Like many of us from the South, Grant Peeples is a
walking, talking contradiction. The man
loves lunatic poets and fast cars, and he’s an unabashed liberal, but he’s not
coming to take your guns away. He’s got plenty of his own. The one thing that
Grant does that sets him apart from his contemporaries is his honesty. Brutal, direct, rhyming honesty, or as he puts
it on this new release, “mixing trouble with metaphor.”
And he does this right off the bat on the first track, You’re aSlave To Your Imagination, a blues featuring the sassy vocals of
Sarah Mac that takes the classic country duet style from “he said/ she said” to
“left brain/right brain.” “You call it
art but you’re just jerking off,” says one side of his head, to which the other
side replies, “I got my songs and a sense of intervention…I know the score.”
The eleven songs are a poetic mix of styles: rock, folk,
spoken word, acoustic ballads and bluesy guitar tunes, produced once again by
Austin’s Gurf Morlix. Gurf has the knack
for putting just the right touches on the music he produces, although I have to
say that the echoes he placed on the brilliant spoken word piece High Octane Generation are, to me,
superfluous and distract from the performance. This is a small complaint,
though, given his body of work with Grant, Lucinda Williams and so many others.
After hearing the wealth of clever, intricate wordplay on these songs, it comes
as no surprise that Peeples is a Roger Miller fan. You can tell that he rubs
the lyrics of the songs on his sleeve until they gleam in just the right way. After working his way through social issues
like capital punishment, homosexuality, war, equality and revolution, he
finishes up the record with It’s Too Late
to Live in Austin, a “shoulda been here when” tale about the live music
capital of the world. Peeples, a recent transplant from Florida to Austin,
reminds us that songs are still being written and sung in Austin….and even more
than that, that songs happen everywhere.
Grant has been refining his sound over his past five
records and his work here is among his sharpest. At his best, Peeples recalls
Fred Eaglesmith, Butch Hancock and occasionally, every once in a while, Kris
Kristofferson. Because fast cars, big guns and fried chicken and okra are not
the sole province of conservative rednecks and because compassion and empathy
aren’t just for tie-died wearing hippies, we need someone like Grant Peeples.
When we finally rip that last month off from the auto parts
calendar on the wall, its just human nature to look back at the previous year and
reflect on what we saw, heard or felt. That remembrance is always a mixture of
reality and perception, of what we wanted to have happen and what really did.
But that’s life.
John Lennon said “life is what happens while you are busy
making other plans” and Warren Zevon famously quipped in his song that “life’ll
kill ya.” Both are true and unfortunately, on January 18th of 2013,
Craig Lieske was snatched, untimely, from this world. Craig was more than the “merch guy” for the
Drive-By Truckers; he was, to many, the face and soul of the band, the person
fans talked to at every show, who always had a smile and a kind word. Craig
passed away in the night during the band’s three-night homecoming stand at the
40 Watt and if anyone ever doubted the transformative, healing power of music,
well, just talk to anyone who attended those shows.
The 2013 Pick of the Litter is dedicated to Craig Lieske:
music lover, musician, music fan. As
Patterson Hood sings in Grand Canyon,
a goodbye of sorts to Lieske from their upcoming release English Oceans, “I’ll lift my glass and smile.”
Album of the Year
– Jason Isbell - Southeastern –
Isbell’s new record is a finely polished dark gem, gleaming with addiction,
redemption, and gumption. Jason Isbell,
through force of will and lack of alcohol, has forged his most complete set of songs
yet and easily the finest record of the year.
Debut record of the Year
– Willie Sugarcapps - Nurtured in
the fertile soil of the Frog Pond at Blue Moon Farm in Silverhill, Alabama, Willie Sugarcapps is roots music at its
most organic. Five musicians who discovered that they love making music
together and that people love what they do. Will Kimbrough joins with Grayson
Capps, Corky Hughes (Capps’ guitar player), Anthony Crawford and Savana Lee
(Sugarcane Jane) to create a mixture of bayou blues and country-rock with
outstanding harmonies and incredible musicianship.
