Saturday Songs - July 30

1. Ryan Adams – “Shine Through The Dark”

A track from Live From Nowhere Near You Vol. 2, a benefit album for the homeless, Adams finds himself by stripping everything away. Adams’s output for the past decade has been notable but lackluster. He will always have trouble topping the spare brilliance of his solo debut Heartbreaker, but this careful number is about as close as he can get.

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2. Ari Hest – “Ride The Brake”

Not one of Hest’s better-known songs, this was a composition resulting from his 2008 “52” project in which the singer-songwriter wrote a song every week for a year. Fans paid a onetime fee to receive the songs, which Hest sent to them by email every week.

While I haven’t had the chance to go through every song from his 2008 catalog, “Ride The Brake” was the one that really jumped out at me. It struck me as a very true to itself. It’s a song about the road and it feels that way. Leading with a breezy acoustic guitar, Hest’s lyrics sound are like bullet points on a list that might have been scrawled on notepad paper with one hand on the steering wheel:

“She reminds you,

you are young;

eager chicken

not yet sprung.

She reminds you

of the reasons

for the big retreat.”

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*3.

Jill Andrews – “The Mirror”

Something I would love to do every week during Saturday Songs is showcase a free single that I’ve found somewhere on the web. There are hundreds and hundreds of unknown musicians out there, some of them willing to share their music for free to get the word out about them. The hunt may be hard, but it’s often worth it.

This week I invite you to check out this song from Jill Andrews, formerly a member of the Tennessee country duo the Everybodyfields. It’s got a nice country shuffle to it—but Andrews is clearly not frightened to shoot for Sara Bareilles territory.

4. Justin Townes Earle – “Can’t Hardly Wait”

Named after one great songwriter and the son of another, fate seems to have blessed Earle. But this track off his third album Midnight At The Movies is not Earle’s song; it belongs, in fact, to Paul Westerberg.

Written for post-Let It Be Replacements, the song finally indicated not a tamer incarnation of the band, but one with more nuance and more flair. If you think the pauses on Earle’s back-porch version sound fantastic, then you ought to listen to the original.

But this cover holds its own. The best part? Replacing the lead guitar line with a banjo. The weirdest part? How much Earle sounds like a less-angsty, wiser version of Westerberg…

5. Aaron Thompson – “Solitude”

I know very little about Thompson; I picked his album out of the WHCL CD rack at random. Easily the brightest spot on the album, “Solitude” highlights Thompson’s breathy vocals and affinity for fun keyboard licks.

The understanding I’ve garnered from a brief foray into the wilds of the Internet’s music blogs (I am, I acknowledge, part of those wilds) is that Thompson produced the album himself. If so, major kudos to the guy. The wacky keyboard solo that begins at 3:35 to end the song is out of this world. Sometimes I listen to it on repeat.