Rolling Country 2006 Thread

Rebel Meets Rebel is on Big Vin Records, which for all I know was invented just for this...

Also listened this morning to local EP by Lorraine Leckie and her Demons -- pretty decent Hank Wiliams "Lost Highway" cover at the end which reminds me of the Mekons's version (though maybe they changed the name? On *Fear and Whiskey* I think) and definitely captures the cheating-on theme of the song well, though most of the EP is more goth-folk in a Tori/Sinead mode, interesting when the instruments stretch themselves into drones at ends of songs but still not really my cup of tea. I do like "Rainbow," though, which has an AC/DC riff and a catchy rapped chorus that's shouted and not detached, and hence rocks.

and okay, here's the cdbaby link, you lazybones:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/kwilder3

True Brothers' *Wanted: Country Outlaw Tribute* is another good cdbaby country CD, with adequate-to-great obligatory covers of "Take This Job and Shove It," "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," "Just Good Old Boys," "Older Women," and (most suprisingly) the Swingin' Medallions "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" (one of my favorite songs in the world, though they don't make it sound like anywhere near as much a drunken frat party as the Medallions did; still, I love that they cover it at all and wonder if anybody else considers it country - where were the Medallions from, Memphis or somewhere? Louisiana? I forget). There are also some apparent covers of novelty songs I don't remember hearing before -- "Marie Laveau", a goofy Shel Silverstein song about looking as ugly as your mom or something, and "Rub It In," which appears to be mainly about suntan lotion and instructs you to rub it on their back and their sacroliliac. And the album closes with an original called "Country Outlaw Theme" where they talk about how their dad thought all country singers should be clean shaven with short hair, but then the True Bros (who are true bros, apparently) started listening to Willie and Waylon and Kinky and Bobby Bare after school, and now Big N Rich and Montgomery Gentry and Toby are "throwbacks" to the original outlaws. Not sure if anybody put it that way before, certainly not in a song.

What's weird is that on the cover of the *Wanted* album (from last year) the True Bros LOOK like hairy scraggly dirty outlaws, but on the cover of their *Hymns and Other Songs We Wrote Ourselves* from 2003 they look like super-clean-cut hee-hawing old-time country (preacher?) dorks in gold (lame'? what does lame' look like?) suits. So at first you think it's going to be a religious record, which it sometimes is, but then you notice there's a real good song about Dorian Gray ("based on the novel by Oscar Wilde") and a real good one about Jecklyl and Hyde and a real good one about how if you marry a banjo-pickin mama she might not do anything else but play banjo, not even cook. And others about getting married and dad getting buried next to a tree so he can be next to his wife for eternity. And other songs *are* Jesus songs, often talked like a rhyming sermon like that old deck-of-cards song (which might not have rhymed, come to think of it) and sometimes acapella (with Louvin/Delmore style brother harmonies); "Six Steps to Heaven" is my faovrite worship one so far, but there are 16 tracks (all fairly short) on the album, and I haven't really absorbed all of it. Instrumentation is fast catchy bluegrass, no showoff bullshit whatsoever. Most of the songs sound like forgotten old obscurities, but songwriting credits are mostly all "Jacky, Roger and Teresa True" except for "A Christmas Wish" by Ricky Dunn, and "missing You/Hats off to Web," which is said to be based on a Red Sovine tune.

Religon stuff on Albert Lee's new *Road Runner* (at least 75 percent a country CD, by an old rocker who appears to be born again or at least is doing a pretty good imitation of being born again) are a lot more reverent and boring. The stuff on the album I kind of like is the Junior Walker title cover, the Billy Burnette and Delbert McLinton songs that sort of sound like 1979 Dave Edmunds rockabilly but not as good, and the seven-minute instrumental guitar jam solo "Payola Blues." But even those I can take or leave, and the more reverent soft-rock (including numbers by Leo Kottke, Richard Thompson, and a horrible John Hiatt one called "Rock of Your Love", presumably from after Hiatt started sucking) are way too hard to get through. Ten Years After CD from last year was way, way more fun.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/truebros2

two albums kicking my ass this morning that i found out about not through cdbaby, but through myspace of all places (nope, i don't have a page, and have no intention of getting one, but i figured out how to do the music search): victory brothers' *kowboyz de loz angeleez* (probably the best big n rich *horse of a different color* substitute I've ever heard including ones by big n rich, and now vying with leanne kingwell as my album of the year) and penny dale's *undaunted* (the best stevie nicks album i've ever heard by a country singer, probably, and an immediate 2006 top ten candidate.) lots to say about these two, eventually, but i'll hold off for now.

