Families That Play Together

From The Sound of Music

New York City, August 13, 2015: This past Sunday, I took the train and then a subway to the Upper West Side, walked up and down Broadway picking at piles of books sold by street vendors for a mere dollar or two, and found shade in a plaza at Lincoln Center as I watched Iris DeMent perform songs from her new album. I looked around to see if her husband Greg Brown’s daughter Pieta was in the crowd with her spouse, guitarist Bo Ramsey. But if they were there, I missed them.

During the show, and as Iris sang, I pulled out my phone and tapped a message to a mutual friend of ours from Iowa City, photographer Sandy Dyas. Although we’ve never met face to face, we’ve had casual correspondence from time to time, over the years, and I’ve written about her work and featured it in my articles. Along with all of the people I’ve met through my connection with this particular website and music community, I consider Sandy a member of my No Depression family.

In life, love, law, politics, society, civilization, art, music, literature, and pretty much everything else in this world, there are threads that bind us together. While a dictionary might tell you that there are only three specific types of families, the American Academy of Pediatrics lists eight and sociologists can quickly rattle off over a dozen. Some folks might tell you that there is only one kind of family, but my own definition is much broader.

Be it a coupling of two or a group of thousands, we seem to have the capacity to create connections that can have the same feel and offer the same support system as what a traditional family does. Sometimes it endures, other times it evaporates as quickly as it came together. But whether bloodlines or lifelines, and despite a high rate of dysfunction, families often and unpredictably can produce some amazing results.

When Teddy Thompson came up with the idea of having his family work together to release an album last year, his sister Kami tried to back out. As quoted in the New York Times Magazine, she asked him “Could I be like that one Osbourne who’s not on the show, whose name no one knows?”

Nonetheless, Thompson’s Family is probably one of the best collections of songs ever created through emails, file sharing, and studio magic. It features music that is just simply beautiful, from divorced parents Linda and Richard, nephew Zak Hobbs, Richard’s son Jack from his second marriage, and the reluctant sister Kami with her husband James Walbourne who perform as the Rails. (If you haven’t heard the Rails’ album Fair Warning, run don’t walk.)

Explaining to the Times reporter how and why this album came about, Teddy says: “It was difficult to make it sound like everyone’s together, because we weren’t – which is exactly the way my family is. If anything, that kind of sums up the whole process. It’s trying to bring everybody from wherever they are, in their own little world. And make it sound like we’re a family.”

At the end of this year, when all of the writers and bloggers and reader polls put together their “best of” lists, if they don’t include Pharis and Jason Romero’s A Wanderer I’ll Stay, they will be sadly mistaken. While I tend to keep my distance from such beauty contests, it isn’t hard at all to point to this collection and scream, “This is why I love music,” at the top of my lungs. While I’ve enjoyed the story of how another married musical couple – Pete and Maura Kennedy – met at the gravesite of Buddy Holly, Pharis comes in a close second because she sent Jason a 1928 recording of Tupelo Blues by Hoyt Ming and His Pinesteppers, and they had a wedding three months after. You can read their whole story here, but you should know they live in Horsefly, British Columbia, he is a custom banjo maker, she was the co-founder of Outlaw Social, they were both in The Haints Old Time Stringband, and as a duo they’ve released three near-perfect albums.

For many years, I lived in a small town north of San Diego and attended services and played music on occasion at a small Unitarian congregation in Vista – the town where Sean and Sara Watkins grew up. While it could be a false memory syndrome thing, I’m pretty sure I saw them play, when they were just little people, at some local events.

Ten years ago, all grown up and based in Los Angeles, they created what I like to think of as an ‘Our Gang’ variety show that features an ever-changing cast of characters. We got to see them at last year’s Newport Folk Festival after-party, and it was the highlight of the weekend, which you can read about here.

When they released an album recently, I made the mistake of sampling some tracks on Spotify and stashing it in the virtual file cabinet. On the way to see Iris DeMent, though, I sat on the train and listened to it end to end, start to finish. Brilliant concept, flawless execution. Coming from a man who dwells in the house of shuffle and prefers my music to pop up unexpectedly like a jack in the box, I have to say: you won’t exactly get the concept of The Watkins Family Hour without putting in the time to go all the way. The only family members by blood in this troupe are Sean and Sara. But what’s so special is that, not only are the other musicians in the cousins’ club, but we – the listeners – are in the family too.

