Rolling Country 2018

What with pretty paper and other holiday goals, Some of yall may have missed Edd Hurt's last-minute contributions to RC 17; they're worth a reprise, so here:

Talking about Caroline Spence: she's doing a residency in January here at the Basement. Wrote this about her recently:

Virginia-born singer-songwriter Caroline Spence released a remarkable track about the limits of Nashville songwriting on her 2013 EP You Know the Feeling. “Whiskey Watered Down” takes down a shallow tunesmith who, Spence declares, will never be “Parsons, Earle or Van Zandt.” What makes “Whiskey Watered Down” a definitive song about a particular strain of Music City songwriting is her choice of role models, but the tune also equates bad songwriting with bad relationships. A Nashville resident since 2011, Spence continued to work in classic singer-songwriter mode on her 2015 full-length Somehow, which includes a full-band rendition of “Whiskey Watered Down” that I find less effective than the acoustic reading she performed on the 2013 EP. I admire Spence’s writing on this year’s album Spades & Roses, which contains the excellent track “You Don’t Look So Good (Cocaine)” and the equally fine “Softball,” about sexism and what it takes to become a big-league songwriter. Spence, who recently released a five-song EP called Secret Garden, has potential — she bears watching. EDD HURT

I didn't vote for Nicole Atkins' new one in the Scene poll I just finished. Not even tangentially "country," which makes sense for a Jersey-bred singer who sounds like Cass Elliot. But a really good album. I like her; she's tough and funny. Did this piece on her in July: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/20867860/nicole-atkins-explores-the-joys-of-organic-songwriting-and-production

― eddhurt, Tuesday, December 26, 2017 5:22 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks! Well, some of us heard Atkins' latest as having kind of a Dusty In Memphis vibe, not country but some urban country appeal and sensibility (broody and drinking and poised after midnight)--sooo, I put her in my gratuitous made-up motley Countryoid/Americana/Related category on the Scene ballot, which I'll post on RC 2018 when the issue comes out.
Kind of off-putting that Spence or whomever harps on this "not as good as such-and-such" bit; once when I was stressing over comparing myself, a photog friend said, "Well I know I'm not the best, but I just want to drink and take pictures." It's worked out pretty well for him.
(And as usual, Earle's latest made my gratutitous made-up About Half Good category; both Earles did, although I may have been too kind to JT, who's convened some motorvatiing musicians, but is so abashed and maybe wasted [on abashment, at least] that he usually sounds like a bug on the windshield of life).
Back to Spence, thanx also for reminder of the new EP, which I think is acoustic? Will check.

― dow, Thursday, December 28, 2017 11:21 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, and I got tired enough of the "sounds like" aspect, even on so many of my favorite albums---self-expression via retro seemed especially prevalent this year--that I took Langford from Related to the real Top Ten, because he doesn't sound like anybody else, even or especially in Muscle Shoals, where he also sounds at home.

― dow, Thursday, December 28, 2017 11:31 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought Robert Ellis' piano playing made the Atkins album. Yeah, Langford's Norbert Putnam record transcended local color but barely. "Natchez Trace" is good, "Snake Behind Glass" the best song on the record. I saw him play here this fall. I also found some things to say about Chris Gantry's 1974 album, which is a beatnk kinda thing. Far better guitar player than singer or even songwriter--Motormouth, from '70, is just something else entirely and not necessarily a good thing, but I admire his gusto. https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/20982813/chris-gantrys-longshelved-lp-at-the-house-of-cash-is-progressive-even-by-2017-standards

I also investigated the work of producer-songwriter-singer Norro Wilson, who died this year. Worked on a bunch of pivotal '70s country records by Wynette and Jones. Undoubtedly one of the savviest singers in "country," a pop-country genius whose '60s and '70s solo records are country, folk, Atlantic-style r&b, West Coast pop, shlock-pop-country in the style of Dickey Lee, Billy Swan or Bergen White. Amazing shit. Got to find his Smash LP Dedicated to: Only You. This is from the 70s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80DECm61mIE

Tyler Coe, one of David Allan Coe's children, has been putting together excellent podcasts about country. Maybe the best so far is on Shelby Singleton, but the Bobbie Gentry episode is really good too. Coe gets the business side of the equation really well, is hardheaded. He also provides transcriptions if you just wanna read: https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/

The highlight of my Americana-fest experience was seeing Little Bandit, a kind of Charlie Rich-depressive-funny band featuring Alex Caress, the brother of former Nashville bassist-singer Jordan Caress. Comes at his "country-soul" from a queer perspective. Breakfast Alone made my Scene ballot. Another hit at the fest I didn't see was the War & Treaty, a gospel-soul duo. Their EP is promising:

CRITICS' PICK
The War and Treaty
This event is over. The High Watt
Lord have mercy, here’s another soul-gospel-pop Americana amalgam. Husband-and-wife duo The War and Treaty, who recently moved to Nashville from Albion, Mich., performed a well-received set in town at this year’s AmericanaFest with backing from Nashville guitarist Buddy Miller’s band, and Rolling Stone gave their turn at the festival a glowing review. Ohio-born singer Michael Trotter Jr. honed his piano chops while serving as a soldier during the Iraq War (somewhat improbably, he practiced on Saddam Hussein’s piano while his unit was encamped in one of the former Iraqi president’s palaces) and met singer Tanya Blount, a Washington, D.C., native, when he returned home. They’ve released their debut EP, Down to the River, which combines their gospel-influenced vocals with tough blues and soul grooves. Not everything works — the duo tends to approach their performances head-on, which sometimes obscures the quality of their songs. Still, material such as “Down to the River,” which features slide guitar, and “Hit Dawg Will Holla,” a stop-time blues shuffle, suggests they could develop into songwriters who know how to work an amalgam. EDD HURT

― eddhurt, Friday, December 29, 2017 8:46 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think Carson McHone, who didn't make an album this year, deserves notice, up there with Whitney Rose, whose record I like a lot. Anyone else hear her?

The ongoing battle over the soul of country music seems like a necessary activity that tends to overstate the danger that commercialism poses. Time and time again, country music has demonstrated its ability to absorb folk, rock, country-rock, schlock, disco, patriotism and regionalism, and young singers continue to discover new ways to syncretize the music of Williams and Wells with pop without pandering to the let’s-save-country ideologues. Hailing from ostentatious Austin, Texas, singer Carson McHone is a young country singer who expresses herself through the form while avoiding the formalism that etiolates the work of many country purists. In other words, she controls an aching break into her head voice that marks her as a stone country vocalist, and her 2015 album Goodluck Man brims with tunes that evoke the spirit of early-’70s country without wandering off into retro. McHone has been working on a new album in Nashville with Spoon producer Mike McCarthy — let’s hope it’s commercial as hell. EDD HURT

― eddhurt, Friday, December 29, 2017 8:52 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I nommed the Whitney Rose on the ILM poll (I think???) I came across her while browsing year end lists. Love her album.

― omar little, Friday, December 29, 2017 9:22 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, and her other 2017 release, South Texaz Suite, an EP. Kinda wish she'd saved the best tracks for the full-length, but it's worth checking out for sure, especially "Three Minute Love Affair."

― dow, Friday, December 29, 2017 9:58 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Texas, that is.

― dow, Friday, December 29, 2017 9:58 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, I led the way to the end of the road (by going back to RC 17):

Now, starting to look ahead:
https://www.rollingstone.com/country/lists/2018-country-music-preview-30-most-anticipated-albums-tours-w514999/loretta-lynn-wouldnt-it-be-great-w515083

here's one:
Loretta Lynn

Album: Wouldn't It Be Great
Release Date: TBA
The Country Music Hall of Fame vocalist delayed the release of her already-recorded new album Wouldn't It Be Great until 2018 after suffering a stroke last May. Like the Grammy-nominated Full Circle that preceded it, the LP was co-produced by John Carter Cash and Lynn's daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and cut at Johnny Cash's cabin studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Boasting new songs like "I'm Dying for Someone to Live For" and "Ruby's Stool," written with songwriter Shawn Camp, Wouldn't It Be Great also includes new versions of Lynn staples "Don't Come Home a-Drinkin'" and "Coal Miner's Daughter." "You can't get them anymore," Lynn told Rolling Stone in 2016 of her decision to update her classics. "You've got fans that want it. So we will give them to 'em." Full Circle was a satisfying blend of old & new, glad she's still in the circle game.

― dow, Monday, January 15, 2018 1:19 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brother colter wall's new one was my album of the year by the way

― infinity (∞), Monday, January 15, 2018 1:28 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He made it into one of my Best New Artist slots on the Scene ballot. I still need to check his Imaginary Appalachia EP, have you heard it?
Another one from the Stone link. She's always sounded like she probably likes Elton John, David Bowie, Patsy Cline: "Americana"? OK!

Album: By the Way, I Forgive You
Release Date: February 16th
On her sixth studio album, Americana heroine Brandi Carlile ramps everything up a notch, working with Waylon Jennings' rebel-yell son Shooter, who co-produced with Dave Cobb. She takes deep dives into her family history ("Most of All") and offers up an anthem for the downtrodden ("The Joke," a chin-up call to arms for anyone feeling oppressed, was blasted out in a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!). While largely adhering to her unplugged, modern-Appalachian approach, Carlile also pushes a few musical envelopes: "Harder to Forgive" is swoony, luxurious pop, "Hold Out Your Hand" has a wall-of-drums wallop and "Party of One" wraps up with shivery orchestration. D.B.

― dow, Monday, January 15, 2018 1:32 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I keep confusing him with music writer Seth Colter Walls in searches (still not quite sure they're two diff people).

― dow, Monday, January 15, 2018 1:34 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha

definitely different people

and i have heard IA a few times actually, yes

it's good but i like his self-titled release better, though sleeping on the blacktop is equally as good as say thirteen silver dollars (similar vibe)

― infinity (∞), Monday, January 15, 2018 1:38 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Caitlyn Smith's Starfire looks interesting.

A record I missed last year is the Kernal's Light Country, on Single Lock out of Florence, Alabama. I recently listened to a couple of prime Jim Nesbitt country albums, '69's Truck Driving Cat with Nine Wives and '70's Runnin' Bare, Nixononian novelty country about how the U.S.A. has trucks and humor and country music. The Kernal is like the Great Nesbitt thrust into post-modernity in a manner I think may kind of help to summarize the shift in 2017 country from bro- to exploratory essays into something resembling...history, maybe, reality. Perhaps the generational shifts have temporarily made it cool for younger folks into country to access some of the more congenially banal aspects of its post-countrypolitan phases. Dave Dudley himself did many pretty damned good albums in the '60s and early '70s, and Moe Bandy was also really cool. I also think Midland is a great Dallas-era country throwback band, like they cut it that record on Dec. 12, 1979. I think it's now cool(er) to embrace the tacky, the banal, the failed, the small-scale, and perhaps this attitude has found its way into Mainstream Country in 2017? Dunno.

To that end I think the Himes-ian yearly Country Essay may be along those lines: the year of the gun and the toppling of the white male ethos. I see it as a year in which the immersion in formerly declasse old-school kountry and also, various now-idiosyncratic roots forms (John Moreland's use of Excello r*b on Big Bad Luv that have merged with the strictures of country songwriting, has produced a hybrid Americana-country music. No doubt few in mainstream, poptimist country this year produced any song quite as fatalistic as Jason Isbell's "If We Were Vampires" or flat-out condemned the bad old white prerogatives of power as straightforwardly as Margo Price on All American. I also thought Daniel Romano's record, for better or worse considering its mannerist tendencies and out-front let's-fuck-with-stuff aesthetic, was the most interesting thing I heard in 2017 in country, but not the most enjoyable.

Come to think of it, in the 90s I started getting self-released promos with press sheets sometimes claiming Sonny & Cher as country inspirations--even before encounters with Dolly Parton and Hee-Haw---and especially The Sonny and Cher Show, though the self-promoters also claimed to be in their early-to-mid-20s, for the most part: too young to have seen it, and this was before YouTube---but maybe it was the idea, the vision of the show they had, while listening to "You Better Sit Down, Kids" and "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves." The connection was not always audible, but good to know. One act that stood out was basically a duo, Y'all, with some fairly seriocomic, fleetingly bittersweet original material among the campy laffs (closer to Shel Silverstein than Sonny Bono). Think that's right--can't find the promos now, and the name is hard to google, even putting in "band."
Countrypolitan is real easy to mess with, it got weird pretty readily---there was research on what kind of music led to serious thinking and drinking of the more expensive booze, thus favored by patrons of establishments with classy cover bands and jukeboxes (ditto the solemn, readily weird Romance of Sinatra and Jimmy Webb---the latter evoked by certain Lukas Nelson-written tracks on Willie's Heroes and '17's Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, also thinking of the even moodier//more perverse/sometimes deadpan jokesters like Lee Hazlewood and Serge G.)
I like Stugill's use of Waylonesque "Eat-Shit, Eat-Shit" beat for orchestral disco (he seems to like Love Unlimited etc) on A Sailor's Guide To Earth---playing it straight(er) on the ones that seem closer to early 70s Van Morrison's Caledonia Soul Orchestra.
Oh and you're also reminded me of this---if doesn't play, it's "Goodbye Squirrel" by Cletus T. Judd (he of "Man of Constant Borrow", "My Cellmate Thinks I'm Sexy" and many more)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NyogxL54NE

And I hope young artists are drinking in the camp fire of Jim Stafford: "Spiders and Snakes", "Swamp Witch", and o course "Wildwood Weed", theme song of some of usens' early 70s---can't find any promising vids of this, screw it.

that Anderson East album has some...interesting singing choices.

Edd's not just woofin' about xpost The War and Treaty and Little Bandit. On first stream, LB alb is okay-to-hey!, ending with a couple of stunners: Womack please cover "Get Me Out of This", Lambert and/or Whitney Rose do "Sinking." (I don't get what's supposed to be so queer about all this, though his writing does sometimes remind me of Stephen Merritt; the voice wears on me better than M.'s)
https://littlebanditmusic.bandcamp.com/album/breakfast-alone
The War and Treaty blew my mind, may try to say more about both acts later. The War's EP is 7 tracks, but surely more of a full-album experience than many albums. Brace yourself:
https://soundcloud.com/thewarandtreaty

new Western Centuries album out April 6. my favorite country band goin'...

Looking fwd to that---their previous made my Scene ballot Top Ten, thanks to your tip.

Note To Self and others (from Sounds Of The Universe, Soul Jazz Records storefront):

Like Nashville In Naija: Nigeria's Romance with Country Music, Yesterday and Today
COMB & RAZOR SOUND
Country music is big in Africa. Yes, we realise how absurd that probably sounds to most ears, but it’s really true: American country & western records have been tremendously popular and deeply beloved across the continent for almost a century. The people of the West African nation of Nigeria have long been not only voracious consumers of country music, but fairly enthusiastic performers of it as well. Cowboy songs have remained a consistent part of most bands’ live repertoire, but relatively few artists have dedicated themselves to actually recording country music. They did exist, though; mostly in the1970s and 80s, but they were rarely heard outside the country, and in the intervening years, most of their output has fallen through the cracks of posterity, forgotten even by ardent music fans at home. Until now. Like Nashville in Naija: Nigeria’s Romance with Country Music, Yesterday and Today collects some of the best country recordings as a loving tribute to Nigeria’s cowboy troubadours of yore. To the best of our knowledge, only in Nigeria.
More Info, Audio:https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/product/various-like-nashville-in-naija"> https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/product/various-like-nashville-in-naija

Forced by the voting thread to finally nail down my best of 2017 list:

Tyler Childers - Purgatory
Natalie Hemby - Puxico
Jaime Wyatt - Felony Blues (sad to see this not get nom'd in the albums poll)
Hiss Golden Messenger - Hallelujah Anyhow
RaeLynn- WildHorse
Colter Wall - Colter Wall
Jason Eady - Jason Eady
Turnpike Troubadours - A Long Way From Your Heart
Chris Stapleton - From A Room: Volume 1
Lee Ann Womack - The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone

Thanks---several of these I still need to check---Stapleton was a finalist for my Scene Top Ten 'til Himes announced that we had to consider Volume 1 and Volume 2] as one album---which ended up in my hacked-in imaginary category of About Half Good (60-45%). Most of Volume 1, with just few from 2= my keeper folder. Womack rools, as usual.

i get to see Womack in a tiny 100-yr-old (former) church bldg next month, i'm excited

Maren Morris hits with her first No. 1, as Nashville Scene's Stephen Trageser reports.

