for the evening and, by any measure, it was a most excellent pairing.

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

1975 Rewind: Pet Rocks & Bruce to Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes

I doubt that anyone could have missed the news this week that, 40 years ago, Bruce Springsteen released his Born to Run album. Somebody somewhere was working hard behind the scenes, getting the word out. Stories popped up all over major television networks and cable channels, national magazines, local newspapers and morning shows, trade publications, websites, social media, and blogs. There were the usual suspects like Rolling Stone and Billboard magazines, as well as the unexpected mentions at Fox Sports and the Absolute Punk website.

I was 23 in 1975, and living in Philadelphia, which was close enough to Freehold and Asbury Park that we considered Springsteen a local boy. His first two albums were played in heavy rotation on our FM radio stations. He performed often in the area, up and down the mid-Atlantic coast. And in February of that year he and the band delivered a spellbinding set at Bryn Mawr’s famed folk club, The Main Point. It was broadcast live on WMMR, was instantly bootlegged, and, remarkably, is still readily available in both the US and UK on a large internet marketplace that begins with the letter A. And you can stream it on the ‘Tube. This clip was shot later that same year in London and the band was still raw and rockin’.

Although my long-term memory is usually laser sharp, when it comes to the mid-’70s, I admit to having a musically blank slate. I suppose we can just chalk it up to high times and one too many Dead concerts, but today I refreshed my brain by scanning all the releases from 1975. I also looked at the singles and album charts and read back issues of the industry trades. It took a little time of sifting through the mud to spot the gems.

The first release of that year was from Elvis Presley and the last in December was from the Bay City Rollers. The number one song was “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille (backed by The Wrecking Crew — catch the fabulous documentary film of the same name). At the bottom of the Top 100 for the year was….wait…I’ll get to it in a sec or two.

On a more roots music tip, a few artists released not just one, but two albums. Dylan had Blood on the Tracks and also The Basement Tapes with The Band. Emmylou Harris brought out Elite Hotel and Pieces of the Sky. Richard and Linda Thompson offered Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Chip Taylor, and Joan Baez each delivered their highest charted albums. There were solo albums from Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, John Fogerty, Stephen Stills, and two from Neil Young.

John Prine, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Steve Goodman, Fairport Convention, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Strawbs, Steeleye Span. Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie all released albums that year. So did Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, Hot Tuna, Little Feat, and Guy Clark. Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings, Stanley Brothers, Statler Brothers, Roy Clark, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Kris Kristofferson, and Chris LeDoux released new albums and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger entered the world. All things considered, not a bad year at all.

Now if any of you out there remember Sir Monti Rock III, congratulations. You’ve managed to maintain your brain cells much better than I. Sitting at the bottom of the Top 100 was his band, Disco Tex and The Sex-O-Lettes. I share this video for educational purposes only, and please be advised of momentary nudity with Saturday Night Fever flashbacks.

https://youtu.be/IDIPRxSZfMs

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.

Anais Mitchell Writes, Billy Bragg Sings, Trump Strikes Fear

We were sitting at a table in our local diner owned by a Greek family, eating lunch and discussing the latest headlines from the Sunday morning news shows about Donald Trump. His position on immigration had just been posted on his website and I was already stuck on the first of his three core principals: “A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.” Not to be contrary or sarcastic, but has anybody thought about Canada lately? If the issue is safety and security, it would seem that we’d want to protect ourselves on all fronts. But that’s not what a wall is really about.

As the conversation took its course, I began to wonder out loud if putting up a barrier to keep people out might also have the unanticipated effect of keeping people contained. Thoughts of the authorities, in the middle of the night, rounding up families who’ve lived here for decades, whose children were born within these borders and are protected under the Constitution, made me think of the politics and tactics of Germany and the Soviet Union. Their wall was called the Iron Curtain, and the government suspended liberties; jailed dissenters; banned books, music, and art; crawled into isolationism; and created a society with a teensy-weensy segment of the population who lived in luxury and privilege, while the majority toiled in poverty.

