Category Archives: My Back Pages

Neil Young and The Damage Done

NY Harvest

When I first heard that Neil Young posted a message on Facebook telling his fans and followers that he had made a decision to pull his music off of all music streaming sites, my first reaction was a non-reaction. In fact, given all the other news of the day, it barely raised a ripple of my interest. Without even delving beyond the headline, I just figured that whatever he wants to do with his music is his business.

I like a lot of Neil Young’s music, and over the years I’ve bought many of his albums – some tapes, compact discs, at least one DVD – and downloaded some stuff too.

Admittedly, at this point in my life, I don’t really check out any of his music very often anymore. Nowadays I tend to spend more time listening to new artists, when I’m not digging deeper into the past by wading through some of the great anthologies of early roots music that have been released over the past few years. Almost everything that I listen to is digitized and, unlike many who have complained about the quality and compression and all those things, I’ve got no problem with it. It’s easy and portable. Lots of people hate it. Lots more seem to embrace it. Whatever.

When it comes to people’s choices about music consumption, I guess I have an agnostic outlook. It’s all good, whatever way you choose it.

If you missed the words that Young first wrote on his Facebook page, here they are:
Streaming has ended for me. I hope this is ok for my fans. It’s not because of the money, although my share (like all the other artists) was dramatically reduced by bad deals made without my consent. It’s about sound quality. I don’t need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution. I don’t feel right allowing this to be sold to my fans. It’s bad for my music.

For me, It’s about making and distributing music people can really hear and feel. I stand for that. When the quality is back, I’ll give it another look. Never say never.

Neil Young has more than three million people who follow his page on Facebook. More than 11,000 people “liked” his post and it was shared more than 2,400 times. Less than two hours later, he returned to post again and that one was “liked” and shared by almost double the number of the first one.

Here’s what he wrote:

I was there. AM radio kicked streaming’s ass. Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming’s ass, and absolutely rocked compared to streaming. Streaming sucks. Streaming is the worst audio in history. If you want it, you got it. It’s here to stay. Your choice. Copy my songs if you want to. That’s free. Your choice.

All my music, my life’s work, is what I am preserving the way I want it to be. It’s already started. My music is being removed from all streaming services. It’s not good enough to sell or rent. Make streaming sound good and I will be back.

A week later, as I’m sitting here writing this, Neil Young’s latest album The Monsanto Years is streaming through my system on Spotify. I just plugged his name into the You Tube search bar and it reads that there are “about 399,000 results.” As I think he’s probably already discovered, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to back out of mass technological media distribution.

Meanwhile, I think there are a couple of stories behind the headline to this post that are of interest. Until I took the time to sift through and sample some of the thousands of comments, I would not have thought that he would get as much backlash as he did, for his words. His multi-generational fan base is rabid and ravenous, and usually when you read about him on Americana or roots music websites such as this one, he is spoken about reverentially.

Here are a few representative samples from his Facebook comments. I’ll try to sprinkle in both pro and con, although overwhelmingly – like maybe 50 to one – the comments were not from people who agree with his choice. The anger from his fans often took the tone of the first one below.

Doing an image search on Google for “Neil Young 8 track” shows exactly how willing you are to put music on garbage formats. Between this announcement, the ridiculously overpriced digital music player you supported and the anti-gmo fear mongering, I think I’m ok with never giving you another cent for music.

It’s artists like you that will help bring out the best in music! We’re suffering from serious lack of quality these days. Thank you Neil Young!

I’ll take your claim to be standing up for music sound quality seriously when you stop selling your catalog on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon, and other download services. Really, it’s about the money, isn’t it? I don’t blame you for that. It’s perfectly understandable from a business standpoint. But don’t disguise your motivation as being “for the fans” and “for the music.”

If I were so blessed to have my music recorded at all, I would want it to be recorded and available at the highest quality possible. I think Neil is as honest as can be. Speaks his mind. Why doubt him now?

I think it’s a terrible decision. I became a fan of yours primarily through the easy access of streaming it through Spotify, despite the “sound quality”. Without streaming, “Neil Young” would pretty much just be character in a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, to me. You’re a singer/songwriter, anyway. Your songs are much more about the words than subtleties in the music that the average listener can’t even detect.