Start here: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/cover-story/article/20990010/18th-annual-country-music-critics-poll and scroll on down to select: the results, the comments, factoids, down a little further for "Lee Ann Womack: Lonely At The Top..." and "How Jason Isbell Changed That Nashville Sound" (might not read that 'un).

xpost Loved Maren Morris's debut alb, as I said last year, except for the radio-bait track re country music as religion. Also grabbed by her duet w T. Rhett, opening his otherworse redonkulous follow-up to the appealing Tangled Up.

The Scene round-up never has incl. individual ballots, so post y'all's here, even if you didn't send one. I'll start o course---added a few from this thread's mentions; final edition, with all my comments, will be blogged (and linked here natch). I's still catching up with yr. mentions, and may downgrade some of the Imaginary picks, prob too kind to JT Earle and Keith and Isbell, for inst. Anyway this is what I sent, plus a *few* more I didn't know about then:

TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2017:
(just in the order they come to mind)
1. Lee Ann Womack: The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone (ATO)
2. Whitney Rose: Rule 62 (Six Shooter)
3. Rodney Crowell: Close Ties (New West)
4. Amanda Anne Platt/Honeycutters: S/T (Organic/Crossroads)
5. Margo Price: All American Made (Third Man)
6. Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer: Not Dark Yet (Thirty Tigers/Silver Cross)
7. Caroline Spence: Spades and Roses (Tone Tree)
8. John Moreland: Big Bad Luv (4AD)
9. Willie Nelson: God’s Problem Child (Legacy)
10. Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls: S/T (Bloodshot)

TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2017:
1. Various Artists: American Epic: The Best of Country (Lo-Max/Third Man/Columbia/Legacy)

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2017:
1. Willie Nelson
2. Rodney Crowell
3. John Moreland

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2017:
1. Lee Ann Womack
2. Whitney Rose
3. Margo Price

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2017:

1. Willie Nelson
2. Margo Price
3. Rodney Crowell
(and their collaborators)

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2017:

1. Margo Price & the Price Tags
2. Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters
3. Willie Nelson, Lukas Nelson, Micah Nelson

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2017:

1. Alex Williams
2. Carly Spence
3. Colter Wall

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2017:

1. Willie Nelson
2. Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls
3. Lee Ann Womack
***************************************************************************************************************
Imaginary categories:
Hon. Mention: Willie Nelson (w Lukas Nelson & Michah Nelson): Willie’s Stash Vol. 2: Willie and the Boys, Alex Williams: Better Than Myself, Carly Pearce:Every Little Thing, Marty Stuart:Way Out West, Lorrie Morgan & Pam Tillis: Come Lonely and Come Lost, Whitney Rose: South Texas Suite, Shovels & Rope: Busted Jukebox Vol. 2, RaeLynn: Wildhorse, Little Bandit:Breakfast Alone

Borderline: Sunny Sweeney: Trophy

About Half Good (60-45%): Nikki Lane: Highway Queen, Chris Stapleton: Songs From A Room, Vols. 1 & 2, Colter Wall: S/T, Angaleena Presley: Wrangled, Jason Isbell: The Nashville Sound, Justin Townes Earle: Kids In The Street, Steve Earle: So You Wanna Be An Outlaw, Midland: On The Rocks
Borderline: Toby Keith: Songs From The Bus, Various Artists:Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams
Less Than Half Good: Banditos: VisionLand, Thomas Rhett: Life Changes, Bruce Robison & The Back Porch Band: S/T

Countryoid/Americana/Related:
Nicole Atkins: Goodnight Rhonda Lee
Lucinda Williams: This Sweet Old World
Jessi Colter feat. Lenny Kaye: The Psalms
Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real: S/T
Gregg Allman: Southern Blood
Otis Taylor: Fantasizing About Being Black
Peter Stampfel & The Atomic Mega Pagans: Cambrian Explosion
David Rawlings: Poor David’s Almanack
Bonsoir, Catin: L’Aurore
The War and Treaty: Down To The River

Related Reissues:
1. Marisa Anderson: Traditional and Public Domain Songs
2. Various Artists: American Epic: The Collection
3. Lydia Loveless: Boy Crazy and Single(s)
4. Various Artists: Rough Guide To Jugband Blues
5. Various Artists: American Epic: The Soundtrack
6. James Luther Dickinson: I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone: Lazarus Edition

Related Hon. Mention:
Pinegrove: Elsewhere, Valerie June: The Order of Time

Related Borderline:
Deer Tick: Vol. 1, Rhiannon Giddens: Freedom Highway, John Mellencamp feat. Carlene Carter: Sad Clowns and Hillbillies, Arthur Alexander: S/T

Should be "I'm catching up," not "I's, " jeez (typo I swear).

i love John Moreland but Isbell's album runs circles around Big Bad Luv. In The Throes would be a fairer fight.

wouldn't have said anything about "About Half Good" ain't quite right. :)

d'oh! i mean:

wouldn't have said anything *BUT* "About Half Good" ain't quite right.

Himes says Isbell and Price are spurring the industry to become more adult, tell stories. I'd say the list reflects Americana as it has usually (always?) done. Valorizing Marty Stuart's pale Byrds imitation, tut tut. No doubt Isbell's "If We Were Vampires" is a good song and Prices made a good album. I think the real action is the music that searches for a new form for country--Walker Hayes, whose record has been condemned as escapist pop (thanks to Chuck for alerting me to Hayes), the Kernal (whom I saw the other nite, fabulous, stepped right out of Nashville Now in 1975, and Daniel Romana (whom I voted for No. 1 and who didn't make the list at all I could see). The Crowell record was like every other well-made country-folk-art song effort he's done; the Stuart record was a well-lit museum exhibit. I dunno how any country poll can really reconcile country with Americana these days, anyway. They have to be together because the relationship is symbiotic. I wonder how accurate it is to say as Himes does that the Industry is laying out Capital for these Isbell-esque and Price-ian mini-Sturgills? I did like the Moreland album OK as a modern Excello record. Which contains the rub re the labels: The critics go for the genteel-isms and retro leanings of Americana kountry, but even Moreland can be just a plain old country writer, which I don't think Isbell is so much? Will the smell of retro kill the Americanaixation of country? Dunno.

Here's the albums list I submitted for the Nashville Scene poll. I beat the deadline by about 10 minutes (the year before I didn't make it in time) so I did't end up getting a songs list done in time. I think I did quickly answer some of the artist, singer, etc. categories but I never feel great about those for some reason (I end up just repeating the choices I made for albums and songs).

TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2017:

1. Carly Pearce, Every Little Thing
2. Charlie Worsham, Beginning of Things
3. Sunny Sweeney, Trophy
4. Brett Eldredge, Brett Eldredge
5. Lee Ann Womack, The Lonely, The Lonesome and the Gone
6. Lillie Mae, Forever And Then Some
7. Little Big Town, The Breaker
8. Kip Moore, Slowheart
9. Kelsea Ballerini, Unapologetic
10.Margo Price, All American Made

very bummed that brandy clark and angaleena presley are playing boston sunday, when i have to cover the grammys

About Half Good (60-45%): Nikki Lane: Highway Queen

Sounds low. I don't know if I listened to any other 2017 album more times in 2017 than this one, and it all seems absolutely perfect to me.

I think Nikki's all right. Not sure her concept goes that deep but Highway Queen has to be her best album to date.

Here's my Scene ballot:
TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2017:

1. Daniel Romano Modern Pressure New West
2. Midland On the Rocks Big Machine
3. Tyler Childers Purgatory Hickman Holler
4. Lee Ann Womack The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone ATO
5. Walker Hayes Boom Monument
6. Angaleena Presley Wrangled Thirty Tigers
7. Little Bandit Breakfast Alone yk
8. Juanita Stein America Nude Records
9. Whitney Rose Rule 62 Six Shooter/Thirty Tigers
10. Little Big Town The Breaker Capitol Nashville

TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2017:

1. Check Cashing Country--Midland
2. Last Time for Everything--Brad Paisley
3. Every Little Thing--Carly Pearce
4. Tin Man--Miranda Lambert
5. Round Here Buzz--Eric Church
6. Softball--Caroline Spence
7. I Saw Jesus Peekin' Thru a Hole in the Sky--Will Beeley
8. Body Like a Back Road--Sam Hunt
9. Better Man--Little Big Town
10. You Broke up with Me--Walker Hayes

TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2017:

1. Will Beeley Passing Dream Tompkins Square
2. Lydia Loveless Boy Crazy and Single(s) Bloodshot
3. Various Stax Country Craft
4. Will Beeley Gallivantin' Tompkins Square
5. Arthur Alexander Arthur Alexander Omnivore

might be seeing Whitney Rose at a BBQ joint in a few weeks. a free lunchtime show! though i think they violated a health code and are currently closed, so i'm not sure it's gonna happen. if it doesn't she playing another show at a cantina nearby the night previous.

NashScene ballot:

TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2017:
1. Charlie Worsham – Beginning Of Things (Warner Bros.)
2. Walker Hayes – Boom (Monument)
3. Kelsea Ballerini – Unapologetically (Black River Entertainment)
4. Jace Everett – Dust & Dirt (Weston Boys)
5. Liz Rose – Swimming Alone (Liz Rose)
6. Sunny Sweeney – Trophy (Aunt Daddy)
7. Lauren Alaina – Road Less Traveled (Mercury Nashville/19/Interscope)
8. Lee Ann Womack – The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone (Ato)
9. Darius Rucker – When Was the Last Time (Capitol Nashville)
10. Nikki Lane – Highway Queen (New West)

TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2017:
1. Haley Georgia – “Shots”
2. Haley Georgia – “Becky”
3. Ashley McBride – “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega”
4. Jessie James Decker feat. Randy Houser – “Almost Over You”
5. Brandy Clark – “You’re Drunk”
6. Midland –“Drinkin’ Problem”
7. Bailey Bryan – “Own It”
8. Nellie Tiger Travis – “Walking in the Rain in Memphis”
9. Hurray for the Riff Raff – “Living in the City”
10. Olivia Lane – “Wrong Girl”

Guess I need to revisit the Jace Everett album, I liked the Live at Alex the Great. Saw the Kernal and Nicole Atkins at the Single Lock Records showcase here--Kernal was the embodiment of down-at-the-heel '70s country, and Atkins did material from Goodnight Rhonda Lee to great effect. Tight band who bore down on that record's '60s-'70s soul usages, and Atkins is a very convincing white-soul Jersey girl who wears what looks like lounge pants and slippers on stage. That's definitely one of the best Nashville records of the year, but I couldn't shoehorn her Lorraine Ellison soul into country, too uptown, basically.

What did you think of this one, or his others, Edd? Jeez, touring behind it even (Drag City prose ahead,, adjust shades accordingly)

CHRIS GANTRY BRINGS PSYCHOACTIVE OUTLAW COUNTRY TUNES TO CHICAGO

https://image-ticketfly.imgix.net/00/02/79/11/07-og.jpg?w=300&h=463

Step back in time and land smack dab in the middle of Music Row with Nashville's living legend and ORIGINAL outlaw country badass, Chris Gantry! At The Hideout next month, for his first performance in Chicago ever, the troubadour will sling tunes from the newly unearthed, early-70s lysergic classic, At The House of Cash and more! Gantry has been writing and recording songs for 40 years, cutting his teeth with solo albums in the late 1960s and 1970s featuring tunes that would be made famous by Glen Campbell ("Dreams of the Everyday Housewife") and Johnny Cash ("Allegheny")-and in true outlaw fashion, Chris continues to write and perform to this day, into his 70s. Gantry's ragged and rowdy maverick spirit, one he cultivated while paling around with Kris Kristofferson, Cash, and Shel Silverstein, is fully evident on his recordings and in his live performances - hell, he's such a wild card even in retirement years, he was cast by Harmony Korine for a role in his film, Trash Humpers.

With sheer wit and judicious charisma, Chris is neither country nor pop, not quite rock but not avant garde, either - like the best artists, his music can't quite be reduced to any one thing, which is exactly the kind of artist we love most! Since Chris' songs are unique and don't succumb to strict definition, it kinda makes sense that an album like At The House Of Cash was never released back when - recorded at Johnny Cash's home studio while Chris got back on his feet there following a marijuana bust and a peyote-enhanced trip to Mexico, it was so singular and strange for its time (particularly trying to imagine it being marketed to a Nashville audience) that it prompted Cash to exclaim, "Chris, June and I listened to your record last night, and I don't think even the drug people are gonna understand it." But we've discovered they do, and so too do the folks on the straight and narrow - Gantry's music is for all, and so we're inviting all Chicagoans to come out for what is quite possibly a once in a lifetime event!

Start hoarding your psychoatives now, Chris Gantry comes to The Hideout on February 22nd, with special guest Jon Langford!
CHRIS GANTRY LIVE:

February 22nd at The Hideout in Chicago, IL

TICKET LINK
http://www.hideoutchicago.com/event/1625495-chris-gantry-house-cash-chicago/

Chris Gantry Online:
http://www.dragcity.com/artists/chris-gantry
https://chrisgantrynashville.bandcamp.com/album/at-the-house-of-cash (2 tracks free)
https://itunes.apple.com/album/id1276375362

I like Gantry's Fred Foster-produced 1968 Introspection in the Hartford-Campbell-Jack Clement-Fred Neil mode of the day. Motor Mouth from '70 on a Monument imprint is...insane, a kind of Beat poetry reading with one or two really impressive subversions of song form. I think the House of Cash record is typical 1974 art song, nowhere near as good as Big Star's Third but ahead of Vince Martin or Mickey Newbury. I don't think the subversion on the Cash recordings adds up to much; Gantry is surrealistic without a grounding principle, but it's listenable. He really did take the time to distance himself from Newbery when I talked to him last fall, he was the new generation in Nashville.

Himes says Isbell and Price are spurring the industry to become more adult, tell stories. I'd say the list reflects Americana as it has usually (always?) done

Sounds right Edd.

Walker Hayes has that Sam Hunt rap-inspired vocal style plus Shane McAnally assistance, but I still can't make up my mind whether I like it.

Might as well post this here -- a fine new project, inspired by Tom Ewing

https://countrynumberones.tumblr.com/

(Should add this is by Robert Ham.)

Still listening to ones from yall's lists, tweaking the Imaginary Categories before officially blogging the ballot. Thinking about adding this IC, for that doesn't even seem Related, quite:
They Came To And/or From Nashville: Walker Hayes, Kelsea Ballerini, and mebbe Nicole Atkins (although I do still think of her as Related via the Dusty In Memphis approach, but that would free up a slot in the Related Top Ten, which I might need...)
I really like Walker Hayes, and might add him to Country Hon. Mentions anyway, especially like "Dollar Store," cos Strip Mall Country is way overdue, and I was hoping Midland's "Check-Cashing Country" would be the check-cashing place/wire money place. next to or also with the title pawn, next to tobacco shop, gun & pawn, phone repair & vape, Little Caesar's, and Rite-Aid, now with Pharmacy By Walgreen's.
Instead, it's 'bout how they *aren't* check-cashing country, they're into journeyman Dallas-era country, as Edd says, for the love of it, a band full 'o' Ringos---well okay, but so far I suspect the Randy Rogers Band do it better, will keep listening tho.
Reminds me: some have objected to their faves being (so far) consigned to About Half Good (60-45%), but this is no diss--a lot of albums in every genre work mich better when filed down to EPs--and the top end of that could put somebody into Hon. Mention or even possibly Top Ten, if the songs are truly outstanding. Also, it can be the overall effect, more than any particular picks. Like xpost Kip Moore's Slowheart, with that sly (incl. sensitive when need-be) voice and beat.

Talking about Caroline Spence: she's doing a residency in January here at the Basement.

Caught the finale of her residency last night. Solid performer, decent band, and the four new songs she played were quite good. Highlight was "You Don't Look So Good (Cocaine)".