About to go off on a long tangential rant, my friend stopped me and asked, “Do you know that song about walls on Anais Mitchell’s album Hadestown? It’s a duet with Greg Brown. Check it out, because I think there might be a thread there for you to pull at.”

And so I did. And so there was.

Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?

Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

Both of my parent’s parents came to America from Eastern Europe sometime around the turn of the last century. When my father died, we heard a story from an older relative who would seemingly know such things that my paternal grandfather escaped from extreme poverty and political oppression in Russia by using falsified documents for his entry through Ellis Island. I imagine it was probably his parents who you could blame for this act of illegal immigration, as he was only four or five at the time. When he turned 18 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and went off into battle during the first world war — the one they called “The War to End All Wars.”

How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?

How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

After my grandfather was discharged from the service, he hung wallpaper for a living and married a woman who worked in a clothing factory for long hours, short breaks, no benefits, and low wages. She later became a union organizer. My father was born, a sister followed, and when the Great Depression arrived, they lived in a small, two-bedroom house in South Philadelphia. Having a roof over their heads made them pretty lucky, and their good fortune was shared by other relatives. A total of three families that included grandparents, husbands, wives, and lots of children lived together in that little house. Over the years, the family assimilated and thrived, and to my knowledge, none of them were sent to prison or ended up on welfare, and there was not a rapist or murderer in the bunch.

Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children
Who do we call the enemy?

Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

My folks were married just as this country entered the second world war and my dad enlisted in the Air Force. After he completed his service, he used his veteran’s benefits to go to night school and earn a degree in engineering. They saved for years to buy a house in the suburbs using a government-backed mortgage, and with my mom also in the work force, they always took care of our needs, paid their bills on time, felt it a duty and honor to be able to vote or be called to serve on a jury. They were good citizens. Beyond just patriotism, they were grateful to have been born and raised in this country. Their generation, these children of immigrants, called it the American Dream.

Because we have and they have not!
My children, my children
Because they want what we have got!

Because we have and they have not!
Because they want what we have got!
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

José Palazón captured that image I used at the top of this column. Those are African migrants sitting on top of a border fence between Morocco and Spain’s North African enclave of Melilla. I believe it to be a strong visual image as to why and to what lengths economic inequalities force people to move geographically, just as my parent’s parents did.

As I stare at that photo and listen to the words of men like Donald Trump who urge us to build walls and deport our own brown-skinned immigrant neighbors, I detest this rhetoric of fear and the media manipulation that fans the fires of hatred. We’re in another political season, and those with large egos and loud voices eclipse our values, sense of reason, and fairness. If you want to make America great, don’t make America hate. Our country and our people deserve better.

“Why We Build This Wall” was written by Anais Mitchell, and performed this past June by Billy Bragg. If anyone is looking for a musical antidote for these times, this might be it.

https://youtu.be/8bQB41kEsYw

Anais Mitchell posted these words on her website about Hadestown and “Why We Build This Wall”:

“To me the essence of ‘Why We Build the Wall’ is, it’s meant to provoke the question. Take global warming to its terrifying logical conclusion and imagine part of the world becomes uninhabitable and there are masses of hungry poor people looking for higher ground. then imagine you are lucky enough to live in relative wealth and security, though maybe you’ve sacrificed some freedoms to live that way. When the hordes are at the door, who among us would not be behind a big fence? These conditions exist already, but most of us don’t have to acknowledge them in a real way. I really and truly had no specific place in mind when I wrote ‘Why We Build the Wall.’ People often say, ‘Oh, that’s just like Israel/Palestine, or that’s just like the US/Mexico border,’ and maybe it is, but the song was written more archetypally.”

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Families That Play Together

From The Sound of Music

New York City, August 13, 2015: This past Sunday, I took the train and then a subway to the Upper West Side, walked up and down Broadway picking at piles of books sold by street vendors for a mere dollar or two, and found shade in a plaza at Lincoln Center as I watched Iris DeMent perform songs from her new album. I looked around to see if her husband Greg Brown’s daughter Pieta was in the crowd with her spouse, guitarist Bo Ramsey. But if they were there, I missed them.