So you get the idea. The yin and yang of public opinion and fandom.

I don’t think I’d be sitting here writing about this if it wasn’t for his comment about AM radio, cassettes and 8-tracks. Because I was there too, and at times I was probably in the same altered states that he was in, but sound quality and the delivery systems today are simply better than those formats ever were. Period.

By the way, if you want to talk about vinyl – I understand the reasons why many people hold it dear and close to their hearts – last February, as he promoted his Pono player, Neil said in an interview with The Guardian that vinyl reissues were just a “fashion statement.” The funny little device he was trying to promote was reviewed by Ars Technica, whose assessment provided possibly my favorite and fitting headline of the year: “A tall, refreshing drink of snake oil.”

Since it’s impossible to put the genie back into the bottle, Neil Young’s music will stay with us forever. And if the stream goes dry, there will be other ways to fish for it. But, should it become too hard to find, future generations might not bother to take the time to go find it. Which would be both sad and tragic. And that would be the damage done.

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

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Too Slippery For Such Simple Categorisations

BPBA recent trip into Manhattan and a stop at Strand Books yielded a $6.95 trade paperback edited by Alan Licht and titled Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy.  It wasn’t hard to miss. There must have been at least 100 or more in stock, sitting on several tables and display racks. It’s either a breakaway bestseller or there was a publisher error. I guess you’d call it simply an interview, with questions asked and answers given, but it reads more like just a conversation, which I imagine sets apart a good interview from a bad one.

Born in 1970, Oldham began acting in his early teens and started making music around the time he was about 22. I’m sorry to have missed his first wave of music that was released in the early ’90s on the Drag City label under various names: Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and just plain Palace.

If you’re unfamiliar with those Palace records or his later work, I’ll quote Licht in the book’s introduction to give you context:

Emerging from the indie-rock scene of the early 1990’s, Palace was at times lumped in with the ‘No Depression’ alternative country-rock bands like Son Volt or Uncle Tupelo, or with the lo-fi movement identified with Sebadoh, Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices or Drag City label-mate Smog, and later Bonnie Prince Billy was occasionally held up as a forebear of the ‘freak-folk’ scene of the past decade. Yet the music is too slippery for such simple categorisations. It touches on – refracts, really – rock, pop, folk, country, bluegrass and ethnic music without hybridising any of them.

In 2003 Grant Alden of No Depression the magazine, not the genre, wrote a review of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s latest release Master and Everyone. And he shared some history.

Years ago I reviewed an early Palace release for Spin, and while I can’t remember which record it was, I know the review was a glowing bit of work-for-hire. Little enough had come my way then (say, Mazzy Star, or Mark Lanegan, both of which remain fond memories), that played so elegantly with the roar of silence, and Palace clearly and distinctly drew from a rural, country tradition. Both of which seemed like good ideas.

A while later I lasted half a set in a crowded club, for none of us had heard the like, and we all had to see. Oldham, the lead singer and provocateur of Palace, spent the whole evening dodging a solitary spotlight. Then Allison Stewart interviewed him for these pages, and he spoke at some length of an imaginary dog.

Finally, he said this in a December 1998 edition of Time Out New York: “No Depression seems like a culturalist, racist magazine to me, about a certain kind of white music.” We have not had occasion to write about Mr. Oldham’s varied exploits since.

He’s an odd duck, an ex-actor who keeps adopting new musical personae, aggressively passive aggressive. And I have come not to like him; that is, not to like his work, to feel violated by all the artifice with which he surrounds ostensibly artifice-free music, to mistrust his motives. This is a problem, when the singer’s principal illusion is intimacy, and it is especially a music critic’s problem, separating the artist from the art.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be believed, but Master And Everyone is, as advertised, a beautiful piece of work.

Probably the best thing about Bonnie “Prince” Billy is that I missed all the stuff that Grant spoke of, and was able to experience the music on its own without knowing a lick about where it came from, how or who made it, and what it was supposed to sound like. No expectations. By the time my kid flipped me a flash drive filled with Palace’s music and told me fire up the ‘Pod, it was 2008 and that concept was a decade and a half in the dust. It amazed me. And still does.

