Saturday Songs Jan. 28

1. “Six O’Clock News” – Kathleen Edwards

When I saw her name on a list of recent releases, I knew that I had seen it before, but I couldn’t quite place it. However, the first review I read explained away my half-hearted acquaintance with Edwards; she is the girlfriend of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, a fact that figured into several of the seemingly thousands of magazine features that have been written about Vernon and his music. But Edwards, as it turns out, should figure just as much as Vernon in a conversation about the changing landscape of folk- and alt-country-derived pop music.

But as good as her latest album Voyageur is, I looked back this week to her 2003 debut album Failer. The lead track chronicles the death of a lowlife criminal with the same honesty and accuracy that the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood puts into his tunes about the white trash of the south. Unlike the current record, which finds Edwards and Vernon (who produced the record) playing around more with the texture of the sound, this album is tried-and-true alt-country, the kind of fare you get from Ryan Adams in his brighter moments. Edwards’s voice is the real winner. While it sounds smooth enough, there is a suggestion of roughness around the edges. Unlike brighter-sounding country singers like Alison Krauss or Emmylou Harris, there is a hard-won believability to her voice.

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2. “Desert Dream” – Larkin Poe

LISTEN HERE

Why I haven’t heard more about Larkin Poe in the musical press is a mystery to me. Sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell started off with third sister Jessica in the aptly titled ensemble The Lovell Sisters before Jessica moved on and her sisters reformed as Larkin Poe. Although the sisters are grounded in a thorough knowledge of country and bluegrass forms and are approaching the status of virtuosos on their respective instruments (Rebecca on mandolin and Megan on dobro), over the course of their four EPs they are moving steadily closer to country-pop fare. While the songwriting is spotty in places, they more than make up for it with their singing and their playing.

I pick “Desert Dream” more or less at random from their discography, but it does a good job of representing their work as a whole. While distinctly coming out of country—for instance, the dobro haunting the seams of the song—it is also clearly moving towards a hazy, dream pop. The production possesses a sparkle and polish that you wouldn’t normally get from a bluegrass outfit and features several well-placed embellishments (triangle hits!).

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3. “Wild Folk” – Jim Bryson and the Weakerthans

Another Canadian songwriter who emerged from the woodwork (meaning Spotify! …and Edwards is also Canadian), Bryson teamed up with the Weakerthans for his album The Falcon Lake Incident (which refers to a famous UFO encounter). The presence of a full band really helps to color Bryson’s tunes; his other work is just as good, but it remains a little skeletal in comparison with The Falcon Lake Incident. “Wild Folk” might be the best example of how well this new arrangement works. The opening seconds feature only Bryson and his guitar—which is pleasant enough—but the song truly opens up once the band comes in.

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4. “Heart of the Continent” – John K. Samson

Can anyone sense my path of exploration this week? It’s Canadian music, for those unfamiliar with Samson, who is of the aforementioned Weakerthans. Samson’s 2012 album Provincial is essentially an exercise in emotional geography that you should read the lyrics to as you listen. I’m so excited by my forthcoming exploration of Samson’s lyrics (“And our demolitions punctuate / all we mean to say, then leave too late. / So I'll make my shaky exclamation mark / with a hand full of the crumpled dark”) that I’m tempted to start on some analysis right here, but I’ll set that aside for a future post.

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5. “Earthquakes” – Danger & The Steel Cut Oats

With a totally weird and unpromising band name, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this recommendation, which came from my friend Sarah. But the band proved themselves more than capable of playing a fine mix of country and bluegrass with some equally fine songwriting. In that they straddle the line between traditional forms and pop music, they’re not too far from Larkin Poe territory. And you can download their EP for free! I know that I’ve been slacking on the free music output recently, but hopefully I can appease everyone with this 6-track offering.

My Spotify Salvation

Yesterday I took the plunge. All it took was a burning desire to listen to the Gourds, a definite lack of the Gourds on my iTunes, a Visa debit card, and…oh, I don’t know…a dose of free spirit. Yes. As of 24 hours ago, I am officially a Spotify subscriber. (For the curious, I am not a “Premium” subscriber, but only an “Unlimited” subscriber.) The monthly fee for the serves is $4.99, which is just about $60 per annum to stream unlimited music…and more music than you can find on iTunes most of the time. There are still some great streaming services available for free online—a favorite of mine is Grooveshark—but none of them match up to the organization, audio quality, and sheer range of tunes provided by Spotify.

