This year’s AthFest compilation slims things down a bit,
with ten tracks clocking in at just under 40 minutes and in a new twist, it’s available
exclusively on vinyl. This is a very
fine collection of songs that doesn’t so much show the breadth of Athens music
as its depth, with tracks by Elf Power, Drive-By Truckers and New Madrid. The sale of this compilation supports AthFest Educates, a non-profit dedicated to local music
& arts education.
Favorites include Faster Circuits with their Beatlesque
pop on Relative Obscurity, and
Family and Friends, whose Rust and Bone
starts out like a delicate Donovan track and ends up as a rollicking
rock-n-roll song. The Drive-By Truckers continue their support of local music
and education with Rock Solid, a
track that was previously only available on their digital-only Dragon Pants EP. New Madrid contributes
Forest Gum, a track from their new
Normaltown Records release Sunswimmer. In 2014, just as it has been for years
and years, the fields of Athens, Georgia are ripe with musical fruit. This
compilation is just a taste.
“I hate Todd Snider and I’m going to tell you why.” No, not me, I kinda like the guy. I enjoy his
songs, his goofy stories, and his general outlook on life. That line came from a review Todd read about
himself and it made its way into his
first book, a collection of remembrances, lyrics and an unflinching look into
the life of a singer-songwriter. That he includes this piece of information in
a chapter in this book is very telling, because he doesn’t go on to talk about
why the reviewer didn’t like him or his music, because that part’s actually irrelevant.
Todd uses this as a teaching moment (yeah, I know…life lessons from this guy,
whose motto is “safety third?”) about fame and why artists sing their songs for
others. Todd says that if you’re doing
it so that people will like you, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
Having seen Todd Snider perform several times and
listened to all his records and literally dozens and dozens of live recordings,
I thought I had heard all his stories and this book would be a rehash of things
I already knew. Part of that’s true, of course, there are times when he retells
his stories verbatim, or at least as verbatim as is allowed in his patented stoner-speak,
stumbling cadence, but in every case, he largely takes advantage of the medium
of print to dig deeper into his adventures, like meeting his buddy Moondawg of Moondawg’s Tavern fame. (They threw him out of so many bars/he
finally built one in his own backyard.) Songs and stories that you just
know are made up out of his own head turn out to be actual, factual things that
have happened to Snider. Todd credits Jerry Jeff Walker as his main inspiration
but it seems the chorus of Kristofferson’s The Pilgrim – Chapter 33 when he’s
stoned could easily be Todd’s bio. (He's a poet, he's a picker/He's a prophet, he's a pusher/He's
a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned/He's a walkin'
contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,takin' ev'ry wrong direction on
his lonely way back home.)
I Never Met A
Story I Didn’t Like is just shy of three hundred pages, but if you’re like
me and go back to re-read a paragraph or two, just to savor the words and roll them
around in your head, it will take you much longer to read. For someone who appears to be busy most of
the time just passing a bong around, he is surprisingly introspective about his
life, what he does and why. He’s like
the Buddha of East Nashville. He invariably has something nice to say about
everybody – the guy who yells Beer Run
all through the show, the guy who stole his song (but it’s okay, Todd stole one
of his back), groupies, drug dealers, police, you name it. Fans of Todd’s music
won’t need to read this review to know that they’ll want to pick up this book.
Music fans in general will appreciate this look into the life of an artist, but
I think this book will appeal to anyone who enjoys a good story, even if they
are mostly true.
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.
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