also really liking irma thomas's *after the rain* on rounder, the "rain" obviously being katrina, though i kind of hate the mooshy shelter-from-storm piano ballad the album ends with though i do hope it provides solace to new orleans. what i love so far is "flowers" (soul about flowers on roadsides after car crashes, with a sound that i swear reminds me of "uncle tom's cabin" by warrant), "make me a pallet on the floor" (cheating with a painter, wow), "till i can't take it anymore" (country music in a soul voice, about how "you work your thing so well/I dream of heaven and live here in hell"), "these honey dos" (vampy bawdy boogie woogie where the honey dos are at first temptations but wind up also being about manners like please and thank you), and "stone survivor" (which is just plain funky).

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=58969629

penny dale:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=8670245

Willie Nelson has always deconstructed westerns, and maintained a
belief in telling the truth about places buried under their own
mythology. It is found on his album, the Red Headed Stranger and in
any number of singles over decades. It is found, in his low, lean and
hungry version of the traditional ballad "He was a Friend of Mine",
which could so easily have been dismissed, because of its lyrics, and
because of its placement on the soundtrack to that Heath and Jake
movie. After his soundtrack work, he released, on Howard Stern and
then i-tunes, a cover of the cult classic outlaw tune Cowboys are
Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other. The two songs entwine, and
emerge as one text, working out familiar themes: the decimation that
unexpected desire can cause, ideas of masculinity and honour, the
implications of dereliction of duty, and larger, more formal concerns
of isolation, landscape and comfort.

Cowboys…is the rare song that actually talks about what it means to
fuck the same gender on the prairies. Fuck in any number of ways, fuck
because they love each other, fuck because they are lonely, fuck
because they want to be kept literally warm or have a companion, or to
continue their lives outside the mainstream, as another kind of
outlaws. Like any number of us, it is about what happens when others
cannot handle the fluidity and dangerous nature of desire. The song is
a classic, because it catalogs the options for how bodies fit
together, and because it acknowledges that some of the options mean
that "there's always someone who says what the others just whisper/and
mostly that someone is the first one to be shot down dead"

The original is done in waltz time, and has a theatrical winking and
nodding. The music has the same kind of music hall extravagance that
caused Jobraith to lose his career, and 30 years later for Rufus
Wainwright to have one. (Think of it as a less secure, less ambiguous,
less haunting version of the Magnetic Field's Papa was a Rodeo.) The
slippages of gender, sexuality, and desire emphasized here are
bog-standard Freud, lines like "I believe to my soul/there is a
feminine/and inside every lady/there is a deep manly voice/ to be made
clear", maintain gay men really want to be women and vice versa line
that seems so old fashioned in the land of Brokeback and the
International Gay Rodeo Association.

The satisfaction in male companionship is a central theme in the both
songs, in the film, in westerns in general. The codes of masculinity
are Byzantine and violations of these codes are rewarded by violence.
One of the reasons why Matthew Sheppard was left to die in that field
in Wisconsin was the difference between city boys and country boys,
between those who went to college, and those who were working men.
Watching Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee is as aware of this; as is Ned
Sublette (the songwriter of Cowboys…) the hardness of the lovemaking,
and the wrestling/shoving/physicality of the foreplay in the movie
show this. He was also wise choosing the solidity of Willie Nelson to
sing over the credits, as a coda, a song that expressed issues of
masculinity, obliquely. He was a Friend of Mine, comes from the ground
of the west. It does not have an author, and the narrative is basic
narrative, with little detail, some in cliché. He sings it with great
tenderness, but little directness (as opposed to Dylan, who was never
really tender).

Like most ballads, the key to "He was a Friend of Mine", is the
repetition of the chorus. The lines "he never did wrong/a thousand
miles at home, and he never harmed no one" have an old fashioned,
permanence—a depth of hagiography that was never really existent in
either Clint Eastwood or in Roy Rogers. The two songs here are never
really about fucking, but about how to live integrously in a land that
rewards anything but what it says it does.

