Tag Archives: Tom Brosseau

My Favorite Un-Americana Music of 2017

Photo by Oliver Zühlke/Creative Commons

This is the season that I try to be the first kid on the block to beat out the barrage of those end-of-the-year lists from critics and pundits. At No Depression, and other like-minded music websites and magazines, the official music polls from readers, contributors, and reviewers will be coming in December. Had I been born a betting man, I’d lay down a few hundred bucks that there’ll be little variation or surprises between any of them. Ever since the term roots music has morphed into a more definable mainstream “Americana” tagline, diversity has seemed to have left the building. While you won’t get much disagreement from me on the quality and depth of music that has been released so far this year, it seems that I continue to find myself taking the road less traveled.

This year it feels as if I’ve been walking down the dark side of the street, whether we’re talking about  art, culture, politics, or simply life in general. There were health issues to deal with and the loss of a parent. I’ve found myself constantly concerned for my children that a madman lives in Washington who is one button away from annihilating the planet when he’s not chipping away at the fabric of our society by normalizing the abnormal. From the racist cries of “blood and soil” to an unjust justice system that tips to white skin and wealth to revelations of what we already know … that bad men do bad things to women and children … and to all the other natural and human disasters we’ve lived through so far, I’m only finding shelter by cocooning with music, books, and video.

So with that bright and shiny preamble, here’s some of my favorite aural oddities and mainstays for the year. As always, I use a different yardstick to measure and compile my list. This is what I have either discovered or gravitated to, undefined by such things as release dates. Whether it was brand new this year or merely recycled from the past, who cares?

The Entire Ry Cooder Catalog

I wish he would have titled one of his albums Pastrami on Ry, and I’m sorry that for most of his career I’ve largely ignored his solo work. Aside from a seemingly infinite number of songs he’s done session work on for others, the only albums I’ve really known inside out have been two from the ’70s: The Gabby Pahinui Band Volume 1 and his solo Bop Til You Drop. So now, thanks to the magic of touch and click streaming, I’m making my way through everything else. While skipping around and sampling from this era and that, I’m spending most of my time with Paradise and Lunch, Into The Purple Valley and Chicken Skin Music.

A Prairie Home Companion

While I know he’s trying his hardest and still growing into his role, Chris Thile’s voice reminds me of Opie Taylor and he’s yet to hone his comedic skills with timing and inflection. But on the other hand, he’s doing an amazing job at making great music with that killer band he’s assembled and presenting exceptional guests week after week. He’s going down the right path but one suggestion would be to please stop referring to Sarah Jarosz as “inimitable.” Why continually state the obvious? Finally, a note about Garrison Keillor. Over the years he’s entertained millions of us and his wit, humor and his support of musicians won’t be forgotten. And while it was sad to witness his termination played out in counterpoint to rapists and serial harassers , he had to go.

David Rawlings

I got a chance to see David and Gillian right before the release of Poor David’s Almanack, and it was the first time I’d ever seen them live in concert. Tickets have always seemed to get swallowed up the minute they go on sale and my budget doesn’t include StubHub. After 21 years of being a devout fan of their partnership, each and every note, song, and harmonic moment gave me a night of multi-orgasmic goosebumps.The album is simply perfect.

Freakwater and The Mekons

In September these two bands reunited as The Freakons and performed two nights in Chicago. Monica Kendrick for The Reader broke the news about a new album they’re now recording. She wrote that it’ll consist of “traditional songs about an industry that links the English Midlands, the Welsh valleys, and the ‘dark and bloody ground’ of Appalachia: coal mining. Haunting tunes in that vein came from both sides of the pond, and the Freakons take them on in the high-lonesome, rabble-rousing tradition of late West Virginian labor singer Hazel Dickens. Proceeds from the album, when it’s finished, will benefit Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a grassroots organization that promotes voting rights and opposes mountaintop-removal mining.”

Rodrigo Amarante

Gotcha … right? A Brazilian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Amarante is a member of Los Hermanos, a band that still plays live but hasn’t recorded since 2005. He partnered with The Strokes drummmer Fabrizio Moretti and American musician Binki Shapiro, who in 2008 released an album on Rough Trade as Little Joy. In 2015 he wrote and recorded “Tuyo,” which has been used as the theme song for the Netflix series Narcos. It’s an earworm.