During the show, and as Iris sang, I pulled out my phone and tapped a message to a mutual friend of ours from Iowa City, photographer Sandy Dyas. Although we’ve never met face to face, we’ve had casual correspondence from time to time, over the years, and I’ve written about her work and featured it in my articles. Along with all of the people I’ve met through my connection with this particular website and music community, I consider Sandy a member of my No Depression family.

In life, love, law, politics, society, civilization, art, music, literature, and pretty much everything else in this world, there are threads that bind us together. While a dictionary might tell you that there are only three specific types of families, the American Academy of Pediatrics lists eight and sociologists can quickly rattle off over a dozen. Some folks might tell you that there is only one kind of family, but my own definition is much broader.

Be it a coupling of two or a group of thousands, we seem to have the capacity to create connections that can have the same feel and offer the same support system as what a traditional family does. Sometimes it endures, other times it evaporates as quickly as it came together. But whether bloodlines or lifelines, and despite a high rate of dysfunction, families often and unpredictably can produce some amazing results.

When Teddy Thompson came up with the idea of having his family work together to release an album last year, his sister Kami tried to back out. As quoted in the New York Times Magazine, she asked him “Could I be like that one Osbourne who’s not on the show, whose name no one knows?”

Nonetheless, Thompson’s Family is probably one of the best collections of songs ever created through emails, file sharing, and studio magic. It features music that is just simply beautiful, from divorced parents Linda and Richard, nephew Zak Hobbs, Richard’s son Jack from his second marriage, and the reluctant sister Kami with her husband James Walbourne who perform as the Rails. (If you haven’t heard the Rails’ album Fair Warning, run don’t walk.)

Explaining to the Times reporter how and why this album came about, Teddy says: “It was difficult to make it sound like everyone’s together, because we weren’t – which is exactly the way my family is. If anything, that kind of sums up the whole process. It’s trying to bring everybody from wherever they are, in their own little world. And make it sound like we’re a family.”

At the end of this year, when all of the writers and bloggers and reader polls put together their “best of” lists, if they don’t include Pharis and Jason Romero’s A Wanderer I’ll Stay, they will be sadly mistaken. While I tend to keep my distance from such beauty contests, it isn’t hard at all to point to this collection and scream, “This is why I love music,” at the top of my lungs. While I’ve enjoyed the story of how another married musical couple – Pete and Maura Kennedy – met at the gravesite of Buddy Holly, Pharis comes in a close second because she sent Jason a 1928 recording of Tupelo Blues by Hoyt Ming and His Pinesteppers, and they had a wedding three months after. You can read their whole story here, but you should know they live in Horsefly, British Columbia, he is a custom banjo maker, she was the co-founder of Outlaw Social, they were both in The Haints Old Time Stringband, and as a duo they’ve released three near-perfect albums.

For many years, I lived in a small town north of San Diego and attended services and played music on occasion at a small Unitarian congregation in Vista – the town where Sean and Sara Watkins grew up. While it could be a false memory syndrome thing, I’m pretty sure I saw them play, when they were just little people, at some local events.

Ten years ago, all grown up and based in Los Angeles, they created what I like to think of as an ‘Our Gang’ variety show that features an ever-changing cast of characters. We got to see them at last year’s Newport Folk Festival after-party, and it was the highlight of the weekend, which you can read about here.

When they released an album recently, I made the mistake of sampling some tracks on Spotify and stashing it in the virtual file cabinet. On the way to see Iris DeMent, though, I sat on the train and listened to it end to end, start to finish. Brilliant concept, flawless execution. Coming from a man who dwells in the house of shuffle and prefers my music to pop up unexpectedly like a jack in the box, I have to say: you won’t exactly get the concept of The Watkins Family Hour without putting in the time to go all the way. The only family members by blood in this troupe are Sean and Sara. But what’s so special is that, not only are the other musicians in the cousins’ club, but we – the listeners – are in the family too.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.