Was thinking of xpost freeing up a slot in Related Top Ten because so far xpost Jace Everett's Dust & Dirt seems deserving of some Top Ten and I can't revise the Country Top Ten since I already submitted it to the Scene polling (also sent the Related o course but it's Imaginary and doesn't count for Himes's purposes).
The production here, especially the vocal, sometimes seemed drier than I was expecting, given the reverb etc. shadows of tumultuous Red Revelations, which made my 2009 Top Ten and incl. "Bad Things," the theme from True Blood. But this is more subtle, though straightforwardly re the spookiness of realer worlds (would still fit the satirical implications of TB, which is now RIP, I think).
There's one about love setting him free from the black-and-white view, although he's still not sure if your eyes are Green or Blue." It's okay though, so far.
He announces he's back in the b-&-w (more as an overall rigid dichotomy than racial per se, here, maybe) in "Free (Don't Ask Me)."
Followed by the even more ominous "Love's Not What We Do"---though the dryness keeps the atmospherics from getting too heavy.
Ditto on his lean-groove cover of Guy Clark's "The Last Gunfighter Ballad," where the G. ends up waving his weapon at "the ghosts in the street", which Everett's shrewd Clark-style delivery has me thinking might well be the cops, or Stand-Your-Ground civilians.
There are also a few conventional love songs, or they seem so pro forma because of the understated delivery. But the total effect was pretty involving right off. Will check it some more, like these others.

Still gotta check that Spence acoustic EP.

It's good. I like the album versions more though.

She said there's going to be a release of duets she recorded with Robby Hecht in May. Not sure if it's an EP or an LP. He joined her to sing "Parallel Lines" which was one of the best songs in the set. I believe her next album is done, too, but she didn't mention it.

Yeah, EZ, she told me last month that she was going to record one of the nights of the residency for release. Wish I could've caught one of them. Dow, I think the Jace album from last year is really good, and he cut an interesting live thing with his trio couple years ago too. Xhuxkk was the one who got me onto the Jace album, which would've made my top ten, probably, had I known about it, missed it.

Same here, I wouldn't have known about the latest Jace if Xhuxcx hadn't just dropped in with his Top Tens, thanx xhuddy.
Speaking of discreet delivery of sometimes weird product, consider also Stax Country, and thanks to Edd for listing this. Given the title, I was kind of hoping for, you know, country soul, country funk, just a little bit at least--the only one that's like I was imagining is Danny Bryan's version of "My Girl"--which is not the self-congratulatory, novelty approach sometimes found on Light In The Attic's Country Funk 2 (which is still real good and real stoned). It's just his thankful 'n' thoughtful, unpretentious voice, mostly solo, although there are occasional angels and strings way back there, otherwise, just him and the steel guitar, a little rhythm picking, piano, bass, drums. Of course, that's not the weirdo material---
Paul Craft's "For Linda (Child In The Cradle," is a gentle waltz, which starts with a lyrical bang, "She's 27 going on 42, with a body that's just turned 16," and some think she's a crazy groupie, but "She's true to the friends and lovers she's made." Very nice tone to the verses, which doesn't break for the chorus, "She's a father, she's a bummer, she's a mother (or mutha), she's a hummer," whut which among other thangs sounds like a parody of Kristofferson's "He's a poet, he's a picker," or however it goes.
(This album is apparently on the Craft label---he wrote a bunch of hits and some presumably lucrative album tracks, so maybe his estate is using some of those Eagles bucks for this?)
Kind of an easier-breathing "Okie From Muskogee" feel to Roland Eaton's "Hippie From The Hills," which starts with "No my hair's not long because I'm cool, Pa broke the shears last winter, shearin' the family mule," and tells the bittersweet story of his young life so far. He's not complaining, and it's a nice vibe.
Connie Eaton's "I Wanna Be Wrong Right Now" turns understatement to moist apology, but Paige O'Brian's "Satisfied Woman" is poised and "knows the score."
O.B. McClinton claims that a lady raised among "The Finer Things In Life" has given them all up for his hobo ass, but Karen Casey's much more plausible "The River Is Too Wide" follows immediately, an answer song in this context.
Not all tracks are all that good, but for instance Becki Bluefield gets points for repeatedly pronouncing "there" as "thar" unself-consciously, and elsewhere there is or are some calm plagiarism I can't mention.
---

Sorry--"his crinkly-voice hobo ass" is what I meant to say: mellow tones don't hide the uncut wistful thinking BS, not here anyway.

Thanks to erasingclouds for posting the Top Ten incl. Lillie Mae's Forever and Then Some:
startling degree of fairly intimate, vivid focus and shading right away, especially considering its her debut--but then, as she says in the following interview, "Ive been working since I was three," starting in the family bluegrass band, Jypsi, and later in a combo with some of her sibs, who (along with still more not in the post-Jypsi teen line-up) play on this set, very cohesively, and non-showboating, sometimes hooky mandolinist sister Scarlett also does some writing and aranging: the style is their own sort of folk-country, though bass & drums have some pop-rock (especially pop) appeal, with occasionally noticeable electric guitar---but def. don't hear it like this interviewer re "indie rock attack" behind the mando, fiddle and other strings (the closer goes into more of an exploratory electric folk modal thing, briefly, guess that could be considered indie-pop-rock).

Slender but effective voice, rec to fans of Victoria Williams, Whitney Rose, Natalie Maines and Sunny Sweeney (Louisiana-Texas-suggestive flexings and inflections at times, though don't think she's from that neck of the woods geographically), listened to subsets of tracks on Spotify during fairly hectic Monday, but no prob getting back into it; faves so far are "Loaner" and the title song.

Good intro and conversation:
https://www.npr.org/sections/world-cafe/2017/06/30/529708788/world-cafe-nashville-lillie-mae

Is and sounds young, but has been around the block as well as the mountain.

Someone else sounding young but experienced and thoughtfully candid, and also from erasingclouds' xpost list: Brett Eldredge, on his s/t fourth album. Younger than Toby Keith was when he starting having hits BE's already had three country number ones), and minus the moods and shrewds just below the robust, sufficiently sensitive surface---also without the vocal range--but Eldredge knows how to use what he's got, and, although as with xpost Kip Moore's 2017 album, it's more about the overall effect here, but each track has its own themette, and "Superhero" rolls into its chorus like TK would approve, the singer kidding himself but into it too, on the look-out for Damsels In Distress, verse by sufficiently sensitive verse.
He's into chasing the "Heartbreaker" too, no complaints, and he's pretty good (lots of practice) at the groveling, unnecessarily self-described drunk dial on another.
His version of a bro song is "Brother", which starts like "We need to talk about why we've been playin' tough all these years"--instead it goes into okay bromantic nostalic anthemizing "You had my back when Dad got sick...you were my first call that night in jail, you raised my bail" later not quite rhyming it with "raised some hell."
"Cycles" also philosophically overviewing, and another with a touch of the late-80s-early-90s headphones atmospherics (speaking or early Toby Keith).
The Happy Hour cowpoke, always hopeful and cleaned up nice, in part because he may have just come from work.

Oops, meant to link! It's all here:
https://bretteldredge.bandcamp.com/album/brett-eldredge

Y'all heard Zane Campbell? Check out the Washington Post piece on him. He's played with the great pedal-steel wiz Susan Alcorn, whom I saw last year in Nashville and who blew my mind. She does stuff undreamed of by Buddy Emmons and Weldon Myrick (and Sneaky Pete too). What I've heard of Campbell's music sounds pretty impressive.

new Brandi Carlile streaming at NPR
https://www.npr.org/2018/02/08/582106372/first-listen-brandi-carlile-by-the-way-i-forgive-you

Yeah, gotta check that, I like her, gotta check Zane Campbell too.
Just listened to Natalie Hemby's Puxico for the first time---will at least another spin or 2 or more to catch all the words in her murmuring condifence in both senses: so far her ruminations seem saved from too much singer-songwriter navelgazing by surefooted professionalism, most of the time. Her songs have been covered by Woamack and other worthies, and several of these could be singles.

One of the initial stand-outs is especially lilting, as she walks through a town basking in the sunshine of your love, "you" being a local hero or heroine gone somewhere, but "They still tell your stories, swap your jokes," and as she walks the high school halls, sees "your pictures in the trophy cases." Next song is maybe sung by another character, who has found that the details of a past (?) relationship have become "trapped in the photographs,,,Just when I understand everything about our story, that's when I forget." Now it's all "feelings in the walls," but sounds like that's okay, more than okay,also
part of the cycle, but nothing mystical. Her tunes and delivery are straightforward as always.

Which also helps with the likes of "Ferris Wheel," similar conceptually to "Circle Game," but her take is not a sing-along for sad Boomers: it seems like a good old sawdust county fair memory and theme song; she ain't sorry.

Edd otm, as usual, re Zane Campbell.
His s/t debut, which I 2015 Top Tenned, started with vintage-y material---which could suggest a fuller-throated, Appalachian American Richard Thompson (or maybe some of RT's mid-60s influences)---yet eventually topped by for instance a sometimes roaring body bags anthem, "Bringing The Boys Home" ("Nobody wanted to do it").
Ola Wave celebrates his equally outspoken aunt, born Ola Wave Campbell, better known to folk freaks as Ola Belle Reed: starts with a Zame original, about asking her why she turned down a potentially-career-making job offer from Roy Acuff (didn't wanna take orders from no man), followed by the title track, which takes off re the force truly advertised by her birth name--he catches up with said force as well as he can on his second and last original here, ditto on strong covers of her remarkable ballads---in which she seems to paying the cost for being her own boss, but then again, so be it---even wth, at times (a blues starts slow, develops a strut), and on we go: as written and especially with Zane's nuanced lungpower, these mountain tunes embody transcendence of mere yearnin.'
Both albums here: https://zanecampbell.bandcamp.com/

I just finished something on the new Secret Sisters album, produced by Brandi Carlile and the Hanseroth twins. The title track of You Don't Own Me Anymore is pretty good, the toughest thing they've done yet. The other stuff is local color, just a bit--their song about the joys of Alabama is banal. They sound like the Everly Brothers circa "Love of the Common People." (Read Jim Dickinson's memoir for a good portrait of the very good songwriting duo of Hurley and Wilkins, who wrote it.) I like the record, but they've still got some growing to do as songwriters. I'm also quite impressed by Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams' Contraband Love, which is already the best Americana album I've heard this year. I found a 2008 interview w/ Campbell, who also played on my favorite reissue of 2017, Will Beeley's Passing Dream, when Campbell lived in Jackson in the mid-'70s (as I discovered he'd told me 10 years ago in the interview). The guitar playing on the new record is great--Richard Thompson-esque Beatles-Byrds modalism in the service of some great blues-soul tunes, including one called "Slidin' Delta" that doesn't seem to be the John Hurt tune. I also recommend a pop-Americana album that's kinda under the radar, Steve Mayone's Sideways Rain.
I'm not sure what in the hell to make of Bonnie Montgomery's new Forever. She's been touted as an Ameripolitan artist--from Arkansas, she moved to Austin and cut her new one w/ some help from Dale Watson. (She also wrote an opera about Bill Clinton's youth,Billy Blythe, which I haven't heard enough of to get a handle on. Montgomery sings a bit like Mary McCaslin--the head voice break, etc.--but her songwriting is, to say the least, perfunctory. There's one about a heist she and Watson are gonna pull, and it contains rather incredible lines about how Montgomery's sister dated the cop in the town they're pulling into to rob (a bank) and an ending that goes "We'll be running 'til the day we die/Just like all the stories/Just like old Bonnie and Clyde." Uh huh. Arthur Penn and Roger Corman (Bloody Mama, supposedly about Ma Barker (who wasn't really a criminal) might disagree with her. The songs are mediocre to godawful--she has no talent for narrative and she perpetrates some of the most atrocious rhymes I've ever heard. But the record has its charming moments, I suppose; the music is received, though, and her observations about the lure of the road are banal. "Crop Dust Eyes" is perplexing--is she just making it up as she goes along? check it out here.

Can imagine how Carlile & Twins' roots-theatrical, outdoor drama approach could suit the Sisters, looking fwd to that. Yeah, I enjoyed their early single of "Big River": they sounded like country kids out seein' the sights, incl. Jack White's look-whut-Ah-can-do! guitar solo on the rapids---but a subsequent, maybe second (White-produced?) album seemed to be going for an Everlys-ish, Kentucky night-to L.A. noir (just off the Greyhound, reading headlines about the Black Dahlia, rings a bell), but they weren't entirely ready for it. If you want that, check some of the vibes on Walk Right Back: The Everly Brothers On Warner Brothers, 1960-1969.

Also I like the Chapin Sisters' A Date With The Everly Brothers, and the Corn Sisters, Neko Case and Carolyn Mark, who mostly show up on comps, but did release one whole set The Other Women, recorded live in a Seattle dive, sounding also like from a stairwell in a well-broken-in Louisville hotel, ca. 50s-60s, when I lived there. So of course it's rec. to fans of the classic Bloodshot approach, though actually released on B's Canadian cousin label, Mint.

Larry Campbell was certainly an attentive picker when supporting Dylan and quite a few female vocal stylists, but his recording debut as a singer often seemed strained and overbearing, trying too hard, especially in comparison with Teresa Williams, jeez. But was smitten w their version of "Attics of My Life"---if he could relax more often, could work out. Will approach new set w cautious optimism.

Speaking of male-female vox, spooky x-roots vibes, etc., I'm also digging Modern Mal, whom xgau recently compared to Dolly Parton x Leonard Cohen. To me, Rachel Brooke sounds more like a Patsy Cline fan (not a wannabee): more relaxed, after-midnight simple-subtle, not as high lonesome as Parton (no diss on DP; this is just different). Also kinda like Nancy Sinatra and several other duet partners of Lee Hazlewood---Brooks Robbins' voice is higher and softer and huskier than Hazlewood's, but the boondocks gothic pop approach is indeed like some of what El Cohen might learned from selective studies of LH, for his own more listenable tracks (BR v. discreetly delviers Cohen/Lizard King-worthy lines like "driven insane by your porcelain frame.")

Also, the songs seem more country-Cohenesque than Hazlewoody re more consistently, closely related to personal experience, however similarly filtered through dark flashy imagery. Even/especially "The Mystery of Death" seems like a relatable barroom-living room sing-along, not too much of a novelty, though Brooke & Brooks def. like the olde novelty-pop, maybe enhanced by 0 budget. (

They also prob like The Captain & Tennille's hit version of "Muskat Rat Love", aka "Muskrat Cdndleiight," its original title on Willis Alan Ramsey's only album---wtf, WAR?
Which reminds me, MM's album comes from the personal experience of taking care of a reclusive old family friend in an old house in "Northern Michigan." (Upper Peninsula?) Nothing about creaking floorboards, bedpans, angels etc., but possibly old scribblings, snapshots, late-night conversations, before, during, and/or after "drinking ethyl." (Think that's lower-case.)

The Misanthrope Family Album is all here:
/modernmal.bandcamp.com/releases

Er, "Muskrat Love," of course, sorry.

I just finished something on the new Secret Sisters album, produced by Brandi Carlile and the Hanseroth twins. The title track of You Don't Own Me Anymore is pretty good, the toughest thing they've done yet. The other stuff is local color, just a bit--their song about the joys of Alabama is banal. They sound like the Everly Brothers circa "Love of the Common People." (Read Jim Dickinson's memoir for a good portrait of the very good songwriting duo of Hurley and Wilkins, who wrote it.) I like the record, but they've still got some growing to do as songwriters.

― eddhurt, Monday, February 12, 2018 11:19 PM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I slept on this last year. Big step up from the previous albums where the production was too heavy-handed and the songwriting too formulaic, but agree there's room to grow.

Tough to make this kind of neo-traditional effort not sound pastiche, but they mostly pull it off. Carry Me and the stretch from Kathy's Song through Little Again stand out. I prefer this listen front-to-back than albums by their peers (First Aid Kit, The Wild Reeds, The Staves), which tend to blur together as albums.

Wow Cowboy. How have I never heard this

You mean the youtubes recently posted here? Aloha, Scott Boyer:
S/D Southern Rock

whut does it mean my modernmal link not found on this server---let's try this
https://modernmal.bandcamp.com/releases

That works, for now anyway--was gonna say it's not all "dark flashy imagery" yadda yadda---there are other thangs, for instance "Clean," as sung by Rachel Brooke:
Bathtime is my favorite time.
The water runs and wets this hair of mine.
It’s ok to say I like it.
It’s ok to say I care to be clean.
Wash away the day’s mistakes.