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

From One-Hit Wonders to State Fairs…Guitar Contraptions to Steve Earle

Partial CapoAs it approaches midnight, my thoughtful column on one-hit wonders and signature songs just took a hard left turn — my finger slid across the track pad and landed on a website that spoke of such things as two-chord songs, partial capos, and Liberty tuning. I seriously don’t have time to transgress from the storyline I’ve worked out in my head for the past five days, especially as a deadline looms and the image of an anxious editor refreshing her inbox is imprinted behind my blue eyes. Actually, hazel. And just an hour ago everything was so perfectly clear and linear, from point A to point B.

So as to not throw the baby out with the bath water, my original premise was more a question pondered and posed about whether if, within this big tent of roots music, we had songs that were either bigger than the musician(s) who wrote or performed them, or were so defining that they overshadowed everything else in their repertoire. I researched and studied, read and listened. I considered some examples mostly from the mid-1950s that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Bond, Hankshaw Hawkins, The Weavers, Johnny Lee Wills, and Ferlin Husky before I advanced the Wayback Machine and settled on Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.” I wanted to juxtapose it with Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart.” Do not thank me for sparing you the anguish.

https://youtu.be/cLdhElV935A

Have you ever been to the Minnesota State Fair? Earlier this week, I flirted with the idea of flying in for a couple of days to visit an old friend and search for deep fried pannekoeken on a stick. Thoughts of quilts, seeds, cows, hogs, and Princess Kay of The Milky Way’s butter sculptures clouded and obscured rational processing as I prepared to hit the buy button on a thousand dollar air-hotel-car package. When in doubt, I pause and play guitar.

Looking into my guitar case, I saw an old partial capo and it reminded me that I needed to get a new one. Amazon Prime whispered my name but I wanted to go one step beyond. The old “one click-two click” took me to the doorstep of Harvey Reid.

It is with fear of public embarrassment that I admit to not having come across this man before tonight, although I have since learned that he performed on a stage at Newport Folk Festival last year with his wife and fiddler Joyce Andersen, and I missed their set by mere minutes. Residing in York, Maine, Reid is master guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, music educator, inventor, and innovator. He has released 32 albums on his Woodpecker Multimedia label, published dozens of instructional music books, and co-wrote the college textbook Modern Folk Guitar. He designed a new type of partial capo (if you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, just go with it), and came up with a unique method for playing and tuning a six-string guitar.

One project that caught my attention as I surfed through what seems like an endless sea of Reid-Andersen websites was The Song Train: 56 Great Two-Chord Songs Anyone Can Play. An 80 page hardbound coffee table book that accompanies a four-CD set. It includes a wide range of music from songwriters such as Dylan, Guthrie, Lucinda Williams, J.J. Cale, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, and Gillian Welch. Released in 2009, Acoustic Guitar magazine interviewed Reid and he shared about this concept that he and Joyce created together as a husband-wife project:

“We sensed a groundswell of interest from people wanting to play music, and we have children now, which really got us thinking about how musical knowledge gets transmitted. We wanted to help pass the torch, and realized that The Song Train was a valuable and unique missing piece in the puzzle of learning that suited our talents as performers and that really would help people get going. If you think really long and hard about it, the idea of The Song Train becomes obvious, though not everybody sees its value instantly. Boomer generation people don’t realize how many of the simple songs that enabled them to start playing music were present in schools and in mass culture, something that is no longer the case. We think it all starts with songs in people’s heads.

We wanted songs that we liked, that were alive and in circulation, and that covered a lot of styles and tastes. We probably could have made a whole bluegrass or gospel Song Train, but we wanted a cross-section, and tried to balance the country, folk, gospel, blues, rock, gospel, folk, etc. We wanted some famous songs, but wanted songs that had some durability, so we skipped topical things like ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and ‘The Beat Goes On.’ Our model was a single person with an acoustic guitar driving the song, so we did that with each song ourselves. Some rhythms are too complex, and we left out a lot of 1 and 2-chord songs that just are not one-guitar songs. ‘Sex Machine’ by James Brown and ‘Heroin’ by Lou Reed are 2-chord songs that did not make the cut, for example.”