Two summers ago, I got a chance to see him and Dawn McCarthy on the stage of New York’s Town Hall with Van Campbell, Emmett Kelly, and Cheyenne Mize. They were at the end of a tour. The album that they played songs from was a tribute to the Everly Brothers called What the Brothers Sang. This is how I described their performance at that time:

Sitting on chairs that looked as if they were bought at a store specializing in selling used office equipment, and while holding blunt instruments in their hands … I witnessed a murder. Note by note, song by song. They killed it. They killed it … meaning it was one of the most memorable, loving, kind, considerate, joyful, musical, harmonious, respectful, caring and beautiful hundred minutes of concert give and take one could hope for.

I’m more than two-thirds of the way through this 329-page interview and I’m finding it hard to put down. Maybe I’m trying to rush to the end, where a 25-page discography awaits, and a seven-page passage called ‘A Cosmological Timeline’. This is a good book to read if you want to learn stuff you didn’t know you needed to know. Admit it: you had not a clue that in 1971 Meatloaf played the role of Ulysses S. Grant in a touring production of Hair. Right?

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

An Imaginary Line From CSN to Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins

ImwithherI awoke this morning with a throbbing left foot. I wore the black boots last night and my toes unconsciously tapped throughout the seventy-five minute set and the well deserved encore that was delivered by three talented singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists. On a beautiful summer night in the Spanish Courtyard of the Rosen House, located on the lush grounds of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts which is a mere sixty minutes north of Manhattan, I kept my eyes closed for much of time to shut out the visual and allow just the sounds of nature melded with the music to pour over the tip of my head and fill my body and soul. The only distraction to my thoughts and immersion were the whoops and cheers that punctuated the close of each song.

Many of us here have known, followed, and enjoyed the artistic talents and work product of these three. Sara from Nickel Creek, her solo albums, that Decemberists’ tour and the Watkins Family Hour which includes brother Sean and what seems to be a revolving cast. Aoife from years on the road and in the studio with Crooked Still, and most recently her solo album. And Sarah, who just turned 24 slightly over a month ago, with an already stunning list of achievements with her albums and collaborative performances.

As I listened to a set that was in equal measure traditional and contemporary, and shifted from covers unexpected to original-familiar, I created an imaginary narrative that took me back almost fifty years ago to the formation of a group with three other musicians: Crosby, Stills and Nash.

While the oft-told story of their coming together has shifted over time like sand on a beach, the one we accept is that Nash was living with Joni in Laurel Canyon and she brought the three of them together for simply a day of fun. And maybe it was Mama Cass. Whatever. One thing led to another, a slot was offered and accepted at the Woodstock festival and an album of virtually perfected tone and harmony resulted. What came after…it doesn’t really pertain to this storyline.

The thread or line I imagine is about taking unique and personal styles, blending experience, skill sets and an obvious friendship and respect toward each other, and creating something new from it. It’s hard enough to begin, almost impossible to endure, and a joy for an audience to witness.

For these three…SAS is not the moniker of choice I would assume, so let’s stay with the I’m With Her tour theme…the idea to play together germinated at last year’s Telluride festival and was allowed to grow in Brooklyn, like the tree before it. As I have lived bi-coastal and experienced the different energies of Los Angeles and New York, it wouldn’t feel wrong to contrast the artistic and creative wilderness of Laurel Canyon where three men came together a long time ago, with the urban and supportive artistic bubble of the borough across the East River that is now a breeding ground for the likes of these three women.

The concert dates so far have for the most part been overseas, the only website merely a rudimentary Tumblr page and with this project they seem to have kept out of the usual media runway and spotlight with the exception of these videos I’m sharing that have been posted along the way. There is a promise of an album, and I would guess a more official type of invitation for a wider audience to experience the music. For now, those of us catching them as the wave rises find ourselves of a privileged class.

With a new project being released soon from the Watkins Family Hour and a string of dates that will keep Sara busy, the three have a small number of summer and fall domestic dates scheduled. In addition to the show last night at Caramoor, there are only three more this month, one in August and two in September. To catch them them perform at one of these events would be like picking up a handful of seashells and being blessed to find just a few that are as close to perfection as you’ll get.

