Colorful Comments and Music From A Common Man

As you may have noticed, The Broadside was broadsided in April, so I’ve combined it with the month of May to give you two-thirds of a season. I won’t trouble you with my troubles, but there are some glitches on the website that are beyond my skill set, and since we’ve last connected I have moved from one place to another which took a lot of time and energy. It felt quite liberating making trip after trip to the local recycling center and the Goodwill drop-off, as I said goodbye to a mountain of possessions I no longer need, as if I needed them in the first place. The albums and CDs, not played in a dozen years, survived. Most books did not. Clothes and shoes older than my twenty-something kids were discarded, and I kept only a few gold records out of the two dozen or so that once adorned my walls. Only two have been hung up, and the rest are resting in the closet.

Here’s the thing about gold or platinum records: they’re handed out like candy to every Tom, Dick, Sally and Carol. They aren’t earned, they are a stroke of ego given mostly to those who had little to do with their success. The first round rightously goes to the musicians, composers, band members, producer and manager, and other people on the creative team.  And then the second batch go to us weasels: label people, distributors wholesalers, retailers, radio stations and a whole boatload of freeloaders. Anyway, most of mine hit the trash can because I wasn’t about to go through the trouble of posting them on eBay, like many of my former music biz friends have done.

Meanwhile, since I last posted there’s been a war, the Supreme Court is probably going to take away fifty-years of women’s rights, supermarkets are now considered soft targets for the radical right racists, and we’ve learned that the pandemic isn’t quite over as many musicians are having to interrupt their tours or go out solo while leaving the band behind. This week here in NY, we were told to start wearing the masks again while indoors, as cases are rising rapidly. Other states are following. And as music festival season is kicking off, some returning for the first time since 2019, we’ll likely need to be flexible in our expectations as performers on the bill will likely shift often.

Can We Please Get To The Music Now?

Anybody else notice that there’s been more new music coming out this year than the last two years combined? Likely an overstatement, but there does seem to be a growing list, week after week, and I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to listen more while  discarding the things I’ve tried hard to like but just couldn’t. Yes, Spring cleaning.

Pharis and Jason Romero 

Here’s the first song from their forthcoming album, Tell ’Em You Were Gold, out on 17th June 2022 on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Their seventh album was written and recorded at the couple’s homestead in Horsefly British Columbia in an old barn that they restored  themselves, milling their own spruce, hoisting beams, and rebuilding a roof originally covered in tin printing plates, all done between building banjos, adventuring outdoors, and loving up their two kids. I love these folks.

The Hanging Stars

Wearing their cosmic country and late 60s West Coast folk-rock influences on their sleeve, embroidered with seams of Crosby Stills and Nash and The Byrds, recorded at Edwyn Collins’ Helmdale studios in Scotland, The Hanging Star’s fourth album Hollow Heart is their best yet. (folk radio.co.uk) The band is based in London and they cite a long list of reference points from Fairport to the Byrds, but they bring on their own unique sound that borders on psych-folk-cosmic-power pop, without the pop.

Erin Rae

Erin Rae makes gentle music that’s easy to listen to over and over again, and yet it is never boring. The Nashville songwriter’s 2018 album Putting on Airs established this strength with 12 impeccable, minimalist recordings that showcased her subtle vocal style and acoustic guitar playing: It also demonstrated a consistent gift for writing earworms. With her latest album, Lighten Up, Rae keeps the songwriting focused and tight while broadening her stylistic palette, landing on a sound that’s less acutely folksy and more classic, unpretentious pop music. (Pitchfork)

Eddie Berman

His fourth album Broken English (released in January) is a modern folk commentary on our tenuous American life–written before the pandemic. Though performed on guitar, the songs were written on the banjo. “With the fingerpicking, flat-picking style I play there’s sort of the bones of the melody baked into whatever I’m playing. When I come up with a progression I like, I turn on a recorder and just start singing to it off the top of my head — sometimes gibberish, sometimes fully formed thoughts, usually a combination of the two. And then at some indeterminate, later point, I’ll take all that subconscious/left brain shit and try to turn it into something more coherent.” (Spin)

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway

For her recent album, Crooked Tree, Molly put together a list of supporting bluegrass and Americana musicians that would catch anyone’s eye: Gillian Welch, Billy Strings, Sierra Hull, Dan Tyminski, Margo Price, Jason Carter, Tina Adair, Old Crow’s Ketch Secor, and Jerry Douglas, who produced the album. With all the songs co-written by Tuttle, the album serves as a reflection of her past in many ways; her love of music as a child, her home town of San Francisco, her challenges and her maturation. (musicfestnews.com)

Billy Strings (and Post Malone)

Hard to connect Billy with Molly, as they represent a new tradition of kids raised on bluegrass festivals with parents who are exceptional players, and have morphed into something new and different. Not surprising that they were room mates when they moved to Nashville, and that their increased popularity seems in synch. Billy has turned out to be more of a live concert creature, constantly on the road and tapping into the work ethic as well as joining the extended family of the Grateful Dead. This video features the unlikely rapper/country-lovin’ Post Malone, and I’m telling you….I sing this song all day, every day since I first saw it.

Kieran Kane & Rayna Gellert

(Wait! Didn’t you post this in March? Yes. What’s your point?)

Kieran Kane’s a folk-music lifer, known for his work in the all-star trio Kane Welch Kaplin and his killer songs, which have been recorded by big names like John Prine and Emmylou Harris. Rayna Gellert’s a world-class fiddler who grew up playing old-time music before finding success in the 2000s with her string band Uncle Earl. Together, they’re not an odd couple, but a finely tuned folk duo whose parts fit together perfectly. The songs on their third album The Flowers That Bloom In The Spring are built from memorable melodies, homespun harmonies, hard times, heartbreak, and the clarion sound of strings plucked, strummed, and bowed. (Bandcamp)

Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage

Making the best of a bad situation, when the pandemic struck, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage revised plans for their third album Ink of the Rosy Morning and recorded the album while holed up in an old seaside schoolhouse in Hastings. They stripped arrangements back to basics with just two guitars and emerged with a collection of mostly traditional numbers subtitled A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America. The album opens with their voices mingling on gorgeous harmony for the twin fingerpicking of A Winter’s Night, more strictly A-Roving On A Winter’s Night, an Appalachian folk tune learnt from the repertoire of Doc Watson, followed by some nimble fretwork with Hannah singing lead for the equally traditional Appalachian murder ballad Polly O Polly. (folk radio.co.uk)

Hannah and Ben have released three albums together since 2016, and they each are from the UK but seem to have travelled extensively. They’ve toured throughout North America, Europe and of course the UK, playing a hybrid of American roots and traditional folk music. Spiral Earth wrote ” This is folk music for everyone – a master-class in proficiency, an exercise in individuality and a declaration of love of the folk tradition from both sides of the Atlantic’. This last clip is the song that led me to them, appearing on a playlist built on an algorithm of my taste in music. It worked.

R. Crumb….just because.