Can’t tell you how happy I am that I abandoned that one-hit wonder theme and ended up finding this incredible tool for learning, teaching, and passing down music. Harvey and Joyce will likely be the beneficiaries of some hard-earned money from my wallet that would have otherwise ended up being spent on a day at the Mighty Midway. As far as Steve Earle and “Copperhead Road” goes … did you know it’s a song with only three chords and a capo used on just five of the six strings? Didn’t think so.

An afterword or two: I originally published this on the No Depression website as my Weekly Broadside column under the title Harvey Reid, Joyce Andersen and The Song Train. As it turned out, it didn’t get much traffic and for that I feel terribly sorry. One…because I happen to like this post. Two…Harvey, Joyce and their project create a vehicle to easily hand down tunes from one generation to the next, which I believe to be a worthy endeavor. So in the days that have past, I think that perhaps a new title and a small-budget marketing campaign on social media might help make more folks get to know this couple and their music. If you like this post or more importantly the Song Train project, please pass this on. Much obliged. EE.

Reid Andersen

Ana Egge and Why I Cry at 2:35

Ana Egge and The Stray Birds

I was not unfamiliar with the name Ana Egge when, on the first of July, I received a communique from a friend of mine that new music from her was on its way. Four years ago I took notice of this woman with an album called Bad Blood, at first, admittedly, because of its connection to Steve Earle. He handled the production, recorded it at Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock, had Ray Kennedy mix it, sprinkled in both his own and ex-wife Alison Moorer’s harmony vocals on a few tracks, and the backup band included Chris Masterson, Eleanor Whitemore, Rob Heath, and Byron Issacs. All that roots music star power aside, what jumped out of my headphones was Egge’s singular voice, clear as a bell, with intelligent songs that offered stories, structure, emotion, and power.

If you missed Bad Blood, you can thank the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t business paradigm that musicians face in this day and age as they try to be heard above all the noise in the aural soup kitchen. Too often great music arrives with so much promise, only to slide past us ever so quietly. We miss so much. It takes strength for an artist to stay the course, but Egge is one who has consistently delivered.

In 1997, when she was only 20 years old and living in Austin, Egge released her debut album, River under the Road. She has not stopped delivering great music since, and now we’re blessed with her eighth album, Bright Shadow.

Just to get you caught up, Egge was raised in a small town of about 50 people in North Dakota, and she also spent time in New Mexico. Her bio quotes her as saying:

“I was taught how to shoot a gun and how to enjoy alfalfa sprouts and tofu, raised by two back-to-the-land hippies. My folks loved the outdoors and eccentric people; I ran around barefoot and learned to ride a motorcycle when I was 5. I grew up with all the time and space in the world.”

While living in Texas, Egge had offers to go out on the road, and she opened for Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Iris DeMent, Shawn Colvin, and Ron Sexsmith. Later she got to share the stage with John Prine, Lucinda Williams, and – yes, this is sort of weird but it’s on her Wikipedia page – Sinead O’Connor. After spending time on the road. she moved back to New Mexico and settled in Brooklyn in 2002. She still lives there today with her wife of seven years and their young daughter.

Sifting through some of the marketing and biographical information about Egge, you start to find quotes like this one from Steve Earle: “Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets.”

Lucinda Williams said she’s “an exceptional songwriter, listen to the lyrics … the folk Nina Simone!”

“An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy,” Mark Miller – a concert promoter and frontman of Spuyten Duyvil – told me. “Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

As I’ve listened to this record over the past several weeks, I’ve come to think of it as a very special project. Egge has said she wanted to do an acoustic album with everyone sitting around a mic, and she self-produced this time around. While Bright Shadow is a collaborative effort with The Stray Birds – Maya De Vitry (fiddle, banjo, vocals), Charles Muench (upright bass, vocals), and Oliver Craven (mandolin, fiddle, slide guitar, vocals) – the cover lists only Egge’s name.