Jason Isbell’s Feat of Tweets

JasonIsbell_Press_DavidMcClisterPhoto_6032-copyIgnore all the press that his new album is getting. Disregard the four-star reviews. Don’t give a thought that he is sitting on top of the Americana Music Association’s radio airplay chart this week. And forget that he’s making some of the best music of his career, touring like a madman and, along with his wife Amanda Shires, is expecting a baby in September. The really big story that the mainstream music press seems to be missing out on is that Jason Isbell has one of the more prolific and engaging feeds on Twitter.

Musicians using social media to promote themselves can be a real slippery slope. On one hand, it’s a great way to let people know what you’re up to, where you’re playing, and when you’ve got a new project to talk about. But since so many people are doing it, most of us become numb to the endless pseudo-advertisements that scream “buy buy buy” whatever it is they’re selling.

There are folks who try a little too hard to come up with the creative and offbeat observations that read like a long-bearded millennial post-hipster Hallmark card, and there are professional Twitter ghostwriters you can pay by the word to enhance and elevate your wonderfully witty image. Record labels, management, and marketing companies often take the reins from an artist to keep the feed on point. If you follow all five of the Kardashian sisters like I do, you’ll realize that there is a lot of auto-script programs that unleash the same stories simultaneously for maximum exposure.

In the case of Isbell, unless he’s fooled me and there is a 17-year-old intern sitting behind a MacBook Air somewhere in Nebraska pretending to be him, he has found a way to connect with his fans by just being himself. On June 20 and 21, he hit his stride when he began to take questions from his 86,000 followers on topics far and wide. I’ve got no idea how it all began, but when you put them all together, it was a helluvan interview.

It began slowly…

Q. What’s your favorite song?
A. I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to stop now)

Q. What’s your favorite album?
A. Sticky Fingers

Q. More importantly, what’s your favorite Michael Bolton song?
A. To Love Somebody

Q. Favorite venue?
A The Ryman

Q. Favorite movie?
A. Magnolia

Moved to things more personal…

Q. Favorite thing about being sober?
A. No more shame

Q. Favorite thing about being Jason Isbell?
A. @amandashires, of course

And morphed into a random call and response…

Q. Favorite Pixar film, excluding Toy Story 1, 2, and 3?
A. Wall-E

Q. Favorite Tom T. Hall song?
A. Mama Bake A Pie

Q. Best cure for writer’s block?
A. Realize that it doesn’t exist

Q. What’s your favorite vegetable?
A. Onion

Q. What would you choose for your last meal?
A. Heroin

Q. Okay, once and for all, who was the best guitar player in the Rolling Stones? Mick Taylor? Keith Richards? Brian Jones?
A. Wayne Damn Perkins

Q. Favorite place to eat in Nashville?
A. Husk

Q. Favorite nut?
A. Pecan. Duh.

Q. Favorite Seinfeld episode?
A. The Parking Garage

Q. One word of advice from your current self to the 18 year old you?
A. Nonsmoker

Q. Favorite chore?
A. Hedge trimming

Q. Setup for that solo on Live Oak?
A. ’59 Gretsch Duo Jet + Dumble

Q. Best car chase scene in a movie?
A. Come on. Blues Brothers.

Q. Favorite way to conclude a Q&A with total strangers on Twitter?
A. {5 emojis of a girl waving goodbye}

And, his last tweet of the day on June 21 was: If I was female and single, I’d be texting Happy Father’s Day to any recent exes. Just to freak them out.

Well played, sir.

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

‘Amazing Grace’: A Rant From A Wretch Like Me

Rainbow_flag_breeze-665x443

As summer has begun, the lazy cable television news cycle of endless chatter about things mostly non-newsworthy has abruptly shifted. A series of events with equal measure of significance and sadness has come at us almost one day after another, as if the dam has burst. Mass murder in America. A story of a prison escape with a soap opera-like plot line of sex and betrayal. A doubleheader grand slam from the Supreme Court that said people are entitled to get affordable healthcare and if you want to get married to the person you love, you can. And in the carnival sideshow also known as your average day in Republican presidential primary politics, there has been hate, anger, racism, bigotry, intolerance, and threats spilling out into the conservative media slipstream.