Yep xp. Thanks

i love this brandi carlile album.

i guess that makes me an NPR fogey but whatever

Still haven't gotten to that, but usually dig her, so looking fwd.
Meanwhile, a couple more from '17: Howe Gelb's Open Road iis "a collection of sketches from several different projects over the last five years," but not too sketchy, no start-stop or mumbling in the background, but the pleasure of finding that good note right now, in several related styles overall, and seemingly fully-produced, if not quite what he's looking for yet, and always a thoughtful, intimate approach, even on a Spaghetti Western trip. Makes me think he's got, not only a tape recorder next to the Gideon Bible in the motel nightstand, but an array of instruments and musos standing by at all times.
Oh yeah, and not all the words may be quite worked out--haven't caught 'em all--but some lines to jump/slip out into memory, like the one about those who don't fall in love are "in love with the safety zone"---not entirely fair/true, but some truth im my case.
http://music.howegelb.com/album/the-open-road
Further Standards is somewhat Country Related if you justify that tag re the amount of the more downhome jazzy lounge-roadhose sounds of this set by the Howe Gelb Piano Trio (with Lonna Kelly in duet and sometimes upfront vocals; guitar octaves occasionally appear). Kind of a Mose Allison thing, minus the zings and bop excursions--there is MA-worthy wordplay, re word meanings and sounds and ideas, bits of storyline sliding around, but this is not Allson's attitude, it's pretty much all Gelb, writing on cocktail napkins and wondering when it's cool or acceptable or saleable or desirable, for that matter---and like what's the point or is it about a point---be "Presumptuous" or "Irresponsible" or an "Impossible Thing"----no matter how experienced and observant of self and others you are, it's provisional, swirling around in that glass, my my. In a discreet or furtive way, he's got the Country Related romantic preoccupations alright.
(Willie and Leon doing "One More For The Road", sometimes on YouTube, also several of Willie's standards collections and Dylan's also Mose-related "If Dogs Run Free" and some of his Sinatra-related covers, especially on Shadows In The Night,are also from this neck of the woods.)
https://howegelbmusic.bandcamp.com/album/further-standards

"Irresponsible Lovers," that is, the couple from Heaven and/or Hell, ask their bartender.

Case Garrett's Aurora has an econo-produced, even "down-at-the-heels 70s" atmosphere, as Edd says about somebody else upthread, but it's pleasantly musty, like a thrift store LP cover, yum, and it's growing on me though low-key it's growning on me: has the means to get catchy, especially on "She Never Liked Elvis": put off by "that slicked-back hair", she's modern enough to get off on "Lester and Earl," who brought their always intelligent if not subtly progressive style to Bonnie and Clyde and The Beverly Hillbillies and other 60s landmarks (also check the Earl Scruggs Review's early 70s Live At Kansas State for the livelier side of newgrass and more).
So Lester and Earl get the inner girl dancing in her ruby slippers, no matter what; "She never told her husband her secrets." Off-handed delivery of lines with just enough of the right detail to add up, a la most or much Tom T. Hall and prime Prime on the verses---then the chorus adds good Buffet-=-no lie, kept expecting steel drums to appear among the Kentucky stringed things.
He get back to the Buffett table in a more speculative way with "The Thought of You," where he's rehearsing the lines going for a soft-spoken tweaking of JB's "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw": he for one is already loaded, which is how he came to think of her, and "It won't take very long" is a key selling point---soon as he can find his phone.
Several celebrations of/while going nowhere at various speeds also have this suitably light, comfortably numb touch, unlike the heavy-handed cartoon contrast Scott Miller occasionally brings to Ladies Auxiliary, which is mostly about being somewhere and nowhere along the foggy smoggy boondocks road ---trying to get to the realness of life-as-transition everywhere, and sometimes it works, like in one about a guy whose mother is fixing to move to Kentucky---no suggestion, written or sung, that he's anything other than a grown man, so time to get it together, and the sense of shifting ground is there in his non-weepy voice, and the bowed bass---also like one about a town with a Spanish name in West Virginia, once ao off-season settlement of migrant workers, perhaps, like my Mom's hometown in the toetip of Applachia---this has some Garrett-like blend of Hall-Prine-Buffett catchy detail (arc of a local soccer team and their coach in one line), and I won't spoil the suitably wry punchline, adding to the trace of high lonesome, even.
Also heavy-handed with teh absurd are several oovers on Bruce Robison and the Back Porch Band, most of which supports the idea that he should never be 'llowed to record anything but self-writ demos---sent only to hardened professionals, sparing the gen. public, for whom those duet albums with wife Kelly Willis are sweet offical release (more please now!)
She's on here a little bit, though subdued (and icked out by the "it goes innn and outtt" bit on a shitty version of "Squeezebox")There are a couple of somewhat-promising-at-least-as-written originals, ditto a cover of Christy Hays' "Lake of Fire" (she's got several things on bandcamp, album out in April)---and a chiming, swaying, building performance of "The Years", by one Damon Bramblett, who released one album, in 2000, and that's it---so far he's an xpost Willis Alan Ramsey for the Millenium (as is the olde original WAR is now), but several tracks are on youtube (with a few others), and I just now ordered it. (Willis recorded his starry, sick, infectious "Heaven Bound" in 1999.)

Wrote a bit about the Secret Sisters, here. Nice girls. Anyone else listening to Courtney Marie Andrews, another Will Oldham singin' partner, folkie Joni singer and full-throated soul artist? Diggin' her stuff, new album out next month, May Your Kindness Remain.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2018/03/01/mike-huckabee-resigns-cma-foundation-board-following-controversy/385920002/

Huckabee whining about being a victim of course

Word to Huckabee: title track of American Grandstan, a honky tonk sidetrip taken by bluegrass stalwart Rhonda Vincent and country-classicist Daryle Singletary, RIP a few weeks ago, but sounding robust and alert on this July 17 release. On "American Grandstand, a set-typical, melodious, harmonious song of discord, they've signed everything, and are now singing the detailed summary and agreement, with, to and at each other, rehearsing "the final show" of family values and marital drama.
All these warm, catchy, sometimes bouncy chestnuts and compatible contemporaries are now playing my headbox on a regular basis, having commenced upon first listening. Adios, D. I"ll know you'll be back with me soon.

Word to me: American Grandstand, July '17 release, ffs,

On Minnesota Public Radio's Live From Here, just now heard immediately and lastingly compelling performances by local hero Kaitlyn Smith, who got more Nashbiz-acceptance as a writer---of several songs I knew, but not as by any one person, let alone her---new release seems to be getting more promotional etc. support than previous. Inneresting feature here:https://www.rollingstone.com/country/features/caitlyn-smith-on-the-closed-doors-and-raw-emotion-that-led-to-starfire-w431402

Um, "Caitlyn," like it says there, yep.

Listening again to some demos, alts, prev. unreleased titles on disc 1 of Gillian Welch's Boots No, 1: The Official Revival Bootleg. Substantial-enough storylines, from a shoebox of snapshots and postcards, plus a fluid-enough way with the tiny tuneful turns of detail, keep most of 'em from being too received folkieness, if you're not allergic to Americana, and this assortment is for making your own sequences: Like "I Don't Want To Go Dpwntown," "Go On Downtown," "Red Clay Halo," "Paper Wings" (this last could be taken as caution to writers, which is ever'body these days of course). A bit too much regret in some subsets, but for instance Bonnie Raitt please cover the Randy Newmanesque "Georgia Road," a report from where "The boys are walkin' funny, and the girls are all undone...workin' those tiny polka dot skirts...I was bawn a nasty man." Ain't sorry, but/and knows he'll die one too. "Prob'ly go to Hell."

Some of these are full band, rockin' in a Model-A way.

"Well the night came undone, like a party dress" (that's not "Georgia Road," it's a bluesy waltz).

"Acony Bell" still the one to end with: seems like a dry little flower, but something inside and all around keeps it alive.

So that “Saving Country Music “ website guy is defending Huckabee and criticizing the critics of him. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised

he's the worrrrrst

I spent an hour talking to Trigger of Saving Country Music the other day. He's gonna part of a piece I'm doing about the, er, state of country criticism.

did you ask him why he's such a sexist prick

In following the twitter battles, I see someone recommending the following country and alt-country sites/writers on twitter instead: highwayqueens ; the musicdivide ; TheDailyCountry; ; CountryUniverse ; Honest_Country ; countrycritics

Thanks---Edd aside, I mostly occasionally skim for info---but did fairly recently read Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz (handsome trade pb w good pix, Routledge, 2003), by Rick Kienzle, who also contributed to the late, useful Country Music Magazine. He doesn't just enthuse, he describes what made and still makes the heyday of Western Swing so musically gratifying, and isn't shy about detailing how and when and sometimes why (increasingly desperate attempts to biz-adapt) the recorded offerings of his protagonists, incl. heroes, turned to shit.
It's kind of Four Lives In The Be-Bop Business in reverse, with questing young musos from hither and yon peaking early in California, then scuffling, going back to the boonies and/or hitting a wall re The Nashville Sound and Countrypolitan.
Although there are exceptions! To any predictable arc, anyway--for instance, Ray Price went to honky tonk with a strong beat, drawing the livelier geezers and some youngsters, without actually playing that rock&roll stuff---then he decided he *did* want to do the smooth Nashville thing, not only on record but replicated live, challenging his carefully established audiences and hardened swing-to-tonk road dawg band---never mind we don't have no orkystraw or choir, just do it. And you out there, you better like it.
And the saga of former teen swing fan Willie Nelson, whose vocal timing (also some of his lyrics) broke the tried & true Hit Factory assembly line, as far as the suits and producer Chet Atkins was concerned--well, you've heard about that, but maybe not in such telling detail (come to think of it, maybe he was influenced by the tenacity of Price, an early employer).
Very handy discography of reissues too.

Also I've gotDreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville(William Morrow,1998), by Bruce Feiler. Bought it after reading an excerpt in which the author runs into Garth Brooks soon after a National Holiday (Thanksgiving, I think). Brooks allows that he spent it curled in a fetal position, contemplating the marketing of his next release. Asked why he still tortures himself thusly after selling nine jillion albums, GB says he wants to be an American Archetype, like John Wayne. Well okay--but Wayne wasn't nearly always the biggest box office draw, far from it at times...

Anyone who thinks John Wayne is some kind of great American archetype is right, of course, but they can't have seen many John Wayne movies, in which he's usually brutal, one-dimensional and therefore perfect for the world of John Ford. Wayne in Hawks' Rio Bravo and Red River, however, is a very nuanced character, one who shows humor and even doubt (which Wayne shows, the doubt part anyway, in the one Ford film with Wayne worth mentioning, The Searchers (honorable mention to Stagecoach, which is really Gregg Toland's movie, not Hawks' or Wane's). In today's cultural climate, Wayne might as well be a serial killer, and that's both to be expected and somewhat unfortunate. The idea of a man telling women what to do, even in the very nuanced Hawks films, like Hatari!, in which women are treated as equals and are also somewhat puzzling figures these men have trouble keeping their heads straight about--sex, and the humorous aspects thereof, are a big part of Hawks even when he's most serious--is not something you can get away with any more and I won't defend that old-school viewpoint. But Hawks, compared to Ford, Huston and even Ray, was virtually a feminist, tho the Hawks bio indicates he was a compartmentalized, sneaky womanizer. I definitely think Ida Lupino is a very fine, underrated director, so let her receive some praise, she deserves it. Enough on the auteurs for now. Garth is just too fucking sincere to grasp any of this, which isn't to say he's stupid.

I hever did listen to him much, despite endorsements from xheddy and zgau, for inst. But, while working in a 90s CD store, I got the demographic appeal: he was one of those who grew up with arena rock---popped up on a Kiss trib, and a Voice feature mentioned "Pink Floyd guitars" on an album drama---so it was time for arena country, High Hat. He was certainly in the vanguard of that, and credited the reinforcement of Chris LeDoux's stage shows LeD. became a real rodeo bravo, so why not ride a mechanical bull while the music played---seem to recall him tagging his approach as "Aerosmith in a cowboy hat." Take that far enough, and you get Aldean for instance, but--
In any case, I never saw that show, only got into him as he was checkin' out fairly early (liver cancer), clued by the famous Garth line, "A worn-out tape by Chris LeDoux, lonely women and bad booze Seem to be the only friends I've got left at all. " From "Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old." And a lot of Brooks' peers related to that too, no doubt, but LeDoux's own music, though it brought the wide open spaces, incl. the lonesome parts, I mainly recall for its confidential tone, as unpretentious as suave can get without boring. Toby Keith seems to embody both sides of LeDoux more than Brooks does, but Brooks is a brother in the trustworthy, well-meaning sense, unlike the moody, shifty TK, who still thereby seems like the more interesting artist, but I owe Garth some more listens, in part for turning me onto Chris.
Being an archetype means getting in under people's hats and staying there, deeper than "Hey, he likes what I like" etc.---could see maybe say Madonna or Taylor Swift with that kind of staying, resurfacing power (gotta move from power to authority though, to be an archetype). We'll see.

Oh yeah, speaking of Wayne, I liked Gary Wills' attentive, appreciative, shrewd, informative as hell, Big Picture with a zoom lens (book), John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity, good crisp take here:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/reviews/970323.23haskelt.html

"zgau"? Still waiting for that one; I meant xgau ocourse.

Jewly Hight on on the changing face of country. Well worth your time.

Meanwhile, yours truly on the related topic of country criticism and the man called Trigger and Saving Country Music. Kinda remedial crit for people who don't know from poptimism, I guess, with Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan making an appearance, along with the equally fine country critic Marissa R. Moss.

i only know her bc she toured with jimmy eat world a few years ago but the courtney marie andrews record that came out today is a deep country stunner

https://open.spotify.com/album/1U8907wmzKNgvDEW3mk21S?si=vcno9D-WTpGJhA-kJMaG7Q

oh sweet i'm glad she was mentioned by someone else on this thread

Yeah it's real good! It was streaming on NPR for a while

Courtney ain't bad. Sounds like Mary McCaslin, if the great McCaslin had played with Will Oldham. Andrews' retro sonics are a bit of a drag. It all kinda comes straight out of the handbook, to my ears, but she's a good singer. I like her subject matter, just get so bored with the received wisdom of the arrangements and sonics, which I could travel 2 miles down the road from here in Gnashville and hear 6 nites a week, and done not much better or worse. Before they cut May Your Kindness, someone shoulda stepped on the organist's hands.

the arrangements/sound is v retro but i find it deep and enfolding regardless

Yeah, Andrews is all right. Hope she comes to play with the Americanas this year, she deserves to be as big as any of them. I just hear so much music that sounds exactly like hers, I guess. As the Americana scene changes to allow, let's hope, some new blood into the club, I think she's expertly positioned to join it. Everyone's gonna be depressed anyway after half the world gets blown up and we're all stuck with our guitars and pianos that no one knows how to tune.

Liked the conversations on country criticism, edd. Also like country pop (Carly Pearce, Kip Moore, Thomas Rhett's Tangled Up but not his current stinker, after the opening duet with Maren Morris, whose debut I luvvved, except for the one about country music as religion)and pop by people who, uh. make pop in Nashville and sound Southern, whether they're country or countryoid or not (like Walker Hayes and Kelsea Ballerini). Have talked about 'em all in print or pixels, but except for Pearce and Morris couldn't think of much to say----also always (or foe a while) fine w the concept of Taylor Swift, but her actual music tends to go in one ear and out the other.
Obv. most or prob all the country icons we're supposed to rail about never being on country radio anymore, in part because most of them are long dead, had enough pop savvy in their art to get on country radio all the time when they got on it at all.
Is Trigger that emblematic of a significant chunk of country commentary?? Guess so yuck (how fitting that he took his name from a dead horse)

Courtney Marie Andrews toured w/ Jimmy Eat World? like as an opener?

backup singer

https://www.rollingstone.com/country/news/courtney-marie-andrews-chris-shiflett-discuss-punk-roots-w463847

She just played with Dead Meadow here in DC the other night

andrews was the backup singer (and iirc keyboardist) for the tour for invented, many of the songs on which were inspired by cindy sherman's photography and written from the perspectives of women and featured traded off vocals between jim adkins and andrews

The duet sets with hubbie that I've heard are good, but fuckin finally a new solo Kelly Willis album (also in here: the return of Sugarland etc.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/country/features/hear-kelly-willis-soul-tinged-new-song-back-being-blue-w518485

When I worked in a Deep South CD store in the mid-90s to early-00ties, Elvis sold almost as well as the Dead, and his gospel outsold all his other stuff. Now Some public radio stations are re-broadcasting/-streaming "He Touched Me: Elvis' Gospel Music, " w cogent comments from colleagues, intros by Laura Cantrell. Sounds great, wish there were more live (do hear some live w Jordanaires x Sweet Inspirations, for some audiences adjusting or not to integration)(most of the material is from the SI's side of the tracks).
More info on the ever-handy (though Not Secure) Elvis Information Network:
http://www.elvisinfonet.com/elvisnews_HeTouchedMeRadioversion.html
The whole show may be posted somewhere.