Tom Brosseau

The ten songs on Treasures Untold were recorded live at a private event in Cologne, Germany. The album features six American folksongs and four originals. Brosseau was born and raised in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where in 2007 the mayor awarded him the key to the city. I think about that often. Since 2003 he’s lived in Los Angeles, has recorded a bunch of albums, and toured Iceland. Well … other places too.

 

Valerie June

I don’t pretend to understand her and I don’t listen to her albums. But I’ve seen her perform twice and she is the modern-day Nina Simone. Undefinable and undeniable.

Tom Russell

He celebrated his 68th birthday last March and has released 29 albums, two of which came just this year. The first was his tribute to his old friends Ian and Sylvia, and now he is out on tour supporting Folk Hotel, a collection of originals. Two shots here: Tom playing with Max De Bernardi “The Last Time I Saw Hank” at Knuckleheads Saloon in Kansas City, Missouri in  September 2017. And while I’ve been enjoying both new albums, I also want to share the song that was my first introduction to Russell and remains my favorite.

 

And to those who passed…

Down that dark side of the street we’ve lost too many folks this past year. I’m not going to list them all here, but we’ll close it out with this … a tribute to them all.

 

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

The One About Doug Sahm and the Jukebox

That photo is a beauty, isn’t it? Wish that old jukebox was mine, but it’s just a stock photo I found somewhere in space and snatched for this week’s column. The plan was to write an update on the Doug Sahm documentary that debuted in 2015 at SXSW, but I got sidetracked when I found this 1959 single he recorded of “Why, Why, Why” and it reminded me of Gilbert’s El Indio on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica.

It’s been over 25 years since I’ve been there, and it was a Friday night destination for years. In addition to serving up the finest margaritas and Mexican food west of Boyle Heights, they had an old school “three for a quarter” jukebox, loaded with mostly 45s from the ’50s and ’60s. My go-to song back in the day was Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and usually by the time we were on our second pitcher of adult beverage I’d stack it up to play a dozen times in a row. But had this one been on there, it might have been a contender.

 

That’s not Doug’s first record, and I don’t really have too much to tell you about the film other than the title: Sir Doug and The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove. I did find a pretty good article about it published at Texas Monthly and a review here on No Depression, which has several video clips including the trailer. It’s been showing at film festivals for the past year or so, and despite exceeding a Kickstarter campaign goal to get it into distribution, seems like it’s not quite a done deal yet. I can’t wait to see it because I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, and his story spans several decades, genres, and memories.

Back to the jukebox … I miss it. When I was a kid my family would often have Sunday night dinners at a place in Philly called the Italian Riviera, and their box was filled with songs from Mario Lanza, Rocco Granata, Caterina Valente, Dean Martin, and Connie Francis – our favorite because cousin Arnold was her producer. But this was probably the most played song of that era: Domenico Modungo’s version of “Volare.”

 

While you can still find them at some bars, there are only two companies left that currently manufacture the coin-operated devices. There’s a bunch of touch screen, digital models being sold, but they just don’t connect with my teenage memories of sitting in a diner and dropping quarters into the slot.

These days I prefer the one that fits in my pocket, can hold 20,000 songs, lets me pay the bills, read the news, get a car, play games, rant on social media, take pictures, and occasionally make a call. I’ll close it out with sharing five songs currently on my “new music” playlist. Three are new or recently found versions of old songs, and two are new songs that just sound old, which sums up how I’m feeling right now.

Chris Hillman
The album Bidin’ My Time was produced by Tom Petty and executive produced by Herb Pedersen and features David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Mike Campbell, Mark Fain, Steve Ferrone, John Jorgenson, Josh Jové, Jay Dee Maness, Benmont Tench, and Gabe Witcher. The album kicks off with a new recording of Pete Seeger’s and Welsh poet Idris Davies’ “The Bells of Rhymney,” which the Byrds recorded for their debut. I believe that’s Crosby and Pedersen doing harmony with Hillman.

 

Joan Shelley
In December 2016, she and guitarist Nathan Salsburg joined Jeff Tweedy in Wilco’s Loft studio for five days. Spencer Tweedy joined on drums, while James Elkington shifted between piano and resonator guitar. Jeff added electric accents and some bass, but mostly he helped the band stay out of its own way.

 

Tom Brosseau
“Treasures Untold is a 10-song collection recorded live at an intimate event in Cologne, Germany. Across six adaptations from the Great American Folksong Book, and four of Brosseau’s own original tunes, he manages to build a dreamy, atmospheric mood with just his voice and an acoustic guitar” – Maeri Ferguson, Glide Magazine

 

Neil Young
A 41-year-old “lost and found” album sounds like it was recorded last week. He says he did it one night strung out on weed, cocaine, and booze, but on most tracks you can hardly tell. Love the animation on this video, which was created by Black Balloon.