If you’re a news junkie scanning the internet, reading the tweets, and sticking to your favorite tube channel, you most likely are in a bubble. People are not standing huddled on corners across the country debating gun control, but they privately ponder how many more will die before something is done. Most of the country had thought that the Confederate flag was already in a museum. The prison break was good drama for a couple of days, but it got boring when they couldn’t find the guys. And when I last visited my doctor’s office, there was no government panel overseeing my prostate exam. And my copay was only fifteen bucks. Affordable health care is a great concept that works.

Question: If the Supreme Court justices had decided that marriage equality should not be the law of the land, how many Republicans would have called for their impeachment? Answer: None. They would have been praised.

We have fuzzy logic. Instead of talking about how to keep a kid from getting his hands on a gun so he can’t kill nine people at a Bible study class, we put our energy and efforts in pulling down a flag. Of course it has become a symbol of hate and racism, but so is a Donald Trump press conference. Let’s not get distracted: there’s real work to be done here. Put the flag away, eliminate assault weapons, and pass laws that require background checks that work. That’s a start.

I know … I’m sort of running off the reservation (a completely non-PC phrase if ever there was) this week, but I’ll give you a little “fair and balanced” thought if I’ve ruffled a feather or two: I don’t like the Clintons either. I want to, but neither seem to be capable of being truthful. Oral sex isn’t really sex; all emails were turned over to the State Department except the ones that weren’t. Right now, I would love to see Bernie Sanders make it to the finals. I don’t know too much about him, but whenever I hear him talk about something, it makes a whole lot of sense and seems believable. Sort of like a Frank Capra film.

Did you watch Obama’s eulogy of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney? He sang a song that was written by an Englishman named John Newton who ran captured slaves from Africa across the sea to — of all places — Charleston, South Carolina. Time magazine reported this week:

After he rode out a storm at sea in 1748, he found his faith. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1764 and became an important voice in the English abolitionist movement. At that time he wrote the autobiographical “Amazing Grace”, along with 280 other hymns.

Like many, I never get tired of hearing, playing, and singing that song. I really don’t know why, as I wasn’t raised in the church, nor am I what one might consider religious. But as I did some research, I found that there’s been many articles and academic papers written about why so many people love it so. Some think it’s the lyrics. But many believe it’s simply the music. Haunting, magical, and mystical.

In 2002, Steve Turner wrote Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and I found this quote:

Somehow, “Amazing Grace” [embraced] core American values without ever sounding triumphant or jingoistic. It was a song that could be sung by young and old, Republican and Democrat, Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic, African American and Native American, high-ranking military officer and anticapitalist campaigner.

And even a wretch like me. Amen.

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

Clearwater Festival, Los Lobos and The Power of Dancing In The Rain

Singin'_in_the_Rain_trailerLast weekend I went to what we might have once called a folk festival and was blown away by the power and majesty of a pure kick-ass electric set. It seems to be an affliction when you dwell in this house of roots music fandom that after a period of time you can become overwhelmed with a false notion of authenticity that only comes with acoustic instrumentation and some sort of lineage that will lead you back to Appalachia or New Orleans or Greenwich Village or any other place you can come up with that reeks of heritage and history. As I seem to have forgotten on occasion, there is a time and place to forget about trying to figure out where and when, and just shut your eyes as the music washes over you from head to tapping toes.

Perhaps its a condition of age. Or not. Given that some of the most muscular rock music comes from people now in their fifties, sixties, and seventies is not necessarily all nostalgia, no matter how it may be marketed and packaged. Although I can guess that many in the audience are in large part reacting to a trip down memory lane, it ain’t all be rice and beans. There’s got to be steak on the plate to create a meal of sonic treats that will leave you feeling satisfied and fulfilled.