Expanded reissue of Emmylou's The Ballad of Sally Rose---good?

Released in 1985, the song cycle is based loosely on her short time with influential singer-songwriter Gram Parsons...Highlights...include the singles "White Line" - which reached #14 on the country charts - and "Rhythm Guitar" with Waylon Jennings on lead guitar. In addition, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt sing harmony throughout the album. Two years later, the friends and frequent collaborators would release their first album together, Trio...
More info: http://view.e.wbr.com/?qs=61051c94690b58e096f0ee97da524b07450d8da7cb262cc9a54ebdc45039d666f3ec1e61f

“We had just enough tequila that I asked them, ‘Do you want to do a show?,’ and they were like, ‘Yeah!,’” recounts Becca Mancari, explaining Bermuda Triangle’s origin story.

The Nashville group – Mancari, fellow singer-songwriter Jesse Lafser, and Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard – rolls into Antone’s on Thursday, with another Music City act in support, Liz Cooper & the Stampede.

Promising a drum machine paired with an upright bass, Bermuda Triangle hit the road for nine dates concluding Friday in Dallas with only two songs on Spotify. Speaking by phone from a solo show stop in Virginia, Mancari chatted with “Gay Place” about summertime crushes, being gay in Nashville, and guitar-shredding ladies. Seems like it might be good. Continued here:
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/gay-place/2018-04-03/bermuda-triangles-becca-mancari-makes-waves/

i have the Becca Mancari album from last year on my 2017 spotify country playlist and it's pretty damn good.

https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/20978146/becca-mancaris-good-woman-is-informed-by-a-life-spent-traveling

https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement-east/liz-cooper-and-the-stampede-blank-range-and-the-kernal

Anyone seen/heard this? Has it been mentioned yet?

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/04/cocaine-rhinestones.html

Oh, I see it up there, never mind.

Thanks yall, will def check all that out---speaking of Gay Place, no doubt the name was chosen for more than one reason, like Nashville Scene's A Face In The Crowd column---in this case, it's also the title (maybe from "It's known as the gay place/That out of the way place") of a collection of three novellas by one Billy Lee Brammer, all of 'em about life and death and other stuff in orbit around a gas giant Governor of Texas, with LBJ-size drive and cunning and deep pockets full of other politicians, civil servants, media workers---and also the kind of un-LBJ-like charm that Huey Long, Big Jim Folsom, Slick Willie Clinton relied on---he's wallking a tightrope amidst 60s shitstorms. It's pretty musical.

Ashley Monroe's new one now streaming.

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/12/601100251/first-listen-ashley-monroe-sparrow

so what does Rolling Country think of this Joshua Hedley fella?

That dude's too much of a kitschy tribute act even for me, and my tolerance for that is pretty wide open.

i have the Becca Mancari album from last year on my 2017 spotify country playlist and it's pretty damn good.

She did a great episode of 'My Favorite Album' talking about Big Thief's 'Capacity' a couple months back: http://myfavoritealbum.libsyn.com/becca-mancari-on-big-thief-capacity-2017

so what does Rolling Country think of this Joshua Hedley fella?

I saw him open for Old Crow Medicine Show last year. you know, he was all right. A good version of the usual Lower Broadway Country for Tourists shtick. I didn't mind him at all.

Saw Lee Ann Womack last week. Amazing singer, good stuff, even a good version of "Long Black Veil." She lives up to the hype.

Was wondering what Amy LaVere's been up to lately---here's a good live set featuring Motel Mirrors, also incl. Will Sexton,John Paul Keith, and another guy whose name I didn't catch---Barbara Ching briefly discusses blues-country connections and plays a few excerpts, but mostly it's the Motel Mirrors show:
http://www.bealestreetcaravan.com/weekly-show/bsc2228/

Most of the songs are from their new album, which I haven't heard.

so what does Rolling Country think of this Joshua Hedley fella?

― alpine static, Saturday, April 14, 2018 10:01 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That dude's too much of a kitschy tribute act even for me, and my tolerance for that is pretty wide open.

― Johnny Fever, Saturday, April 14, 2018 10:30 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Idk I think he might actually have the tunes and pipes to back up the act.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNVUTgd4pio

Probably late to this, but I heard this while driving through Ohio last week.

Total rip off of Kid Rock's "All Summer Long".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16s7He1C9BE

Those xpost two Bermuda Triangle tracks on Spotify instantly toke a hold of me, and haven't let go: deepnrich, up front: "You love Suzanne, I love you, where is she? Go and get her." Such a contrast with the aforementioned Becca Mancari set, at least the sound, which is thinned and chill, latte, with most of the vocals double-tracked; they and the good session band are distanced. Going for a the xx effect?

Seems like the writing is good too, but it's also filtered. "Kitchen Dancing" is "dry"/up front, and the best track here; subsequent acoustic single version of "Golden" is better (would like to hear Willie cover this: about a lover who won't go 'way after leaving: "You keep going golden"--was already thinking of when the sun goes level, won't get out of your face, before becoming aware of the words, especially that hook-line at the beginning of the chorus, so I guess in that case the filter is a good test, but still prefer the acoustic, with the increased/undiminished vocal presence).

Really looking fwd to more Bermuda Triangle.

Ah meant "took a hold," but "toke" yes too.

brothers osborne album seems incredibly badass on first listen to me

anyone excited for the new dierks?

me

me too. single has v obvious tom petty vibes

Over at Saving Country Music, Trigger continues his crusade. At this point I'm a fan of the man. He continues to write his criticism in the face of all known facts or interpretation. This time he's taking down Bebe Rexha this week.

I did shorties on Sam Morrow: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement/sam-morrow

The Weather Station: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement/the-weather-station-wfrances-cone

Charley Crockett's half-assed record: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/mercy-lounge/charley-crockett

Over at Saving Country Music, Trigger fulminates against Bebe Rexha: https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/bebe-rexhas-arrogance-should-be-alarming-to-the-country-industry/

I did shorties on Sam Morrow's Lowell George fixation: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement/sam-morrow

Weather Station's dystopian Joni kick: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement/the-weather-station-wfrances-cone

Liz Cooper's pretty damn good folk-rock: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-basement-east/liz-cooper-and-the-stampede-blank-range-and-the-kernal

The great Chris Smither (go find his I'm a Stranger Too! and Don't It Drag On): https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-bluebird-cafe/chris-smither.baB8Vb

Also enjoying Caitlin Canty's pretty darned good new Motel Bouquet, unaffected and moving: https://local.nashvillescene.com/event/the-bluebird-cafe/chris-smither.baB8Vb

sorry to repeat, wanted to add those to the post...

haven't written about Canty, hope to soon. Sorry for the repetitions.

can we save the saving country music links for the worst music writing thread

That Jake Owen ripoff of Kid Rock taking from John M etc is not impressive

new sam hunt:

http://strm.to/DowntownsDead

not an anti-suburbia treatise

Oh, I heard another album by a member of xpost Bermuda Triangle: Jesse Lafser's 2015 Raised On The Plains. It does sport a "Don't Fence Me In" urgency, but then she turns out to be more like a historical cowboy, covering a lot of ground but still making the rounds, having similar experiences despite the momentary excitement and current details: lots of romantic frustration, and though the astute Dylan and Richard Thompson ballad studies provide springy, birch-tree support and projection for self-expression, sometimes she gets into an overly complicated presentation of an easily recognizable point---then again, sometimes you gotta load all the way up with whatever you can find to blast your way through said frustration.
But so far seems like it usually works out, like with "Rosie," which is also one of those BT tracks on Spotify: she leaves the TV on all night long, blasting updates on the forest fire, the better to torture herself via associations with that flamin' outrider, and now the sun's on the bed where you lay your head. Looking fwd to more Bermuda Triangle.

I mean she sounds like she's learned some things about songwriting from Dylan and Thompson, not singing (well maybe what not to do; works for them fairly often, but no need for her to follow suit)

Latest Dierks Bentley hit "Woman, Amen" has annoying arena-rock drums and production. Haven't heard the rest of his new album The Mountain which is coming in June (and was recorded in Telluride, Co)

i heard parts of it recently and liked it a lot but i like arena-rock drums and production

x-post--I like the Sam Hunt lyric

Downtown's dead without you
Girls walk by and friends say hi
Then Friday night it might as well be just another
Tuesday night without you
As long as you're still in my head
There ain't a way that I can paint a ghost town red
Downtown's dead, downtown's dead

I like Bentley’s “Drunk on a plane.” More clever musically

album’s pretty good. brothers osborne and brandi carlile guest

Reminding me I still need to check their latest albums as well as his.
Proceeding somewhut alphabetically, just trekked through Ashley McBryde's Girl Going Nowehre which of course is meant to be and moderately is an inneresting title for what I assume is meant to be a breakthrough album: starts right off not with a band but the foreboding, low-key title track, which is a twist on the obligatory-for-country-girls salute to the hometown. As performed, it's not an ironic twist: she sounds sincerely and humbly grateful for their telling her she's bound to fail, for giving her that much more incentive to make it. Quietly sincere, determined, and spooked.

It's a combo which works great on the better tracks, like "American Scandal," where she turns the volume up to make clear this is non-ironic desperation---she really really needs it to be like Kennedy and Monroe. But the next one, "Southern Babylon," seems, even before the unnecessary mention of "Hotel California," like an alibi for of the fodder it's sandwiched between, the Springsteeny "Radioland" and
and MellenPettyCarnes tap-tap-tap of "The Jacket, " both fortified with country-Americana namechecking o course.

There's a sincere etc. tribute to another kind of family, in a dive bar, but with unremarkable mumblecore imagery she might as well be nodding to the sunday school teachers and grannies as happens in the usual obligatory-for-girls etc. "Next Door To Leroy" at least singles out and details one of the fellow misfits who provided reinforcement early on: says something, pretty succinctly, about your high school years, when you have to recover from the results of peer pressure by going over to the junkie's house. Good loud guitar too (several of these, but she needs more, at least as distraction).

She sincerely can't live without her boring messy boyfriend, Andy."El Dorado" more intended radio fodder yadda yadda, but the countryiest (sincere note to a wholesome type), "Ef yew git tahhred of bein' happy, give me a cawl," may also be the most rocking, in a whiskey-cymbal-splashing, Eric-Church-with-a-much-better-voice kind of way, and is certainly one of the best at least. Ditto the finale, "Home Sweet Highway," sincerely horny ghosty eyes on the prize and distinctive musical twinges amidst the twangs.

"starts right off not with a *bang*," I meant, though might not be a band either on that opener: as I said, it's a very quiet track.

So title track of xp The Mountain is an ominous victory song, and Bentley stays out of the way as the guitar chords and the words skulk their way to the peak, still not satisfied (he turns up the volume on choruses to confirm this). Could be a Neil Young song, about "turning that hill to gravel."
Otherwise, these sundown views of younger wilder times and the road ahead drone on and on through greeting card sagas, til finally Brandi Carlile pipes up on Track 12, "Travelin' Light" (def not the JJ Cale' this 'un's about forgiving yourself and embracing yourself and floating along), and takes it away from him without even seeming to try---once again, he stays out of the way, without even seeming to try either---so many songs, so little voice; it's the longest 44-minute album---ever. Okay, a few others kinda work, and might grow on me, but would require more listening than seems likely.

That one hit on this one that I dislike has scared me away from the whole Bentley album, but maybe I should give it a shot.

I think the Bentley album is really solid. 2/3rds good songs, a couple duds.

I also happen to love (a) his voice, (b) the general lyrical perspective on this one, and (c) all the snow-capped, grizzly-bearded Colorado marketing around it. So YMMV.

agree ^^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FuF1xcg5WU

this song is awesome. of all things it reminds me of american music club

colter will be releasing an album this year and this is one of the singles, just in time for the calgary stampede, which is surely not accidental

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYq6zKdqfkY

should mention it's a wilf carter cover

aha Brad I can kind of hear what you mean

I still can't get over that Colter Wall is the son of Brad, but I admit I'm a sucker for that voice of his

He has said him and his dad are very different people if that helps

I didn't really mean it in the sense that it was a problem, but it *does* help!

i really like this keith urban & julia michaels song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC7wWFQUUqU

Fans of the new Dierks album might find similar appeal on his guest Brandi Carlile's own By The Way, I Frogive You: looking out over the blue Rockies at her life's landmarks, incl. relationships w deep and still-rumbling layers, provisional peace, possible wisdom---Dierks sounds happier, but she's still strong, thriving on the drama under her boots and out there---a few tracks I haven't wrapped my head around yet, but overall good stuff.

er Forgive You

really a missed opportunity for a kermit led county classic. i have a one year old so please don't roll your eyes at me

Wish she'd thought of that!

by the way i forgive you is an incredibly powerful album, lots of great tracks with her vocals sounding very big

i have a personal quibble and it's really because i have old man ears at this point in my life

and it's that her vocals feel like they were recorded too hot and are overdriven, which affects my enjoyment of it

i think i understand why they did it though -- it's the whole raw/emotive feel of if, which is good

i just would've preferred warmer sounding vocals, but that would've removed the affect i guess

i'm sure this album is mind blowing live

party of one is one of my favourites

indeed, the Brandi album is great

ya gotta be OK with riding the blurry line between earnestness and over-the-top-ness to lock in to her, but she's definitely got the goods, imo. has for a long time.

She really sells it on party of one. My bro sent me that song and it was enough for me to want to check out the album.

Yeah you gotta be ready for her theatricality, and I kept thinking she's performed with this guy? Even before I got this update:
Elton John calls Brandi Carlile’s By The Way, I Forgive You his “Album of the Year” on his Rocket Hour radio show on Beats 1 on Apple Music. Listen to the full interview, which aired this past weekend(if you've got Apple Music or want to go to the iTunes Store yadda-yadda, anyway I can imagine her singing some of his early country-ish [& other] songs better than he did, no prob)

From Variety:

“I learned a lot about phrasing listening to Frank,” Willie said recently in an interview for AARP magazine (June/July 2018). “He didn’t worry about behind the beat or in front of the beat, or whatever-he could sing it either way, and that’s the feel you have to have.”

Nelson, who cancelled some shows earlier this year due to illness, is back on the road through the end of this year; the “My Way” tracklist appears in full below:

Fly Me To The Moon
Summer Wind
One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)
A Foggy Day
It Was A Very Good Year
Blue Moon
I’ll Be Around
Night And Day
What Is This Thing Called Love (with Norah Jones)
Young At Heart
My Way

First single and video is "Summer Wind." Album's out Sept. 14.

x-post

indeed, the Brandi album is great

ya gotta be OK with riding the blurry line between earnestness and over-the-top-ness to lock in to her, but she's definitely got the goods, imo. has for a long time.

― alpine static, Tuesday, 10 July 2018 02:27 (one week ago) Permalink

A tad melodramatic at times, but yes to Brandi Carlile

Willie doing "It Was a Very Good Year" might actually kill me

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-lori-mckenna-writes-the-most-devastating-ballads-in-country-music/2018/07/19/544b51e2-89f4-11e8-8aea-86e88ae760d8_story.html?utm_term=.84e448afa0e0

Chr*s Richards in W. Post on folky gone Nashville country songwriter Lori McKenna who lives in Stoughton, Massachusetts

But this is how her songwriting often begins — eavesdropping and people-watching while she runs her daily errands. “We’re all people-watchers in some way,” McKenna says over the telephone from her living room in Massachusetts. “We see a person, and we make a story up in our head. . . . I don’t know if empathy is the right word, but we develop some curiosity in one another.”...McKenna has said that she feels a pressure to write airtight lyrics to compensate for her limited vocal range — and while it’s hard to hear a voice as expressive as hers as limited, it’s easy to hear how wisely she deploys her resources.