 

Richard Thompson
Acoustic Rarities is the third album in a series that began in 2014. These tracks are some of his more obscure material along with some never before released and cover versions. “Sloth” first appeared on Fairport Convention’s 1970 Full House album, and Thompson left the band the following year.

 

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

Easy Ed’s Favorite Un-Americana Albums of 2016

Last week the Americana Music Association released its year-end list of songs that got the most airplay on Americana radio, and in the next few weeks No Depression and other like-minded music websites and mags will publish their own music polls. If I were a betting man, I’d lay down a few hundred dollar bills that there’ll be little variation or surprises between them. Ever since the term roots music has morphed into a more definable mainstream “Americana” tagline, diversity has seemed to have left the building. While you won’t get much disagreement from me on the quality of music on AMA’s list since virtually all of the artists are located somewhere in my digital jukebox, it seems that lately I find myself taking the road less traveled.

Every year I designate much of my listening time on studying music from the past, and this year I dipped deeply into the catalogs of Norman Blake, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Delmore Brothers, Doc Watson, and a lot of jazz: Lucky Millinder, Chick Webb, and several anthologies from the 1920s and ‘30s culled from lost and found 78s. For a few weeks this summer I blasted through the box set This is Reggae Music: Golden Era, which covers only 15 years beginning with 1960, and breaks it down into mento, rocksteady, ska, R&B, early reggae and the birth of roots. Good stuff.

As for albums released in 2016, I’ve come up with a short list of my own favorites that somehow have failed to make the “official” Americana chart, and consequently may be missed in this endless parade of polls and lists that’ll stalk the internet with killer click bait titles. I’m choosing to call it Un-Americana … and that’s a name and a genre descriptor that just might stick.

The Handsome Family – Unseen

“Unseen finds Brett and Rennie Sparks two years after an unexpected spike in popularity due to True Detective fame, while simultaneously finding the duo displaying an outward reverence for the genre and subsequent fan base that has bolstered them to alt-folk antiheroes … one would be hard-pressed to find more true-blue progenitors of the darker side of American music who are still working hard to get you to question a bump in the night.” Jake Tully/Elmore Magazine

Jack and Amanda Palmer – You Got Me Singing

“Amanda Palmer has long been divisive – dedicating poems to bombing suspects, dressing up like a conjoined twin, doing things that make outraged thinkpiece writers jiggle with glee. Her latest album, however, a collection of folk, blues, country, and contemporary covers with her once-estranged 72-year-old dad, Jack, strikes the right chord.” Kate Hutchinson/The Guardian

Marissa Nadler – Strangers

“Marissa Nadler, the galaxy-gazer of American somni-folk, is not of this world. She is an extraterrestrial unloved, a wanderer nonplussed, an inhabitant of a realm that aligns dissonance with wonderment. She is ethereal, moody, and dark like early morning, and with Strangers, Nadler’s seventh full-length album, our indelicate eyes are able to adjust to her clear, clairvoyant lens.” Cassidy McCranney/Slug Magazine

Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms – Innocent Road

“On their new album Innocent Road, Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms stake a claim as two of the finest traditional musicians in America. Their sound is a throwback to the heyday of rural American dance-hall music.” Jerad Walker, NPR Music

Tom Brosseau – North Dakota Impressions

“Tom Brosseau’s unique tenor is instantly recognizable, and it imbues his songs with a palpable feeling of loss, regret and nostalgia. His phrasing, the emotional quiver in his voice and the bare-bones production evoke the feeling of a late-night, working-class living room with friends sharing their most intimate secrets.” j. poet/Magnet 

Kaia Kater – Nine Pin

“The banjo’s recent return to favor has seen the likes of Otis Taylor and Rhiannon Giddens reclaim the instrument as part of African America’s musical roots. Twenty-three-year-old Kaia Kater from Québec studied mountain music in West Virginia and writes songs from the here and now. Her second album manages to triangulate bluegrass, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison.”  Neil Spencer/The Guardian

Dori Freeman – Self-titled

“For the love of God just let the songs speak out and choose their own path, and that’s what happens in this self-titled release. The sentiments are so naked and pure, and as potent to stirring the spirit as the smell of a baby’s head that it awakens more than just an appreciation for music, it awakens an appreciation for life.” Trigger Coroneos/Saving Country Music