What has made me slow to a crawl in going to see loud amplified music at larger venues for any genre has been the production and scale. The moves are all the same, the set list rarely changes, the cost and opportunity to acquire tickets are beyond my pay grade, and the lighting, set design, and ambiance are designed to elicit emotion. Sort of like what Disneyland does. Or a Broadway play. Or a show in Vegas. None of which are wrong or bad, but just not my thing.

It does not escape me that many of my peers think that my usual preference for a simpler form of entertainment is some sort of elitism, and that I choose to stay clear of the mainstream because of some sort of inadequacy or inability to blend. And I won’t disagree too hard with that. I don’t like to blend. And I don’t like to dance. It can be a problem.

Last Saturday morning it was cool and drizzly when I got to Clearwater, the festival known for being founded by Pete Seeger. I bypassed the big stages to start my day at a song circle that was led by a trio  of talented local musicians who did a great job of setting my mood straight. I caught Mike and Ruthy’s new band, which did a great set. Kate Pierson from the B-52s was next; an odd choice, I thought, but young hipsters in long beards and flowing dresses danced like lobsters as I slouched off towards the river toward the dance tent. The Klezmatics! Who doesn’t like an accordion, fiddle, horns, and clarinet? Hundreds were dancing the hora. I stood outside with my umbrella.

I really had come to see just one band. They were scheduled mid-afternoon on the main stage, and by now the rain was steady and umbrellas were up. As festivals go, Clearwater is very orderly and neat. People come early, put out their chairs and blankets, and when they get up to wander to other areas in the park, anyone is allowed to occupy their empty spaces. But everything was soaking wet, so I made my way to the small area at stage left that is reserved for dancing.

Los Lobos. Damn. It’s been so long since I last saw them; most likely in LA during the eighties. I’ve been a fan, but hardly a fanatic. My old friend Chris Morris, who has authored their soon-to-be-released biography, has lately been posting on Facebook about them and it piqued my interest. And from the opening chords of the first song to the last, the mighty and powerful wolves played music that seeped into the cracks and crevices my soul and made my feet frolic in the puddles. Loud. Driving. A wall of amazing sound that shot out across the field like a bolt of lightening against a soundtrack of thunder. I’m screaming, dancing, and done. Like the bunny, I’m energized again.

Have about 80 minutes to spare? Probably not. But here’s the full 1999 Woodstock set that the band did. I’m going for it.

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column. The original title was “If You Want To Dance With Me”.

Ebin-Rose Trio: Americana Outliers Connecting Dots

Ebin-Rose-TrioFour years ago on this site, I posted an interview I had with a woman from Boston by the name of Marissa Nadler. She had been described somewhere on the web by various somebodies as both “the indie-folk pinup girl and mistress of the murder ballad” and “a damsel who has tumbled from a frayed tapestry in search of her unicorn, a crystal doll who has escaped from her vitrine, or a tubercular maid who has slipped out of her Victorian deathbed photograph to traipse this earthly plane.”

While most of Nadler’s music and striking visual image screamed goth-girl-fairy-princess, it turned out she was a No Depression reader in high school, loved Americana music, and recorded several albums of covers that she sold on Etsy, including the songs of Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. She has a track on the Karen Dalton tribute album, Remembering Mountains, that’s been getting a lot of press lately, and has been recording a new album that’s due out later this year.

From Nadler’s music, I began to connect the dots with the sort of electric ethereal psych-folk music that she was doing, along with fellow travelers like the Philadelphia band Espers, the solo recordings of their vocalist Meg Baird, and Maine-based Buck and Shanti Curran who perform and record as Arborea. Buck is a fine guitar maker and excellent musician, and Shanti sings and plays something called a Banjimer (a type of banjo-dulcimer made by Tennessee luthier Gwen Forrester), harmonium, ukulele, sawing fiddle, and hammered dulcimer.

Over the years I’ve kept in “Facebook-touch” with all of the above, and last November I got a message from a person with a suspiciously long name who told me Buck Curran had thought I might be someone that he should reach out to in regards to the music he was making with his trio.

It was a good call. One particularly haunting song has pushed me back down into the Americana rabbit hole, where we bust genre stereotypes by melding various styles with new traditions. After dozens of listens, it’s become my adult version of “It’s a Small World,” and is now looped inside my brain.