Both performances then are about what the Quakers would call speaking
truth to power, and farmers I know, would call handling your own shit.
The laconic taciturn outside of the cowboy hides a soft center. There
is an effort to keep secrets, to cause no trouble. There is something
of the private text, spoken softly amongst friends, in He was a Friend
of Mine, and Willie infuses all of the privacy, the sadness and the
shock, in the line "Stoles away and cries". There is tension between
being quietly silent and actually processing grief, a tension that
violates the code of the west, just as admitting that the desires that
one cowboy has for another, may not only be geographic convenience,
but about lust.

This might be Willie Nelson's American Recordings moment, a desire to
push himself away from old complacencies, and old audiences. It often
happens when someone's physical instrument is so ragged, and when the
desire is to communicate differently Nelson's voice is shot. But how
ragged he sounds here, and how broken he sounds, makes the two songs
even sadder, stronger, more tragic. They are a return to questions
that remain unsolved in the 70s, and their answers are of an old man:
be generous to people, mourn the dead, fight for the living, refuse to
apologize for love and desire. Together, they prove a testament to
Nelson's skills as an interpretive guide, and to someone who really
knows cowboys.

the road hammers are headed by jason mccoy, who i have been talking about forever, there was a fascinating reality television seires putting together the band, lots of juicy bullshit about the nashville scene, hes really astute in terms of the pure commerical aspect, and he hasnt broken thru from canada yet. i have seen him maybe 4 times, and hes a solid guy too, never interviewed him, though i guess i should for somewhere because of what he thinks about the industry is as impt as his work,i can video tape and send the reality show, if you want chuck. (hes acutally all over cmt, he has had several making the video specials, an hour at christmas this year, a support the troops thing, and his videos are consisently in the top ten, hes toby keith big up north, though he won the CMA Global Country Award this year)

Jason is such an amazing muscian, with a voice like a bullet thru glass, and i am sort of disappointed by the road hammers because it doesnt flatter him, its a bit too much of a cliche, and his love of the good lord means that he holds back a bit when he shouldnt. (there is a scene when they are in the studio, when he is singing about white pills and red wine or something like that, and he felt really bad about that, because he didnt want to be a bad example)

singles to hear, solo:
this used to be our town
born again in dixieland
doin it right
this could take all night
kinda like its love
ten million tear drops
doing time in bakers field
i lie
i feel a sin comin' on
she aint missin me
and his covers of billy shaver are amazing (as is xmas cd)

anyways road hammers, good, jason mccoy, best thing out of country music in the last half decade

don, the nancy mccallion CD i got is self-titled, so it may not be as knew as i thought it was (though i could've sworn it's listed as 2005 on cdbaby, though artists cheat on years there all the time, i've noticed.) also, some copyrights on it date back to '98 and even '84. best tracks on it, seems to me so far, are 'the leaving kind,' 'reckless child,' 'misery,' and especially 'moon over the interstate' and especially especially 'money's moving up' (about how the trickle-down theory's a lie), and they do indeed sound fairly molly-esque to me, more than some of the more staid other tracks.

as far as responses to posts go, seemed to they'd pretty much dried up in recent weeks, and the thread had pret'near up and died except for my own posts. though hopefully that was just a temporary lull.

It just flopped around like a fish on a table and after awhile I got sick of listening to it. A shame because I liked the first record and didn't expect such a mediocre second one.

hes not like dwight at all, hes more tender and almost milksop in a way, he emotes more then dwight ever did.

jason mccoy isnt milksop, wrong word...he emotes, with a depth and an almost tender meloncholy, a sort of melodrama, but not femminine at all, butch!

Don't give up on it, xhuxk. I've been neglecting it just cause I've been freakin swamped and I expect the same is true for others and I've been mostly listening to Go-Betweens albums lately. I think they may be the least country band to ever build music around acoustic guitars. P.S. I saw Tim Carroll and Elizabeth Cook this evening. Sweeter folks you'll never meet. Elizabeth has a new record coming out in Feb, and the single is: "Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman."

Yep, that's exactly the one I got, too (including the '04 part).

And Anthony, if Jason McCoy solo is even *remotely* milksoppy, or even tenderly melancholy, I'm almost *positive* I'd prefer his Road Hammers stuff. Which isn't to say I wouldn't check him out solo.