Freakwater – Scheherazade

“The darkly austere alt-country group Freakwater has kept their simple, gothic sound consistent through the years, but on their eighth album they overhaul it almost completely. It’s their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to their short, violent songs.” Stephen M. Deusner/Pitchfork

 

Make Americana Great Again: Why We Cherish Those Amazing Polls

donald-trump-neil-young-rockin-free-worldThat is one helluva picture. You might recall that it surfaced this past June after Neil Young demanded that Donald Trump stop using “Rockin’ in the Free World” at his campaign events. Utilizing his standard and preferred method of statesmanship, Trump went on the morning news shows, called Young a bad name, and then tweeted this: “A few months ago Neil Young came to my office looking for $$$ on an audio deal and called me last week to go to his concert. Wow!”

Young, no slouch himself when it comes to using social media, seemed to confirm Trump’s assertion of capitalistic hypocrisy when he wrote on Facebook: “It was a photograph taken during a meeting when I was trying to raise funds for Pono, my online high resolution music service.”

That Neil Young would choose Trump to get cozy with as a potential partner is enough to cause the price of flannel futures to tumble. Besides, in the past several months, Young’s digital entree has entered and floundered into the ether of a disinterested marketplace.

Pushing that particular random thought-bubble aside, it’s time to talk about the annual readers and critics polls that focus on one type of music or another. These are soon to occupy much of our collective time and space via traditional and social media, using the skill sets and wisdom of random cubes tossed together in a Yahtzee cup and spilt onto the countertop. Can we all agree that this excercise produces an inaccurate and imperfect list of superlatives? At the very least, I hope it will open up new avenues of exploration for some folks, as well as simply serving to bolster our own opinions based on an album’s popularity.

It is the former that most excites me because, with well over 120,000 new albums being released each year, there is no possible way to see all, know all, or hear all. It’s the depth and diversity of new music that makes scanning these polls so much fun. Nothing beats discovering something that slipped through the cracks.

In late October, the editor of No Depression:The Roots Music Authority requested a list of my favorite titles (I think she used the word “best”), and this is the list I sent her:

Jason Isbell, Daniel Romano, John Moreland, Pharis and Jason Romero, Tom Brosseau, Noah Gundersen, Watkins Family Hour, Joan Shelley, Milk Carton Kids, and an exceptional concert compilation called Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of a Dreadful Film. (Note to self: Going forward, try to be nicer.)

I’m sure y’all can spot the problem. It was way too exclusive. Narrowing my favorite albums of the year down to ten is just plain silly.

I also would have loved to include releases from Calexico, Jessica Pratt, the Westies, Kristin Andreassen, Joe Pug, Shakey Graves, Sufjan Stevens, The Kennedys, Kepi Ghoulie, Leon Bridges, Meg Baird, the Lonesome Trio, the Deslondes, Frazey Ford, the Skylarks, Kacey Musgraves, Ana Egge, Darrell Scott, Nikki Talley, Lindi Ortega, Dave Rawlings Machine, Jill Andrews, Darlingside, Decemberists, Daniel Martin Moore, Susie Glaze and the Hilonesome Band, and my friends Spuyten Duyvil.

I really like the duos and duets too. Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield, Anna and Elizabeth, the Lowest Pair, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. Not to mention the Honey Dewdrops, Iron and Wine and Ben Bridwell, Dave and Phil Alvin, and both the Wainwright and Chapin Sisters.

Don’t forget compilations with really long names that may or may not have been released this year, that I’ve been enjoying regardless: Arkansas at 78 RPM: Corn Dodgers & Hoss Hair Pullers, The Brighter Side: A 25th Anniversary Tribute to Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton, and Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music On the Mason-Dixon Line.

And then there are the names you already know: Iris Dement, Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Leonard Cohen, Jesse Winchester, Dwight Yoakam, Mark Knopfler, Fairport Convention, and Bob Dylan (the old new stuff, not the new old stuff).

I haven’t counted them up, but this longer list of mine can’t be more than 50 or 60 albums — a pitiful, sickly and puny little list. Seriously, I’m ashamed. There are at least 119,940 or more to choose from and I know that you can do better than me. Whether you participate in the No Depression poll or any of the thousands of others that lurk out there, relax and enjoy. Have fun, don’t stress, don’t argue. It’s all about exploration.

Postscript: For the record, Americana is a radio format and an association, not a genre.