Over email, Egge recently told me: “The Stray Birds approached me as fans a few years ago wanting to back me up live at Folk Alliance [Toronto 2012]. We recorded the album two years ago and their success since then has been marvelous. I actually asked them about billing the album as ‘Ana Egge and the Stray Birds’ after we recorded it, but they didn’t feel that it was right. I had strong arrangement ideas going into it, and I think it would be different if we had co-written or recorded some of their songs.”

After they finished recording, Egge’s mother passed away and she also welcomed the arrival of her daughter. In retrospect, she says, the songs on the album mirror those intense and formative life changes. There is a very soft, warm feeling throughout the album, with layers of delicate textures in the instrumentation, and vocal lines that can go left when you expect them to go right. The tight harmonies that are a hallmark of the Stray Birds’ repertoire envelop and complement Egge’s voice. If you need an additional descriptor, I’ll sum up: stellar songwriting with sophisticated string band instrumentation.

Back in May, there was a video from Bright Shadow posted online for Mother’s Day. Egge wrote the song with Gary Nicholson, and in the description it says that it’s “a tribute to mothers everywhere as well as the divine feminine and possibility of redemption in all of us.” Filmed and directed by Paul Kloss and edited by Amy Foote, “Rock Me (Divine Mother)” features simply Egge and her guitar, interspersed with clips of moms and kids from what I imagine to be home movies.

Rock me in the arms of my divine mother.
Divine mother.
Rock me now.

It’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, but this is the one: A tribute to mothers. Indeed it is. By the time the Stray Birds add their voices to the chorus toward the end, you can tip me over with a feather.

And I cry at 2:35.

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

In Memory of Jillian Johnson

JJThere was another all too frequent feeling of sorrow this week as I read about the victim of a shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette Louisiana. Jillian Johnson, a 33 year old artist and designer who ran the Red Arrow Workshop with her husband Jason Brown, was also a radio DJ and roots music fan. She was the ukulele player in The Figs, a band who Gambit Weekly of New Orleans said “looks like a country-time tea party of pretty girls in pretty dresses, but it rocks, Cajun-style, like a roadhouse full of moonshine and buckshot.”

A former resident of Nashviile, television station WKRN reported on their website of her friendship and support of musician Woody Pines.

Musician Woody Pines met Johnson 10 years ago as he got his start on the streets of New Orleans, hitchhiking from city to city. She first became a fan, and then a friend.

“She posted a photo on MySpace saying, ‘Woody Pines super fan,’ and that was the first time, you know. We were just a small traveling band,” Pines said. “That was touching.”

His group often made trips to Lafayette, Louisiana, to play at the Black Pot Festival, and Johnson hosted them all at her home.

“She put us up, me and my band, always gave us a couch to sleep on; even when there was no couch, just floors,” Pines told News 2. “She was not a native of Lafayette, but people said she made the city cool.”

Pines was glued to the TV last night watching the aftermath of the theater shooting, not realizing Johnson was one of the three people killed until this morning.

“It blew my mind; it made me hold my hands to my face and say no,” Pines said. “I imagine being in that theater for a second.”

Johnson also designed Woody Pines first logo, and the graphics on the band’s first website. She was a musician herself, part of the all-girls string band The Figs.

This is what her husband posted on Red Arrow’s Facebook account, and there’s really nothing else to add other than to say our collective hearts and spirits are broken too, and our thoughts are with all of those who have been touched by Jillian.

Our hearts are shattered. We will love you forever. She was a once-in-a-lifetime gal. A mother, daughter, sister and a truly exceptional wife. She was an artist, a musician, an entrepreneur and a true renaissance woman. She was the love of my life and I will miss her always.

Thank you all for your kind words and offers of support. Our family is together now to mourn our loss. We would appreciate privacy during this time but your messages on outlets like this truly mean the world to us.

Our thoughts are with the family of Mayci Breaux. We mourn with you. And finally our thoughts and prayers are with Jillian’s best friend, who was in the theater with her at the time of the shooting. We love you and we’re wishing you the best!

This was a senseless act and, as is the case with all such acts, there is no playbook, no rules on how to cope. We’re trying our best to pull ourselves together. We’re putting one foot in front of the other. Thank you all. If you have a thought or memory you’d love to share, feel free to do so here or Facebook.

Red Arrow will be closed until further notice. Thank you all for your support and understanding.

 

 

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.