I still totally love the cocaine and hangover songs on that Shooter album, and am stumped about why George or anybody else would think the latter, at least, doesn't have a masterful kick to it. If Poco or Pure Prairie ever rocked that hard, they hid ir from me.) (Didn't notice he'd switched the cover at the end; that stinks, both because his "Living Proof" sounded good last time I listened to it and because I sent my advance to either Frank or George or both, without closely checking the tracklist apparently, when my real one arrived.)

(though his last solo album, shes not missing missing me at all rocks the hell out of a broken heart)

I dunno, if it was such a commercial-careerism move (not that it'd necessarily be a bad thing if it was) wouldn't it consist of something other than country-rock trucker songs (hardly the most commercial subgenre out there)? How many trucker songs actually become c&w hits these days? or maybe they do in canada??) anyway, the more i listen, it's clear his "emotive" slow ones are the dullest songs on here (and so far the little feat and jerry reed covers seem the *least* dull -- though i like plenty of the truckin' originals too.)

(As for the Go-Betweens, I think "Bellavista Terrace" probably is the place to start because it's an overview and that's the grown-up way, but I love "Spring Hill Fair" best of all, and I can't help thinking you're going to go mad for "Bachelor Kisses", and maybe "Part Company" (my favourite of all), so I'm half tempted to recomend you start there.)

he has a best of cd out right now, and honky tonk angels, the cd is ecellent as is fears lies and angels (i need to check that title)

meanwhile i think i'm starting to come to turns with ashley monroe, a little. "he ain't coming back," her album's closer, is a breakfast breakup song (since she pours a cup of coffee in it) that seems to take its chorus's melody from one of my all-time breakfast breakup songs, "superwoman" by karyn white, but the breakfast breakup song it's paired with (since this one precedes it), "hank's cadillac," sounds like a teacher's pet is singing -- okay, maybe it's not a breakfast breakup song; wasn't paying attention to the (teacher's pet) title when i was listening to it, just to "if i'd kept the coffee strong," and regrets about all the other stuff she could've done different and he (hank?)'d still be around; the words are fine but the music's a bore. The two rockers, I guess (are there more?) are "can't let go" (another hard-to-let-go codependency-maybe song, same title mariah carey used once) and "pain pain" (which has the eddie rabbit love-me-in-the-rearview rap section and double entrende's about coming again). "that's why we call earch other baby" is the gender-quarrel duet, semi-rockabilly and not bad; who's the guy? (sounds like dwight yoakam, but maybe -- see my jason mccoy notes above -- everybody sounds like dwight to me this week). and then there's "satisfied," which feels dead in the water, and the song i'm really starting to hate, "pony," a preciously polished turd which seems to entail ashely being a little girl who wants a pony and wants a baby and wants to be your lady when she grows up--unless i totally heard it wrong; either way, get it out of my house, ok?

*born and raised* by self-released monroeville, PA six-piece cdbabies North of the Mason-Dixon (aka NOMAD) is interesting in a post-hair-metal world in that it includes (1) a cover of REO Speedwagon's "take it on the run" which sounds like the eagles, (2) a decent rocker called "farmer's daughter" that starts off seemingly swiping chordage from nazareth's "hair of the dog" even though NOMAD's idea of rocking is about one-twentieth what nazareth's idea of rocking was; (3) a track that sounds like billy ray cyrus doing a summer song halfway between bryan adams and kenny chesney; (4) a blatant bon jovi ballad imitation i don't like much called "i'm not your man; and (5) a decently drummed and horned rocker called "alone when you're lonely" that seems to employ cowbells. i also like the slightly latin bluegrassish lilt of "dyin' to live" and the hoedown jamming in "watch the girls." the "amazing grace" cover is okay, and the rest is no worse than lone star or rascal flatts. (in fact, i'd take the album anyday over the new rascal flatts CD, which i wound up liking two or three tracks on okay, but it still mainly stinks.)

road warriors song annoying me the most so far: "heart with four wheel drive". road warriors song reminding me most of big'n'rich so far: "i'm a road warrior," where they brag about their "pimped ride."

I think that's the Kasey Chambers connection I noted earlier. I like Kasey, but that's one of her most pusillanimous tunes.