Brian Ebin Parker Wolfe is a guitarist and mandolin player. His wife, Rose, does the vocals, and Bobo Lavorgna plays upright bass.

Based in Southeastern Connecticut, the trio made their debut in 2013, although they have each been performing in various configurations, in and beyond New England, for quite some time. Last May, they put out a five-track EP called Bare Wires, followed three months later by a live version of those same five songs, aptly titled Live Wires. Their newest EP, Wind Pictures, was released May 9. All are available on their Bandcamp page, and the 1998 album credited to just Ebin-Rose (sans Lavorgna), Through the Wires, can be found on Spotify and the iTunes store.

For the past six months or so, Brian and I have been exchanging emails, and in a new-age-y, dot-com-era way, it feels like we’ve developed a friendship over common musical tastes and interests. Like many artists I’ve come to know, he has aspirations to expand the band’s reach but also seems much more comfortable talking about the music rather than marketing and self-promotion. Some of you musician types might know of him through his day job at AcousticMusic.org, the shop halfway between Boston and New York that specializes in handmade guitars, mandolins, and banjos. Others might remember reading about him and Rose in Dirty Linen, a great roots music magazine that sprouted from the Fairport Fanatics and had a 27-year run before folding in 2010.

Rose and Brian met when she came into the store to buy a Martin guitar, and she joined the band he was in at the time, which was called Pottery. “[She] grew up in a family filled with music,” he says. “Her father played guitar and harmonica and sang, her mother sang, and other family members played mandolin and banjo. We would call it Americana; they called it music.”

Rose also credits her family and some close friends for inspiring her to sing, and says her style of singing evolved from the music that she and Brian have created together over the past 20-plus years.

(You might have noticed that the trio looked extra large in that video. Matthew Bruns was the other guitarist in Pottery, 30 years ago, and he is also the composer and second guitarist in the video.)

Lavorgna is a journeyman bassist, associated for many years with the late New Haven blues musician Robert Crotty. He’s also played for a number of other groups. In addition to his work with the trio, he proudly proclaims himself to be the 48th member of the great ‘60s band Jake and the Family Jewels, going on his 38th year with them. His work with Brian and Rose, he says, has “given me the opportunity, the freedom, to create a foundation, a color, and a depth to some of the most beautiful and moving music I have ever heard and been privileged enough to play. It is a gift I do not take lightly, and [I] treasure every time we come together to perform and record.”

When Brian and I got around to talking about influences, it wasn’t surprising that we had similar tastes and touchstones: Beatles, Kinks, Stones, Lovin’ Spoonful, Moby Grape, Fairport Convention, Byrds, Blues Project, Pentangle, Fahey, Dead, Joni, CSNY … all the usual suspects of FM radio back in the day. They were all “guitar-driven,” he says, “with a player who had their own style and we were like sponges. Then came Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Pierre Bensusan … and by the late ’70s, I started to feel my music was at a point where I was becoming more focused on what was in my own head and what I wanted to say through it.”

Like everybody else who plays or writes inside the “big tent” of Americana, Brian now is struggling with what label might be best used to describe the trio’s music. When I recently heard a song on the radio that featured Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, and Ella Fitzgerald and realized it reminded me of ERT, I thought, “jazz – there it is.” Brian has a different perspective:

“Strangely enough I think that Celtic Americana is close, even though I thought it odd at first. I guess if Richard Thompson can be acknowledged by the AMA as Americana Artist of the Year, it is a fairly wide-open field. Anglican folk rock comes to mind as a label, but I doubt there is ever going to be a drop-down box for that. Appalachian music is certainly at its heart Celtic, and how could there be Americana without Appalachian music? When people ask what our band sounds like, I sometimes say we are like Pentangle, only not from the UK, knowing most of them will not have a clue as to how Pentangle sounds.”

Whatever you call it, Wind Pictures is a four-track EP that pays homage to Brian’s old band Pottery by including a song of the same name. Recently the track was included in a compilation from Good Sponge Records, and I like their motto: “Your brain is a sponge. Be good to it. Absorb what’s of quality, and wring out the rest.”

Ebin-Rose Trio … glad they landed in my stream of connectivity.

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