McKenna’s exquisite new album, “The Tree,” directs that curiosity toward families — her family, other people’s families, imagined families, families where the kids grow up too fast, and the parents grow old too soon, families that make her new songs feel as mundane and urgent as life and death. And while many have praised McKenna for her ability to elevate our most piddling pedestrian life-stuff to profound heights, for her, there’s no heavy lifting involved. When the ordinary is already extraordinary, the music is all around us.

this is kind of big I think https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/eric-church-desperate-man-nashville-country-700750/

Church says he’s not a member of the NRA and never has been. “I’m a Second Amendment guy,” he emphasizes again, “but I feel like they’ve been a bit of a roadblock. I don’t care who you are – you shouldn’t have that kind of power over elected officials. To me it’s cut-and-dried: The gun-show (loophole) would not exist if it weren’t for the NRA, so at this point in time, if I was an NRA member, I would think I had more of a problem than the solution. I would question myself real hard about what I wanted to be in the next three, four, five years.”

Church knows he’ll get blowback from some fans for this. “I don’t care,” he says. “Right’s right and wrong’s wrong. I don’t understand why we have to fear a group [like the NRA]. It’s asinine. Why can’t we come together and solve one part of this? Start with the bump stocks and the gun shows. Shut a couple of these down. I do think that will matter a little bit. I think it will save some lives.”

Was just about to post. One of the best interviews I've read in months.

roger mcguinn, chris hillman and marty stuart & his fabulous superlatives, sweetheart of the rodeo full album show, los angeles, tuesday night. opening night of a short-ish tour. it was ragged, loose, occasionally awkward and more than occasionally great. they did one set of truncated versions of hits and deep cuts, and then the sweetheart of the rodeo set, played in full but out of order. i got the sense that stuart and the superlatives rehearsed thoroughly on their own and mcguinn and hillman maybe not so much. they missed cues left and right, were looking down frequently for chords and lyrics, and while hillman's voice was in good form, mcguinn was having a little trouble cutting through. but their instincts for harmony are still dead-on, and stuart fit right into that. i felt like i was watching a band still working out its sound, and as a result, when something gelled, when they hit a sweet spot, it was magical. like watching a band discover itself in real time. and that second set was way better than the first. it felt like having a piece of my own dna read back to me. maybe they felt the same.

encore: two byrds classics and three tom petty classics. i was wondering if maybe they would be able to coax david crosby (who i assume still lives here though i have no idea) onto the stage for a song or two. instead we got mike campbell, who joined for "american girl" -- after which they kicked him off and, strangely, played more petty songs without him. marty stuart did a bluegrassy take on "runnin' down a dream" (thumbs up) and hillman did a fairly faithful "wildflowers," which apparently petty produced for him for an album he put out last year.

they also told some stories. they're not particularly good storytellers. damn those harmonies though.

Was already hoping for an album from that tour, even more while reading your dispatch. Marty and His FS have the drive and expertise to keep those geezers functioning onstage for as long as possible.
Yeah, Hillman's always seemed better in bands, all the way back to the Hillmen, but the Petty=produced set has keepers; my comments from the most recent Nashville Scene ballot:
Have not yet made it through Chris Hillman's The Asylum Years---some hideous harmonies get wasted on the way---but will give it another shot. Some nice tracks on the new Bidin’ My Time, especially "Walk Right Back," one of the many under-covered Everlys Bros worthies, seeds of West Coast country rock at its best (he credits inclusion of this song to producer Tom Petty, who did what he could all over--Hillman's not the strongest solo artist among his peers, but has his moments, when the setting's just right, or just about) McGuinn and The Croz show up; some Heartbreakers, still radio-ready, also appear.

"Everlys Bros"? Oh well it's just a ballot.

yeah, marty and his fab superlatives really are great. versatile, too.

thanks for the hillman review, will have to check that out.

Not much of a review, but you're welcome, and thanks for the exciting concert review.

Speaking of ballots, I eventually revised my 2017 choices, aided by y'all's further listening tips.
whole thing posted here: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2018/03/cant-stop-shakin-pt-1-nashville-scene.html, although a lot of the comments are the same as or based on Rolling Country 2017/early '18 posts.
As for the basic lists,
here we go:

TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2017:

(just in the order they come to mind)

1. Lee Ann Womack: The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone (ATO)

2. Whitney Rose: Rule 62 (Six Shooter/Thirty Tigers)

3. Rodney Crowell: Close Ties (New West)

4. Amanda Anne Platt/Honeycutters: S/T (Organic/Crossroads)

5. Margo Price: All American Made (Third Man)

6. Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer: Not Dark Yet (Thirty Tigers/Silver Cross)

7. Caroline Spence: Spades and Roses (Tone Tree)
8. John Moreland: Big Bad Luv (4AD)
9. Willie Nelson: God’s Problem Child (Legacy)
10. Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls: S/T (Bloodshot)

TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2017:
1. Various Artists: American Epic: The Best of Country (Lo-Max/Third Man/Columbia/Legacy)
2. Becky Warren: War Surplus (Deluxe Edition)(self-released, I think)
3.Various: Stax Country (Craft/Concord)

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2017:
1. Willie Nelson
2. Rodney Crowell
3. John Moreland

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2017:
1. Lee Ann Womack
2. Whitney Rose
3. Margo Price

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2017:

1. Willie Nelson
2. Margo Price
3. Rodney Crowell
(and their collaborators)

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2017:

1. Margo Price & the Price Tags
2. Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters
3. Willie Nelson, Lukas Nelson, Micah Nelson

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2017:

1. Alex Williams
2. Carly Pearce
3. Colter Wall

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2017:

1. Willie Nelson
2. Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls
3. Lee Ann Womack
Comments after the following: ******************************************************************
Imaginary categories:
(They Came To And/Or From Nashville (Pop, Country-Related??):
Nicole Atkins: Goodnight Rhonda Lee, Walker Hayes, Boom, Kelsea Ballerini

Hon. Mention: Willie Nelson: Willie’s Stash Vol. 2: Willie and the Boys, Alex Williams: Better Than Myself, Carly Pearce: Every Little Thing, Lorrie Morgan & Pam Tillis: Come Lonely and Come Lost, Whitney Rose: South Texas Suite, Lindi Ortega: Til The Goin’ Gets Gone,, RaeLynn: Wildhorse, Natalie Hemby: Puxico, Lillie Mae: Forever And Then Some, Kip Moore: Slowheart, Zane Campbell: Ola Wave, Alex Williams: Better Than Myself, Brett Eldredge: s/t, Rhonda Vincent & Daryle Singletary: American Grandstand, Whiskey Gentry: Dead Ringer

Borderline: Sunny Sweeney: Trophy

About Half Good (60-45%): Nikki Lane: Highway Queen, Chris Stapleton: Songs From A Room, Vols. 1 & 2, Case Garrett: Aurora, Little Bandit: Breakfast Alone. Colter Wall: S/T, Angaleena Presley: Wrangled, Jason Isbell: The Nashville Sound, Justin Townes Earle: Kids In The Street, Steve Earle: So You Wanna Be An Outlaw, Midland: On The Rocks, Scott Miller: Ladies Auxiliary, Charlie Worsham: Beginning of Things, Marty Stuart: Way Out West

Borderline: Toby Keith: Songs From The Bus, Various Artists: Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams

Less Than Half Good: Lady Antebellum: Heart Break, Little Big Town: The Breaker, Tim McGraw & Faith Hill: For The Rest of Our Lives, Thomas Rhett: Life Changes, Bruce Robison & The Back Porch Band: S/T

Countryoid/Americana/Related:

Jace Everett: Dust & Dirt

Howe Gelb: Further Standards

Jessi Colter feat. Lenny Kaye: The Psalms

Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real: S/T

Gregg Allman: Southern Blood

Modern Mal: The Misanthrope Family Album

Rev. Sekou: In Times Like These

David Rawlings: Poor David’s Almanack

Bonsoir, Catin: L’Aurore

The War and Treaty: Down To The River

Related Reissues:
1. Marisa Anderson: Traditional and Public Domain Songs
2. Various Artists: American Epic: The Collection
3. Lydia Loveless: Boy Crazy and Single(s)
4. Various Artists: Rough Guide To Jugband Blues
5. Various Artists: American Epic: The Soundtrack
6. Gillian Welch: Boots No, 1: The Official Revival Bootleg

Borderline (Docked A Notch For Being A Re-Recording Of A Good Old Album And Even Of Bonus Tracks From The Same Sessions):
Lucinda Williams: This Sweet Old World

Related Hon. Mention:
Pinegrove: Elsewhere, Shovels & Rope: Busted Jukebox Vol. 2, Howe Gelb: Open Road, Peter Stampfel & The Atomic Mega Pagans: Cambrian Explosion,
Valerie June: The Order of Time

Related Genealogically As Well As Musically Hon. Mention:
North Mississippi Allstars: Prayer For Peace, James Luther Dickinson: I’m Just Dead, I’m Not Gone: Lazarus Edition (also a Related Reissue)

Related Borderline:
Deer Tick: Vol. 1, Rhiannon Giddens: Freedom Highway, John Mellencamp feat. Carlene Carter: Sad Clowns and Hillbillies, Arthur Alexander: S/T
Related Less Than Half Good:
Banditos: VisionLand

Just got word about xp Colter Walls' Songs of the Plains coming out Oct. 12---link to first single, album & tour info here: http://www.sacksco.com/pr/colter_wall.html

Did not see this coming:
With ‘Blaze,’ Ethan Hawke decided to break all the rules by telling the story of an obscure singer who died in 1989.
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/ethan-hawke-blaze-foley-movie-biopic-texas-songwriter-703024/

I've never been able to watch Ethan Hawke since he was in Square Pegs, but have heard that he's improved. Only know Foley's actual music (vs. backstory and a few reviews of his few albums) via Merle's version of "If I Could Only Fly."

That’s awesome and adds to the many reasons why i like ethan hawke

Wrt to colter wall, I follow his music releases closely so I’ve known about that single and the new album but don’t wanna fill this thread with colter fun facts

Anyway there’s another one from the album floating around on YouTube

Also two of my all time favourite colter tracks are on the new album (sask in 1881 and wild bill hickok if it actually is railroad bill)

Gonna go to one of his shows later this year

I'm seeing Colter this weekend. Pretty excited!

Here's Brandi Carlisle's whole set, just over an hour:
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/08/636376855/brandi-carlile-live-in-concert-newport-folk-2018

Xp

How was it

He sounded great, cracked a couple jokes, but I couldn't really dig in because of distractions. Saw about 15 minutes of two different sets, neither with a decent view, either.

I also think he's already much bigger than I realize.

Last year i paid like $15 to his show

This year i paid $40

He definitely blew up

from now on when non-mainstream country/roots acts jump from 400- to 1200-cap rooms in 6 months, they're on The Sturgill Journey

mm i would talk to some people in saskatchewan about him being "non-mainstream"

just feel like it's worth noting that he's received pushback from people less than thrilled with his dad

(also what even is "mainstream" these days that isn't like... florida georgia line)

mm i would talk to some people in saskatchewan about him being "non-mainstream"

well there are these things called “legs up” you see and they tend to perpetuate hegemony on certain levels

anyway i read stuff. i don’t know if i agree with their assessment. i’m just saying, “mainstream” or non is a slippery way to define quality, especially in this fragmented time.

Paisley was on Fallon or Myers show this week; guess he's still the mainstream, despite that there Welcome Obama song, and the one about racial tolerance in general, which caught some flak from various sides, but so far he hasn't gotten the Dixie Chicks (and Eric Church?) treatment. Miranda Lambert had all them hits, but now she's kinda weird, on her own albums and w Pistol Annies (who have a third album at least in the planning stages, according to Monroe). Chesney still keeps everything paved over, so he's real dependable mainstream. Jason Aldean has probably had some discussions with his people re future venues, at least I would hope so, but no cracks in the pavement that I've noticed.
Hot Buttered Rum have a somewhat misleading name, like they're some kind of lumberjack party band---true, they keep it moving---their mandolinist is also/maybe mainly their drummer---but one of the perkiest numbers on the well-titled Lonesome Panoramic is 'bout how when that lonesome feeling comes around, you better let it in, it might just tell you something; one of the catchiest (even some scat-singing at the end) is 'bout how "You don't know what lonesome is, 'til lonesome's gone." Some of it seems a bit murky so far, but also a spooky, almost country-noir ballad 'bout how there's shit you can't take back: a father's looking for his derelict son, his runaway daughter, while sort of acknowledging that he's not perfect.
Rec to fans of Western Centuries, the pensive-yet-limber side of Hunter-Garcia, post-Marmaduke New Riders.

Not that I'm anti-mainstream, but hard to find a mostly satisfying album of it these days (I'm mostly an album listener). Maybe I was spoiled by the late 90s-early 00s. Still, post-peak Tim McGraw units are always good for at least a few sparky, distinctive tracks, even the mostly ridiculous duet set w Faith Hill, which goes bad in a sparky, distinctive. listenable way---amwazingly bad! And how often does that happen, in any genre? Something went out of the music when the Four Seasons and Jefferson Starship stopped making new records (yes, they're probably still playing somewhere).

*amazingly* bad too

Although at least xgau is still/maybe more than ever capable of the occasional amazingly bad music pick---can't believe he recently gave Chicago Farmer's Quartet Past Midnight an A minus! A few decent tracks--though most of those don't urge me past a couple listens---but overall this is exactly the kind of
cute corny cliche, self-promoting folkie sensitivity training he used to scorn. Of course he's an expert talker, even has a routine 'bout how you too can learn the faux-Arlo delivery, but all too often the songs seem anti-climatic after the set-ups, in that common folkie club way.
But sometimes he does manage an effective anecdotal-musical merger, my fave being the one about his neighbors, offspring of the Chicago powerhouse-to-rustbelt working class, who start their own bakery, everything looking up 'til the '08 evaporation of credit etc., to which their response incl. working even harder, becoming closet methhheads. This comes to light after their children turn up at school "blind, and the other one couldn't see"---a uniquely tasteless joek/journalistic detail from the Farmer, maybe an actual anti-tearjerking move, even though this is one of his least tearjerking songs. Anyway, it's not too big a jolt, maybe because it's something a neighbor might gossip, at least to himself.
Rec. to fans of early Prine, Silverstein, Steve Goodman, his buddy Arlo, but only if you're fairly desperate for more of that good old Old Town plaid yarntunespinning Chicago stuff.

Brothers Osborne, Port Saint Joe: Oho, I like Brother John's vintage-ish etc. as contemporary country instrumental settings very well and right away; famous geezers who know they need freshening up should borry him (and producer Jay Joyce's board team). Brother TJ's vocals tend to point up the limitations of the songs, but it all comes together sometimes, often enough that I'll keep listening for sure, whole or most of it may grow on me.

xp Pistol Annies album is now far past prev. announced "planning stages," reports A Taste of Country:

The country-singing trio have been in the studio this year working on their third album. Presley reveals to the Boot that she and her Annies partners have finished recording at least an album's worth of new material, saying: "We just finished our third record."

Ruby Boots' Don't Talk About runs the two-lane from Brenda Lee to Nikki Lane (was thinking that before I read that the actual NL co-writes and sings on some of this), also Nashville to British Invasionville and back, country enough (via twangy vocal linchpin, for inst) that nearly a cappella gospelly waltz "I Am A Woman" sounds at home between garage stompers "Somebody Else" and "Infatuation" (former also feat. good fuzztone---Texas Gentlemen can go wherever she leads). Finale "Don't Give A Damn" starts with acoustic strum and shaker, goes to full kit and randomized electric howls, keeping that Maro Price Mellencamp, born-in-a-barn catchiness (yes, it's on Bloodshot). Not original atall, but/and so far mostly good.
Although a few tracks do have me looking at my watch---one prob w hot chesnut associations is when you might start to recall that old tyme radio edits weren't much over 3'30", at most, while most of these go on up for to a minute longer

Don't Talk About *It*(emphasis added)!