Song of the Year
– Jason Isbell – Elephant - As a
songwriter, Isbell is operating at a stratospheric, Guy Clark level,
constructing lines like “sharecropper eyes and hair almost all gone.” Inside of
Elephant, Southeastern’s emotional centerpiece, a tale of watching a friend
suffer from cancer, he creates a place all too real.
Billy Bragg at Americanarama.
Live Performance of
the Year – This is probably the hardest one to fill in given the elusive
nature of the category. There are so many variables that don’t exist in the
studio…sound, weather, the attitude of the artist or the audience…and my own
subjective experience. But, I’ll have to give the nod to two of Billy Bragg’s
Americana Festival appearances in Nashville. A radio interview as part of the
conference and a solo performance at Americanarama, a sidebar daytime festival
held in the backyard of Grimey’s New & Preloved Music, were both illuminating. Billy
Bragg proved that punk can grow up, that attitude doesn’t have to disappear at
30, or 40, or even 50, that we can still rail against injustice with grey in
our hair or with no hair at all, and we can do it with style, humor, panache
and intelligence.
Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott.
Music Festivalof the Year – The Americana Music
Festival and Conference – Nashville has hosted this amazing collection of
showcases, conference panels and an incredibly well-done awards show each year
for the last fourteen years, and each year, it’s grown in popularity. The
awards show at the Ryman sells out and many of the nightly showcases are
standing-room only, but the showcase wristbands are still a good deal and the
quality of music is unparalleled. Highlights of the 2013 festival were St. Paul
and the Broken Bones, Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien, Scott Miller, and
Houndmouth, but no matter where you end up, you’re bound to find some of the
best and brightest Americana artists playing for a crowd of music lovers.
What else was good last year? Plenty:
My Favorite
Picture of You – Guy Clark
The Marshall
Mathers LP2 – Eminem
Tooth & Nail
– Billy Bragg
Live in San
Francisco – Ry Cooder
This River –
JJ Grey and Mofro
Opening Day -
Peter Cooper
From the Hills below
the City – Houndmouth
Down Fell the
Doves – Amanda Shires
Memories and
Moments - Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott
My Dearest Darkest
Neighbor – Hurray for the Riff Raff
Looking back, 2013 was truly a fine year of music from
both new and established artists. 2014 is already off to a good start as I type
this, with very strong releases from Rosanne Cash, Tinsley Ellis, Bruce
Springsteen and the Hard Working Americans, a “super-group” with Todd Snider
and Dave Schools (Widespread Panic), which is leading the early pack for album
of the year.
My friend Anthony knew Craig Lieske. My friend Anthony just celebrated his 40th
birthday and his birthday wish for us was for “everyone
to read good literature, listen to good music, and love one another a little
more on our next trip around the sun.” I
concur. I’m pretty damn sure Craig would
too.
The studious eight-year old in a Braves cap on the cover
of this record is indeed Peter Cooper, the guy who thirty-five years later is
writing the liner notes for his third solo album from Australia. The man has clearly come a long way, and it’s
those parts in between Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and a continent a half a
world away that make this record such a delight.
The first of eleven tracks is the autobiographical Much Better Now, where Cooper details
some of his employment history (among others, a waiter in a buffet restaurant
where the people “can’t see their feet.”) The man who gave us the best song ever
about baseball (715 (For Hank Aaron)
from his 2008 debut release Mission Door)
comes back with another excellent one in the title track, where unbridled
optimism at the beginning of the season when “we’re tied for first with the
whole season left to play” gives way to grim reality (“with a couple of breaks
we might take fourth place”) by the end of the first verse.
Cooper’s songwriting has matured tremendously on this
record. Always able to turn a phrase inside out effortlessly, here his
attention to detail in each song complements the clever word-play. As with his always excellent columns in the
Tennessean, he writes with a detective’s eye, picking out details that define
people, moments, situations. He takes a subject, builds on it, expands it,
makes his point and most importantly, since we’re talking about songs, he makes
it rhyme. The mood shifts from light-hearted (the eye-rolling Grandma’s Tattoo, co-written with Tommy
Womack) to serious (Quiet Little War
is about drone warfare and how you can fight a war in Afghanistan from New
Mexico and go home to your wife each night or Jenny Died at 25, the type of death where you go on living.), but
all the tracks are finely honed pieces, illustrated by pedal steel legend Lloyd
Green, Jen Gunderman on keys, bass from Dave Jacques and Dave Roe, vocals from
Eric Brace (with whom he’s recorded two fine albums), guitars from Richard
Bennett (Mark Knopfler Band) and producer Thomm Jutz.