Now, rethinking the Road Hammers: I'm starting to the get an idea of what Anthony means about Jason McCoy's heart not being in the more rowdy trucker stuff. Outside of the two covers, which are real good but mostly because they're just plain great songs, the only song he really completely puts over, to my ears, is "Girl on the Billboard," which has a cool sort of modal/circular/fugue-ish verse structure and also must be the song I was referring to when I said he sounded like Dwight Yoakam, because it's the only one where he does. The one and only ballad, "Call it a Day," *does* seem somehow more heartfeltedly sung than the faster stuff, and it's not as dull as I implied upthread; the guy does lonesome weariness pretty well, I guess. But I also wouldn't say it's any *less* generic than the speedier tunes; just generic in a less energetic way. I like "I'm a Road Hammer" pretty well, but the five-minute "reprise" version of it at the end (with its jew's harp type break and remixed stretching-out effects) is more B'n'R than the regular version at the beginning, and though Jason also says "chillin' the most" in it, it's really not all *that* B''n'R; actually, toward the start of it, his voice reminds me a little of John Anderson for a line or two. "Nashville Bound" (as in "hellbent and Nashville bound") irritated me at first since its title seemed gratuitious in two different ways after they'd already done "East Bound and Down", but I'm a David Allan Coe and Charlie Daniels fan, so any song where long-haired country guys get in a fight with a redneck is okay by me. "Keep On Truckin'" is not Eddie Kendricks by any means (wow, I just checked Joel Whitburn's book; I had no idea his '73 proto-disco song of that name went #1 pop for two weeks!), but it's kinda funky regardless. And there's lots of little doo-dads, ignition noises and incidental tracks and a track of bloopers called "Flat Tires" (plus the theme song reprise) to make people think this 10-song (eight orignals) album has 14 songs on it, and I appreciate the ripoff shamelessness of that, but then again I didn't have to pay for the thing. Only song I hate is the Country-and-Westerbergish one, "Heart With Four Wheel Drive," which sounds as bland as bland can be.

Roy wrote: P.S. I saw Tim Carroll and Elizabeth Cook this evening. Sweeter folks you'll never meet. Elizabeth has a new record coming out in Feb, and the single is: "Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman."

I'm back, I'm back. God, my mother's dying of cancer before my (and my sister's) eyes, we got this bad news a couple weeks ago. So I just have been worn out.

Tim Carroll and Elizabeth I've known for maybe 10 years. Great people.

I've been working, as much as I can in between this whole lousy situation--I did a piece on Mark Nevers for the Scene that should run next Wednesday, and he's a fascinating guy. Whatever else you can say about him or Bare or even Lambchop, he gets some cool sounds, and on this new (non-country, actually sorta "Adventure"-era Television/Pavement sounding) Lone Official record he did (they're a Nashville band led by a guy named Matt Button who writes songs about horseracing, feeling lost in the big city, and one kinda great one about bar fights!), Nevers is kinda a poet of the pedal steel or somethin' corny like that. Anyway, I found him real interesting, real cool (into punk rock and Eno and stuff) and he really uses those Music Row miking techniques mixed with his vintage 2-inch tape machines and so forth). I like the way his records sound, even the Candi Staton which I think Chuck mentioned he wasn't impressed by--well, it's probably a bit staid in a way, but it sounds great to me, real good revivalism that isn't stupid.

So far behind--I am also talking to Blaine Larsen sometime next week, so I got to sit down and re-listen to his new one.

I read some of the above posts, and will catch up tomorrow, I promise. I hope everyone here is doing OK--Anthony, Chuck, Roy, Don, everyone.

I did notice some talk about "Girl on the Billboard" above--the great version I know is by Del Reeves. And Chuck, remember the Dean Martin reissue of "Swinging Down Yonder" you were talking about? I saw a great film of him doing "Hominy Grits" from that record, around '52. Awesome.

Finally, it is terrible about Grant from the Go-Betweens. I don't know all their stuff, but I do like a few songs from "Tallulah" which is the most commonly praised one, I think, and from "The Friends of," the one they did in Oregon or wherever. But I never went the way of a lot of people with them, I never quite loved them or anything. They always seemed so serious, and I was always a bit put off by the angst or something. Angst, man, I do not need right now.

much love
ase