Margo Margo *Margo*---sorry again!

Not sure if this is for this thread or the world music one, but I've been enjoying the reissue of Jess Sah Bi & Peter One's Our Garden Needs Its Flowers - mid-80s Cote D'Ivoire take on 70s US country & folk-rock.

https://jesssahbipeterone.bandcamp.com/

on first listen "To The Sunset" by Amanda Shires sounds like a good album from a promising artist

other ilxors hold it in high regard, so I'm thinking it may be a grower

xp Thanks, etc.! Got into it right away. Incl. lots of good info & descriptions: ... fusion of traditional Ivorian village songs and American and English country and folk-rock music. Jess and Peter sang in French and English, delivering beautifully harmonized meditations on social injustice and inequality, calls for unity across the African continent, an end to apartheid in South Africa and the odd song for the ladies, all set against lush guitar riffs, rustic harmonica and rollicking feel-good rhythms. Although I'd say "sophisticated," not "lush," the way they take what they need from what they like---title track suggests Don Williams guiding Crosby Stills & Nash in a non-snoozey, shuffley direction---"rollicking" is an overstatement, but on a foggy morning this set cleared my head right up.

Aug. 24 press release onslaught:

COLTER WALL’S “SASKATCHEWAN IN 1881” PREMIERES TODAY
NEW ALBUM “SONGS OF THE PLAINS” OUT OCTOBER 12
EXTENSIVE HEADLINE TOUR CONFIMRED

“AMONG THE MOST REFLECTIVE YOUNG COUNTRY SINGERS OF HIS GENERATION”---The New Yorker

Colter Wall’s new song “Saskatchewan in 1881” is premiering today. Listen/share HERE. The song comes from Wall’s highly anticipated new album, Songs of the Plains, which will be released October 12 on Young Mary’s Record Co. via Thirty Tigers and is now available for pre-order.
Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio A with Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb, the album features eleven songs including seven original songs written by Wall, versions of Billy Don Burns’ “Wild Dogs” and Wilf Carter’s “Calgary Round-Up” as well as two cowboy traditionals, “Night Herding Song” and “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail.” Each digital pre-order comes with an immediate download of three album tracks: “Saskatchewan in 1881,” “Calgary Round-Up” and “Plain to See Plainsman,” which was released earlier this summer. Of the song, Rolling Stone declares, “…Colter Wall delivers this classic-minded cowboy song in a leathery, lived-in baritone. There’s some soft percussion and honking harmonica tossed into the mix, too, but Wall’s voice is the biggest attraction here, sounding less like the croon of a Canadian-born Millennial and more like Roger Miller after a long night of drinking.”
Of the album, Wall comments, “One thing I’ve noticed over the last few years, in the United States and playing in Europe, is that people all over the world really don’t know much about Canada at all…When you talk about Saskatchewan, people really have no idea. Part of it is because there are so few people there. It’s an empty place—it makes sense that people don’t know much about it. But that’s my home, so naturally I’m passionate about it. With this record, I really wanted people to look at our Western heritage and our culture.”
In addition to Wall (vocals, acoustic guitar), the album also features Cobb (acoustic guitar), Lloyd Green (pedal steel), Chris Powell (drums, spoons), Jason Simpson (bass), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Blake Berglund (vocals) and Corb Lund (vocals).
The Saskatchewan native will tour extensively this fall in celebration of the release with headline shows at New York’s Irving Plaza, Nashville’s The Basement East (two nights), Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club, Seattle’s Showbox @ The Market and Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse among many others. Tickets are on sale now. See below for complete details.

Photo credit: Little Jack Films
The release of Songs of the Plains follows a breakthrough year for the Canadian artist, whose self-titled debut album was released last May to widespread critical acclaim. The album entered the Billboard charts at #2 on “Top New Artist Albums” as well as #6 on the “Americana/Folk Albums” chart, #11 on the “Independent Current Albums” chart and #14 on the “Current Country Albums” chart. Additionally, it landed on several “Best of 2017” lists including Rolling Stone, Paste, Stereogum, The Boston Globe and UPROXX, who praised, “…this self-titled slow burner is surprisingly fresh, full of existential dread and gorgeous, meandering melodies that occasionally whip themselves up into frenzies. For all your friends who declare pop has cannibalized country, play Colter Wall for them, and watch them slip back into the outlaw past with glee.” Moreover, The New Yorker declared, “Wall is among the most reflective young country singers of his generation... His ace in the hole is his showstopping voice: a resonant, husky baritone, wounded and vulnerable.”
SONGS OF THE PLAINS TRACK LIST:
1. “Plain to See Plainsman” (written by Colter Wall)
2. “Saskatchewan In 1881” (written by Colter Wall)
3. “John Beyers (Camaro Song)” (written by Colter Wall)
4. “Wild Dogs” (written by Billy Don Burns)
5. “Calgary Round-Up” (written by Wilf Carter)
6. “Night Herding Song” (Cowboy Traditional)
7. “Wild Bill Hickok” (written by Colter Wall)
8. “The Trains are Gone” (written by Colter Wall)
9. “Thinkin’ on a Woman” (written by Colter Wall)
10. “Manitoba Man” (written by Colter Wall)
11. “Tying Knots in the Devil’s Tail” (Cowboy Traditional)
COLTER WALL CONFIRMED TOUR DATES
August 24—Tonder, Denmark—Tonder Festival
August 29—London, U.K. —Scala
August 30—Manchester, U.K. —Gorilla
September 1—Salisbury, U.K. —End of the Road Festival
September 2—Stradbally, Ireland—Electric Picnic
September 12—Nashville, TN—AmericanaFest
September 14-15—Athens, Ontario—Festival of Small Halls
September 16—Lansdowne Park, Ottawa—City Folk
September 23—Indianapolis, IN—Holler on the Hill Festival
October 12—Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—O’Brian’s Event Centre
October 13—Saskatoon, Saskatchewan—O’Brian’s Event Centre (SOLD-OUT)
October 16—Regina, Saskatchewan—Conexus Convention Hall
October 18—Edmonton, Alberta—Union Hall
October 19—Calgary, Alberta—Macewan Hall Ballroom
October 21—Missoula, MT—Top Hat
October 22—Bozeman, MT—The Rialto
October 23—Billings, MT—Pub Station Taproom
October 25—Omaha, NE—The Waiting Room
October 26—Des Moines, IA—Woolys
October 27—Maquoketa, IA—Codfish Hollow Barn
October 28—Detroit, MI—Majestic Theatre
October 30—Columbus, OH—A&R Music Bar
October 31—Pittsburgh, PA—Club AE
November 2—Somerville, MA—Somerville Theater
November 3—South Burlington, VT—Higher Ground Ballroom
November 5—New York, NY—Irving Plaza
November 8—Charlotte, NC—Neighborhood Theatre
November 9—Richmond, VA—Richmond Music Hall
November 11—Carrboro, NC—Cats Cradle
November 14—Nashville, TN—The Basement East
November 15—Nashville, TN—The Basement East
November 16—Asheville, NC—The Grey Eagle
November 17—Atlanta, GA—Variety Playhouse
November 18—Charleston, SC—Charleston Music Hall
November 24—Toronto, Ontario—Opera House
November 28—Washington, D.C. —9:30 Club
December 1—Madison, WI—Majestic Theatre
December 2—Columbia, MO—The Blue Note
December 10—Santa Fe, NM—Meow Wolf
December 12—Solana Beach, CA—Belly Up
December 14—Los Angeles, CA—El Rey Theatre
January 19, 2019—Vancouver, British Columbia—Commodore Ballroom
January 20, 2019—Seattle, WA—The Showbox @ The Market

www.colterwall.com

i've been listening to sask in 1881 a lot for over a year now

i think this one is better than the studio version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrIUdXrRZuY

this is good, brings the Whiskeytown/RA vibes:

https://www.stereogum.com/2011971/ruston-kelly-dying-star/music/album-stream/

ugh, yeah some of those tracks/lines hit me hard

Got memo @4:14 CST, no idear how long offer is good for:
Announcing a free download of Garth Brooks' latest album, Triple Live

Fresh off this week's appearance on America's Got Talent, Garth Brooks has announced his newest album, Triple Live, is available to download on Amazon, free for a limited time! This new collection of music features 26 tracks taken from live performances throughout his recent world tour.

Click below for your free download of Triple Live, as well as two of his other blockbuster albums, The Chase and In Pieces. Amazon is what it is. Just now downloaded Triple Live( w/o Amazon Music app), and I'll do well to make it through all of that, so may not get the earlier ones.

What the heck, I got those too.

nice thanks

i pressed play on her album on spotify just bc i liked the cover art but lydia luce's azalea is kind of a surprisingly good countryish folk/folkish country record so far

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFC07th1bXI

https://popula.com/2018/09/13/canon-fodder/

piece re: missing country music on the Pitchfork '80s list

^^Shuja Haider

Charlie Robison is retiring from music due to complications from surgery that left him unable to sing. I haven't listened to anything of his in a while, but his 2004 Good Times album has some favorites on it.

xpost Garth's Triple Livetook some getting used to on the first set, with distracting sound quality and badly timed blurts, also massive audience chant-alongs, sometimes overemphasizing the more simplistic lyrics and less hooky tunes, which is most of 'em, at least as presented here (dude obv luvs pop-rock so wot's, uh, the deal) despite the okay band and occasional back-up vocalists--the on-stage ones that, is---but it gets better, and overall seems like at least a (shortish) LP's worth of striking songs and performances. He presents and testifies and is a quick change artist in the hot midst of the blistery mystery of life and love and fun and sorrow, hallelujah.
Will def have to check studio version of "In Another's Eyes," re inttriguing lyrics partially blotted here ( nevertheless, we get good duet w Trisha, whom I prev. considerd the definition of boredom). Especially impressed by "Mom":child scared of being born, is reassured by God re soon will meet an Earthly guide on the patch back to Himself: just barely time enough for that to seem a little spooky, and then look out for "Mama sure was a looker...Daddy's in the pen," cheatin' and Maker-meetin' in between, wheee---somewhere down the road, the responsible salaryman who knows he works so hard because he's controlled by somebody else, transmutes into your "Shameless" and triumphant madman, higher and higher on risk and sacrifice. This is the best of his gut-swaying Elton John-like anthems, at least in this setting; others can seem redundant, over-explaining his principles---"Whiskey to Wine" (it's not the same high") comes close to overexplaining, but it's a supple toon, another good duet with Trisha, as they settle for each other, but not really, so their secret or maybe post-counselling/too-amicably-separating selves sing to and with each other.
Then there's angry suicide as creative breakthrough in "The Beaches of Cheyenne," and then there's "The River," "changing all the time," and then there's "The Fireman," "makin' my rounds all over town, puttin' out old flames," and then he gets progressive in a natural and chosen way on the finale,"We Shall Be Free."
But in between those and a few others, like "Friends in Low Places," o mannn----howsomeever, I now find myself seriously wondering if I will buy his ten-disc set, on Amazon for 15.98 (no shipping & handling if Prime).

the *path* back to Himself (of course it is but a patchy path, this life and world)

However the movie story goes, and I hope it's not this relaxed, Blaze Original Soundtrack (type it that way if you look up on Spotify, although looks like I should check out that guy's Blaze Sountrack playlist) calmly presents the title character as a reflective fella, riding the bus and occasionally venturing into the bar, sitting by the road, frequently dubious of his choices and acutely aware of the gaps in himself and in crowds, distrusting the flow and churn and everything else except his baby. Sounds like she (played by Alia Shawkat, who brings more definition to the better Ben-as-Blaze ruminations) might be what keeps him so sweet (though the real-life Blaze was brave and honorable enough to die defending a friend, trying to defuse a confrontation).
The tumult, incl. the actual lifestyle miles, does come outside in the closer, "Drunken Angel," written about him by Lucinda Williams, sung here by Alynda Segarra, with none of the Snorah Jones tendencies of he Hurry For The Riff Raff breakthrough (guess I better check the follow-up, which is said to be more dynamic, and the previous set had its keepers for sure). She's also good w lead actor-singer Ben Dickey on Blind Willie McTell's "Pearly Gates, " another wake-up change of pace, which gets jokey at one point, without disturbing the overall sense of aspiration and conviction---"When this short life is over," he means to keep fingerpicking through yon portals. Which goes right with the brief glimpse of Robin and Little John bopping through Sherwood Forest, not knowing or caring about bad water or the bad Sheriff, in Roger Miller's brief "Od-De-Lally" (so I guess I better check out that 2018 Roger Miller tribute collection too).
The shadings in Foley's better originals aren't eclipsed by the covers, even of Townes Van Zandt's stark "Marie," a tale of what might have happened to Foley and his Sylvia, did happen to many others, on the street and under the bridge, with just a few wronger turns. Though it's performed here by Charlie Sexton, mainly a guitarist, and his sincere, sometimes soft vocal begs comparison's with TVZ's unrelenting clarity, though they're equally succinct.
Starts and stays snoozey for a while, but seems like 8 out of 12 good 'uns (though maybe I'm too just dried up for "Blaze & Sylvia's Lullaby," another duet with Alia Shawkat, and it's the lone Dickey original, no snoozier than the preceding Foley originals--what the hell, I admire it from afar. Cute couple.)
Grab a coffee and turn it up, or just listen near bedtime.

Yep "Od-De-Lally" sounds good on the Roger Miller tribute too, even though I usually don't like Eric Church's little voice, but he sounds hearty and absurdist here, jumpin' through the hoops of careless and outrageous fortune, incl. good luck and the Sheriff's traps too (bass shadows keep coming up). 37 tracks and I gotta listen some more, but pretty sure Ringo's version of "Hey Would You It Down" is one for my Beatles and Ex-Beatles tape, and overall sense that the Bird of Paradise has long since flown up yore nose and is still flying and bouncing off the dusty walls of all that room up there, which (so far) gets me through some of the more woeful ballads, cos whut does he know other than happy and sad and life and death and bippity dang boppa=me. We'll see. Cool cracks and zesty-old-guesty remakes (not rowdy enough to alarm the caretakers) from the man himself.

Also enjoying Roland White and Friends' A Tribute To The Kentucky Colonels, which comes out Oct. 26 and reworks several tracks from the KC's 1964(before Clarence joined the Byrds) Appalachian Swing. If that title appeals to you, you'll probably dig this set.

Also getting into Mary Gauthier's Rifles and Rosary Beads, songs written with soldiers--had assumed that these last were all vets of Afghanistan and Iraq, but no reason they couldn't have been in Vietnam or elsewhere. Incisive details of experience, Over There and Homefront, keep it grounded, not too anthemy or sloggy, past maybe the opener. MG's got the wiry arrangements, spare and flexible, and enough voice for whatever occasion, without over- or underdoing it (I'm always startled by the various ways she repeats the title phrase of the always startled "It's Your Love." "Morphine 1, 2" gradually turns into something like a country Lou Reed song, but it fits. "I Got Your 6" is a sly little possum, "Iraq" is a furtive message with no time for all the details, but the singer, male or female, is "a mechanic...I try to fit in...what I don't give they take..." Others are def guys or gals, in particular circumstances, incl. marital and professional.
Lots more here, incl, co-writes w SWS co-founder Darden Smith and many others, ongoing:
https://songwritingwithsoldiers.bandcamp.com/

I'm liking the Eric Church record, which is sparer than a country superstar's needs to be.

Just listened to that, and I'm more than pleasantly surprised! The spareness seems relaxed, confident, thoughtful--even "Monsters,", which he has learned are not under the bed, so he's grateful that he also learned to pray, sounds like a humble sop, but is not overundersold, and mention of letting his little son sleep next to him to keep the monsters at bay, does not incl. teaching said son to pray; he seems to be letting him learn at his own pace, as Daddy apparently did (no memories of Churches at church, choirs fading in and out etc. etc.).
The writing and arrangements are usually taut, resourceful, even daring at times, like he's really learned from hippie radio, and not the one in the disappointing track of that title. Most startling moment is when he suddenly starts wobbling that note in "Higher Wire," fixing to take off---also like the quavery verse voice on "Solid," setting up the chorus. and the way the back-to-basics "Jukebox and A Bar" sets up the attempt to chill of "Drowning Man, " in which thinking about politics has driven him to drink once more; weed's not gonna cut it tonight or today.