Peter Cooper is a journalist, a college professor and
student of country music, a guest DJ on radio, a baseball fan and luckily for
us, a songwriter and a musician. With Opening Day, Cooper steps up into the
bigs.
On Cover Me Up,
the opening track of Southeastern,
Jason Isbell sings over an acoustic guitar and a moaning slide that “someone
needs medical help or the magnolia’s bloom.”
That the couplet is at once unexpected and perfected crafted is what
makes this record a finely polished dark gem. Fulfilling the promise of the
young twenty-something whose songs and guitar energized the Drive-By Truckers,
fleshed out their southern vision and contributed to what is arguably their two
best records, The Dirty South and Decoration Day (the title cut belongs
to Isbell) and washing away the inconsistencies of his solo and band
recordings, this newfound creativity and sobriety was hinted at on last year’s
release Live from Alabama. On those performances, you could hear a man
and a band that was operating at a higher level and with a resolute purpose and
focus. Jason Isbell had something to
prove.
Whatever wreckage Isbell caused, created or enjoyed while
partying his ass off gave fuel to his creative fires, at least when the smoke
in his head cleared enough to write down what he remembered. Painful and honest in a way that allows no
self-pity, Isbell ponders his new life. On Live
Oak, he realizes “there’s a man who walks beside me it’s who I used to
be/and I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me” and on Different Days, he sees that “ten years
ago…I might have offered up my help in different ways/ But those were different
days.” The dozen tunes here are mostly
built around acoustic guitars, relying on the strength of the songs and lyrics
rather than raging electric riffs. The exceptions are Flying over Water, which utilizes a quiet/loud dynamic and Super 8, a snarling, undeniably great
rock n roll tune the Faces would be proud of. In a recent interview, Jason said
that he wasn’t going to leave a good song off the record just because it didn’t
fit the mood, but its placement is still
jarring.
As a songwriter, Isbell is operating at a stratospheric,
Guy Clark level, constructing lines like “sharecropper eyes and hair almost all
gone,” from Elephant, the album’s
emotional centerpiece, a tale of watching a friend suffer from cancer or the
chilling, gothic Yvette, a story of
abuse where the narrator, in a flat voice sings about “a bedroom upstairs/it’s
a family affair” and how he’s “cleaning my Weatherby/and sighting my scope.”
Southeastern
is filled with addiction, redemption, and gumption. Isbell, through force of will and lack of
alcohol, has forged his most complete set of songs yet and one of the finest
records of the year.
A comeback
album? Only these guys would slap such an
ironic title on a record. 2011’s I Love: Tom T. Hall's Songs of Fox Hollow was a remake of Hall’s classic children’s
record, nominated for a Grammy, one of my favorite albums that year, and Eric
Brace and Peter Cooper were all over it, organizing, producing, coordinating, singing. Their 2010 duo record, Master Sessions, featured pedal steel king Lloyd Green and
dobro wiz Mike Auldridge (The Seldom Scene). On this, their third record
together, Braceand Cooper complete each other’s lines like a
married couple finishes each other sentences. This familiarity breeds not
contempt but better performances. Brace is the more
emotional songwriter, while Cooper is adept at wry lyrics. Brace is literal,
where Cooper is literate. But instead of each song being a Bracesong or a Cooper
song, this time out they’re Brace and Cooper songs. On Johnson City, Bracetakes the more
direct route, singing about being locked up in the Tennessee town’s pokey (“I know the way to Johnson City/ now I just
gotta find my way out”) while Cooper comes in on the bridge detailing a surreal
jailhouse conversation with God.