Because--monsters really aren't under the bed! Well not all of 'em, nosiree.

colter doing a traditional cowboy ballad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zpz5wgwt2Y

I'm convinced: the Church is his best since Chief and when it's on ("Higher Wire," "Solid," "Some of It") his best ever.

Not wowed by big hit “Life Changes,” by Thomas Rhett (from 2017 album still getting radio airplay this year)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/lifestyle/whats-next-thomas-rhett/?utm_term=.c937b9c18932

His country songwriter Dad is proud of him:

“He doesn’t sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write the most different song today.’ His songs just come out pushing the envelope naturally,” Akins said. “You have to learn that Thomas Rhett has always known since he was a kid, since he was old enough to know what was cool and what wasn’t cool, he knows the trends before they’re going to happen.”

Did this on the Watson twins: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/spin/article/21027316/the-watson-twins-bring-heavenly-vocals-and-special-guests-to-the-basement

and on Austin Lucas: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/21023914/austin-lucas-transcends-americana-on-his-new-lp-immortal-americans

Albini production on Austin Lucas....interesting. Will check it out

Eric Church channeling/ripping off "Sympathy for the Devil" on "Desperate Man" not bad

Rhett's 2015 Tangled Up was really fun; didn't nec. think of it as bro country, but if so, as some tagged it, he was the only country bro good for a whole album. Past the duet with Maren Morris, Life Changes was disappointing.
"Lake of Fire," written by Christy Hays, was one of the few good tracks on last year's Bruce Robison & The Back Porch Band (although they spelled her name wrong). 2018's River Swimmer presents her as a true lady of the canyon, with a big chunk of aural atmosphere down and up there, incl. good drummer and/or programming digging in---touchstone might be Emmylou's Wrecking Ball, also the more recent Lucinda Williams albums, though without vocal slurs or drunken angels or ghosts on the highway. Plenty of shadows and light, re sense of time (of day and season and sometimes lifespan) and place (usually out west, but sometimes just east of the Mississippi, and then there's that "Town Under The Ground," where I wanna go).
Some substantial songwriting for sure, restless and grounded, but a couple mostly going for Americana airplay, and the sonics can be too rich for me to digest the whole set in a single listening. That's okay though. It's all here, along with some earlier releases, which I haven't checked yet:
https://christyhays.bandcamp.com/

I really like those Lucinda albums, for the most part, but glad that this isn't too close!

Good to know there's a new Austin Lucas!

Listening to the Hays again: no prob this time w the sound design, which I'm absorbing and being absorbed by/accepting as such, with conversational appeal in the foreground, and lots of good lines in the verses, but somehow they don't pull me in as consistently as the choruses---would rather have it that way than the reverse, if I had to choose, so I just did---but some of that effect comes from the way lines in the verses get me thinking, so that I may miss the next thing she says, as can happen in good non-musical conversations---but some other times my mind just wanders away completely, for the next line or two, and I blame her more than me. Maybe unfairly, and good album overall, but for now I'm going onto something else (the latest Loretta Lynn, most likely, or Garcia's Before The Dead box).

One more bit about Hays and then I'll shut up: For once, the traveler sounds positively proud of herself for reaching a destination. Then gradually not so much, and then, "I hate it when you worry about me!" Settles back down, before sliding into the chorus and title, "Don't let me diiie/In California." A call, not a cry, and commanding, robust (might not know anything was wrong if she didn't imply it, or if you didn't know her too well, as apparently somebody dies). The call keeps rising and falling, staying in place, being answered by a nagging little guitar figure, suggesting a shriveled McGuinn.

Y'all, what is a good 2018 album of Mexican or Mexican-American or other Latin country etc. music? Any style or subgenre, long as it's got something in that makes me say "Country."
Only one I've heard this year is the poetically precise, lithe life study Alma P’urhépecha, by Los Centzontles and this guy:
Atilano López Patricio

Atilano López Patricio is a Native P’urhépecha musician, songwriter, artisan and painter from Jaracuaro, Michoacán, México. In his youth, Don Atilano worked in the fields along with his brothers and father Gervacio López Isidro, and played music in the afternoons. He first came to California in 1999 at which time he began sharing his traditions with members of Los Cenzontles.

Original and translated lyrics on LC site https://www.loscenzontles.com/product/alma-purhepecha. Music's on Spotify: 28 minutes, but not at all skimpy.

Correction: should have been *8 songs in 20 minutes,* but not atall skimpy.

Watching CMA Awards (from last night on tape)....Ricky Scaggs tribute was ok. My fave moment was soul singer Mavis Staples joining Chris Stapleton and Maren Morris on a medley.

Florida Georgia Line & Bebe Rexha’s poppy “Meant to Be” was good, but purists & others online didn’t like it

https://www.countryliving.com/life/a25107823/florida-georgia-line-performance-cma-awards-2018/

Luke Combs sounded good; as did Dierks Bentley with Brothers Osbourne. I like the Pistol Annies but wasn’t wowed by their Miranda Lambert penned “I Want my Name Change Back”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/11/15/cma-awards-complete-list-winners-best-worst-moments/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e28138b5e549

Kacey Musgraves was the best album winner. CMAs are radio-friendly country mostly, but sometimes they go for acts without a lot of current chart toppers

Just now discovered that Willie Nelson's taping an upcomimg full-hour Austin City Limits, this livestream started at 8 central:https://www.austin360.com/entertainmentlife/20181119/tonights-night-watch-willie-nelsons-austin-city-limits-livestream-here

I came in on "Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die," then a Djangoesque instrumental, now A Tom T. song I'm unfamiliar with: everything quite perky and limber so far, more about the picking than the singing in that regard, but voice is still good enough, in the Willie way.

Well that was a trip. Hope the whole thing will be posted on ACL's YouTube channel, before editing for broadcast, which may not for inst. incl. Bobbie's coda for the finale,"Will The Cicle Be Unbroken">"I'll Fly Away."

Sweet... I saw Willie and his family show at Red Rocks, around 7 or 8 years ago; I was blown away by his bursts of atonal guitar playing... it was like some “harmelodic,” avant-grade shit. Saw the show again here in L.A., a year or so later. Would love to see him play on TV.

Yeah, the sounds he got from Trigger--- long the oldest, ugliest acoustic guitar I've ever seen---were truly karma chameleon, and always fit---even writhing through "Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground," without breaking vibe or meter, like one of those Old Testament, Milton or Blake angels, not from a greeting card (that I'd be likely to get, anyway).
Can prob find more TV appearances on the Tube---he and his family and friends band were all of the very first Austin City Limits ep, in '74, been on there several times since (his collaboration with Asleep At The Wheel etc), and prob some on the Farm Aid channel. His CMT "Crossroads" episode with Sheryl Crow was ace, especially his electric guitar all over "Every Day Is A Winding Road."

Maybe this goes better somewhere else but here's some electro-country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpOdJhLvHE8

George Jones and the Jones Boys, Live In Texas: True, some of the classick self-torture serenades, though always ready for the spotlight turns, can seem a bit hemmed in here, where ever'body's having so much brisk-to-frisky fun at Dancetown U.S.A., where the supposedly rock & roll-hating Jones delivers a well-fueled "Bonie Maronie" by request, ditto his own "White Lightning, from way back when he was still recording that greasy kid stuff under duress. The Jones Boys, with steel guitar great Buddy Emmons and ace fiddler Re Hayes guesting, open the first set with Billy Butler & Clifford Scott's "Hold It," close for "liquormisson er, intermission" with Ellington's "C Jam Blues," also we get western swing gems "B Bowman Bop" and "Panhandle Rag"--hell, they even bring out Rufus Thibodeaux ("Two-by-Four," George says it) for "Jole Blond," with Emmons and Hayes right in there, of course; that's one of my favorite songs ever. Jones Boys trusty Don Adams is a totally artificial and strangely satisfying Texas-Nashville crooner while the boss takes another break or three, and, like all the JBs and guests, perfectly supportive when he does show up again, which is often enough for me. Really good mono.

Live In Texas 1965, that is. ace fiddler *Red* Hayes.

Charlie Rich, Too Many Teardrops - The Complete Groove & RCA Recordings: Choirs and strings oops upside your head, but get bearable and even occasionally useful, after or during the first couple listens, although Disc 2 still kills some of the weakest material, and that's what he gets for turdpolishing with his surefire sound (a la Elvis, Sinatra, Willie, etc.) But I like a lot and love some, as expected of Big Ol' Charlie on li'l cat feet---that voice, them keys, which deliver the expected drama and rolling country-plus, also the sassiest "Old Man River" and bluesiest "Twelfth of Never" ever.

And as I said over on Charlie's own thread:
Also a couple of intriguing ballads written by Freddie Hart:"Too Many Teardrops" starts out feeling for a fella who lost his love to the narrator, yet, "I did what any man would do"---emphasis on "man," because the cry guy wasn't "strong enough to play the losing hand"--crying and drinking yourself to death doesn't count as a well-played losing hand, so what does? Revenge, mebbe? Doesn't say.
The other Hart-written track, "There Won't Be Any More, " has a terse, I cut-you-off lilt that somehow reminds me of some British Invasion tracks, like uhhh covers like "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying"? But with more attitude.
The Riches-written (lots of originals here) "The Grass Is Always Greener" advises that, "You may think you're rollin' in clover/But you better think it over." Shaddup with that, I must not think bad thoughts!
The Complete Smash Sessions is the one to start with, but this is def worth checking out.

Re redeeming the less promising material, the way Rich and his hairspray angels do "Nice and Easy Does It Every Time" isn't so nice, and it isn't so easy, except in a not-nice sense.

There Won't Be Any More is the latest reissue of the complete Smash sides: an Ace Import, like Too Many Teardrops, and both are readily available on Amazon (as I know from a recent Rich binge, once I found about 2018's TMT---my wallet doesn't thank you, ilm, but I do).

Onetime ilxor and current City Pages editor Keith Harris has The Pistol Annies as his number 1 album of the year. The Ashley Monroe solo album has appeared on a few too I think

But the awards-show inequity pales to what’s afflicting the country airwaves, and the degree to which Music Row refuses to rock the boat — even when it comes to meaningful progress toward gender parity — in favor of not angering the decision makers at radio. Put simply, the inequality issue is one of which everyone is aware, and yet no entity capable of enacting change — from the CMA to Country Radio Seminar — has publicly floated the idea of country’s own task force.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/women-in-country-music-grammy-awards-768170/

https://www.popmatters.com/best-country-albums-2018-2622402944.html?rebelltpage=2#rebelltitem2

Eric Church #3, Ashley Monroe at #4 . Kacey M won

I have to say the new Colter Wall is a huge improvement on the last album

His voice makes my throat feel good. He should do a tea commercial, wrapped in snowy blankets or his bog coat. I like that he seems to travel or sit around in various centuries, maybe. Just gives me that impression sometimes, just passing through.
I don't know what the title of John Prine's The Tree of Forgiveness means, but "I live deep down inside my head" and yet still goes out on a limb and gets some air once in a while, checks the groundhogs and such, a sociable-enough hermit, not trying to avoid his own shadow, or the lonely friends of science. Prine country.

His *big* coat, not bog coat, jeez. Although could be both.

I included a song from it in my Himes Scene poll I turned in last week but didn't vote for the album itself, which is just underproduced. But Kevin Gordon's Tilt and Shine is a great example of the Nashville Prestige Effort that's also insufficiently populist, and good. Gordon has been a cause celebre for Himes himself and for others, and given a budget, some horn arrangements and a good coaching on vocal presence--making him cut the vocals until he gets it right, or better than what's on this album--he'd be a major guy. Because the songwriting and the musical conception is purt near close to "major"; Gordon's writing, while kinda writing-school stuff at times, can be brilliant. As in the song I picked for the poll, "Drunkest Man in Town."

The other local Nashville guy who, if produced more outgoingly (and made to ditch some of the affectations-mannerisms of his singing and guitar playing), might break thru into something more than cult popularity I've been catching some sets by is Jon Byrd, who sounds sort of like Gram Parsons.

The best sorta local thing I saw this year might be Joseph Hazelwood's recent set at a West Nashville club. Hazelwood, who is sort of a country-blues guy writing about modern things in an intermittently modern way, is eccentric and weird enough without trying, and at his best he's on the edge of an unselfconscious pop-blues-folk synthesis, with "pop" the operative word; one tune he did this month reminded me of Seals & Crofts, some schlock-pop remains from the '70s he used with no sign of strain.

Also filed a Scene piece this week on a real interesting mostly unknown Mississippi-born singer, Chelsea Lovitt, who's around 30 and a garage rocker who twists the form smartly and a quasi-country-Americana artist who comes from the Parsons-Chilton school of modified folk-rock-rock. Were she not so abstract, and literary (songs often use free-floating imagery that glances off their ostensible subject matter), she'd be in the league of Nikki Lane or Elizabeth Cook. The album, cut in Nashville in 2016 and just released in fall 2018 to virtually no notices (on a small Knoxville label, Fat Elvis), is You Had Your Cake, So Lie in It, which includes some post-Wanda Jackson vocals along with a few post-Kinks garage rockers and the weird Parsons-esque (reminds me somehow of "Luxury Liner") tune "De Donna," which someone should work to make Lovitt as famous as she probably deserves to be.

Here's what I said about Kevin Gordon this year: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/21014643/kevin-gordon-makes-pop-conventions-work-for-him-on-tilt-and-shine

I also did this on a duo of Ivory Coast Simon & Garfunkel-influenced "country" singers whose excellent 1985 album has been reissued by Awesome Tapes from Africa, and they played a Nashville show as well: https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/article/21033204/jess-sah-bi-and-peter-one-revisit-our-garden-needs-its-flowers

Those guys are playing out again, and in America! Thanks, hadn't thought to check. Think I posted the reissue on bandcamp way upthread---from backstory there:
Our Garden Needs Its Flowers was a lush fusion of traditional Ivorian village songs and American and English country and folk-rock music. Jess and Peter sang in French and English, delivering beautifully harmonized meditations on social injustice and inequality, calls for unity across the African continent, an end to apartheid in South Africa and the odd song for the ladies...As well as French and English, Jess and Peter spoke Gouro (a Mande language). They had the shared experiences of loving and drawing inspiration from the traditional and ceremonial songs they remembered their mothers singing in their respective hometowns of Barata and Ono. In addition, hearing imported country and folk-rock music over the radio in the early ‘70s was a lightbulb moment for both of them. Jess recalls DJs playing Kenny Rogers, Don Williams and Dolly Parton on the radio in the morning, while Peter notes the significant presence Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Creedence Clearwater Revival had in his listening life.
https://jesssahbipeterone.bandcamp.com/album/our-garden-needs-its-flowers

x-post- listened to Kevin Gordon after I saw his album in Geoff Himes roots music top 10 at Paste. On first listen I thought his bar band roots rock was just ok but my wife was more impressed. Maybe i will give him another listen. Haven't dug into his Iowa writers workshop lyrics yet either.

Gordon has been a Himes subject for years, and Himes overrates him. Himes did a Scene cover story on him, called him the country's best songwriter or some such. Gordon is like a thousand other people in Nashville--they can't just make a good-sounding record, it has to be this commentary on the South or whatever it is. I've seen Gordon play guitar, and he's a very good Telecaster blues guy, solid down the line. Also a pretty good singer. My problem with him is the fucking production values.

Jewly H year-ender piece on women in country and more:

https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/country-music-women-pop-crossover-nashville.html

A number of newer country acts, the majority of them women, presented themselves as singer-songwriters in the classic sense of the term—not just performers who had a hand in co-writing their material, as has become common in Nashville over the last decade or so, but those connecting with audiences on the strength of their particularized perspectives. I’m thinking of major label signings like Rachel Wammack, Tenille Townes, and Kassi Ashton, and artists like Jillian Jacqueline, Bailey Bryan, and Kalie Shorr, who are either on the rosters of powerful indies or entirely independent. from Jewly H essay. Too much music to keep up with. I don’t know these acts at all

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country-lists/25-best-country-and-americana-songs-of-2018-770295/courtney-marie-andrews-may-your-kindness-remain-3-770333/

Dow, you gonna start the 2019 thread?

Yep.