The opener Ancient History is one of their tradmark
clever, up-tempo tracks, a meditation on the impermanence of existence using
stage names and nicknames as a metaphor for change in life. (“Richard Nixon was Tricky Dick/Dick trickle
was a race car driver, no really he was a race car driver, a talented popular
race car driver”). Baseball references are scattered throughout (also from Ancient History: “Sid Bream was safe at home…the eighth world wonder was the Astrodome”), although
I wish they had included Cooper’s fine song Opening
Day on this release. Nine of the
twelve tracks were written by Brace and/or Cooper, with one of the covers
coming from the aforementioned Tom T. Hall, Mad,
which features guests Duane Eddy, Mac Wiseman and Marty Stuart (“When she’s mad, that’s a dangerous game/in
the obituary column, they’ve already printed my name.”). Recorded in
Nashville (of course) by Thomm Jutz, the album features a core of stellar
musicians, including Paul Griffith on drums, Dave Jacques on bass, Green on
pedal steel, and Jen Gunderman on keys.
The overall
theme here seems to be one of uncertainty, whether the protagonists in the
songs are in jail looking for bail, a perennial loser buying lottery tickets or
a sailor adrift in the darkness. But that doesn’t mean the album is dark or
completely introspective. Eric Brace and Peter Cooper see to that through their
solid songwriting, singing and impeccable harmonies. The Comeback Album may not be an
over-the-fence, Ruthian home run, but it’s a solid rap into the gap, a triple
and with a combination of determination and talent, Brace and Cooper
score. Just like Sid Bream.
In November of last year, Hundred Word Highlights reviewed Patterson Hood’s record Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance
and this month is his partner Mike Cooley’s turn. The Drive-By Truckers’ other half may be less
loquacious and prolific than Mr. Hood, but he is just as talented of a
songwriter and performer. This live
acoustic solo recording showcases finger-picked versions of his rock tunes
along with a full glass of wit served with a side of sly winks and surprisingly
keen insights. Cooley even picks up the banjo for an eerily wicked take on Cottonseed. Picks: Cottonseed, Carl Perkins
Cadillac.
Two of the brightest stars in the Americana firmament
team up for this collection of country, R&B and good-natured rock. Buddy
and Jim are well-respected musicians, with shelves of awards between them, but
more than that, they’re friends and this record has that easy vibe of two
buddies making music together. There’s not a Buddy song or a Jim song, they
both own them, especially when their harmonies remind you of the Everly
Brothers with a twang. The eleven songs won’t break any new ground, but that’s
kinda the point. Picks: Vampire Girl, I Lost My Job of Loving You.
Mary Gauthier’s songs, like the artist herself, require
your attention before their brilliance becomes apparent. This is music that
involves and captivates, not background music that slides underneath whatever
else you have going on. In the same way Bob Dylan’s early lyrics held meaning
and weight, her songs are carefully crafted, whittled and polished until what
remains is gleaming, straight and perfect.
Gauthier, Louisiana-born but now living in Nashville, has a lyrical
preoccupation with outcasts and outsiders and her songs are imbued with a sense
of her real life, a hard life, and so are the three covers she chose for Live at Blue Rock, all from another
fine songwriter, Fred Eaglesmith. A teenaged runaway and recovering addict,
Gauthier sings about what she knows, or as another cinematic songwriter, Guy
Clark, put it in his song Homeless, “the
bums, the whores and the abused.”
The eleven tracks here were recorded in an intimate
setting outside of Austin, Texas, with Mary on vocals and acoustic guitar, Mike
Meadows on percussion and the wonderful Tania Elizabeth on fiddle and vocals.
Tania’s fiddle perfectly accentuates the songs and is an essential element,
while the percussion is solid throughout.
On some tunes, not a syllable is wasted, not a line thrown away and on
others the words tumble out like coins from a Biloxi jackpot, especially on Wheel Inside the Wheel (a track covered
by Jimmy Buffett, she sometimes jokes that his cut of this tune allows her to
drive a nice car). It’s a Mardi Gras tune of a surreal sort (“Sipping wormwood concoctions/drinking absinthe and talking trash/it’s
a red carpet, black tie all night celestial bash.”) that
caps the record, rolling to a driving, joyous conclusion.
Her sixth record overall and her first live recording, Live at Blue Rock may not be an easy
record to like, but it’s an incredibly easy record to love.
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