I should admit something: I did not start paying for Spotify because I felt guilty or because I wanted to or even because I thought all those independent musicians out there deserved a few more coins to jangle in their pockets. I started paying because I had to. According to the contract of those who download Spotify for free, not only do you have to start coughing up the money after six months, but also you are only given two weeks using Spotify for free abroad. So now here I am. Paying for Spotify. And you know what? I feel pretty good about it.

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In the past I’ve ranted about how the “physicality” of books is the trump card that they can always play over the Kindle and, while I haven’t posted anything on the blog about it, I’ve always appreciated the reality of owning a CD (or a tape or a record) as a piece of physical property. A digital album download always felt like it was too easy because of the lack of physical interaction. I click a few buttons, type in a credit card number, click a few more buttons, and voilà! the album is playing through your computer speakers. This “easiness” has always irked me in the back of my mind. I would always own a CD than a digital album (although preferably also have digital files and have the CD not in a plastic/jewel case but a cardboard one…I’m picky). A digital file just doesn’t do it for me. A digital file which I do not actually own? Maybe that’s one step in the wrong direction…

But at the end of the day, Spotify is too good to be true. There are limits on how much money I can feasibly spend on music—a problem that Spotify dashes on the rocks. Here’s a little math: let’s say that I bought every song in my iTunes…(which I haven’t…?). Assuming that I purchased all of them from the iTunes Store at 99¢ a pop, I would have spent a grand total of $12,375. More simple math? If we assume that I started listening to music (and buying it) at age eight, then I would have spent $883.92 per year on music. (Math note: I realized after I did this super-duper complicated math that not only do I have around 100-150 songs that were downloaded for free on my iTunes, but also that there are several hundred (thousand?!) songs on my hard-drive that are unaccounted for in above heady mathiness.)

Spotify? Like I said above, $4.99 per month, roughly $60 per annum. Because I’m a math major (lie), let’s do a little more math. At $60 per month, that same number of songs could have been listened to me (assuming, of course, that Spotify existed when I was eight) for a paltry total of $840…a little less than what I otherwise would have (should have…) been spending per year.

Oh. And the ads are gone. That’s a definite plus.

On Joe Purdy And "Song-stories"

As all of you are aware by now, I have a great deal of respect for songwriters who can tell stories in songs. Not first-person narration—that kind of song has difficulties of its own—but nothing is quite as difficult as the third-person song. Every single songwriter that I’ve interviewed has agreed with that sentiment. Other songwriters, such as Liz Longley, had never even thought about writing a third-person story into a song.

“I ought to try that,” she mused.

Most songwriters don’t bother with this kind of song. They can sound unwieldy and forced and they require the singer to sever the prized personal connection to the audience. It’s no secret that confessional-style songwriting, which had its heyday in the early 1970s with the heartbreaking lyrics of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, can often work wonders on an audience. When James Taylor tells the audience, “Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone,” everyone swoons at the sadness of that line.

On the other hand, a songwriter might try their hand at a song that tells the story of a few down-on-their-luck characters and the audience could only manage to wince. There’s isn't as much personal energy invested in the story. The songwriter invokes not a template of "sinner" or "culprit," but rather the less emotionally dynamic role of the "storyteller."

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Steve Earle, in a class he once taught on the songwriting of Townes Van Zandt, which I did not actually have the pleasure of attending (I read the transcript!), described Van Zandt’s songs as quintessentially philosophical. Van Zandt liked to dig deep into a personal thought and expand upon it. That’s how he ended up with striking lyrics such as those of “To Live Is To Fly.” (“We’ve all got holes to fill / and them holes are all that’s real / some fall on you like a storm / sometimes you dig your own.”)

Van Zandt, Earle is quick to point out, also has a knack for “story-songs,” but he did tend more to the philosophical. On the other hand, Van Zandt’s close friend Guy Clark is a master of the story-song, with a far weaker grasp on the philosophical fare. Consider Clark’s tune about his relationship with his step-grandfather, “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train.”

I don’t know that I exactly concur with Earle’s somewhat curt division of the world of songs, but I think that he provides a valuable template to look at. For one, it helped me move past the greatly simplistic division of “third-person” / “first-person”—songs are not so simple.

I should admit that this mention of Earle, Van Zandt, and Clark is somewhat of a digression—loosely related to the theme, but a digression nonetheless. The point of this post is to posit that Joe Purdy, with whom some of you may be familiar, is an excellent story-song writer (story-songwriter?). Ever since I saw him perform, I had that knowledge tucked away in the back of my head—having experienced the story of “Outlaws." A careful piano number, the song starts off as a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde, a man picking up a woman in a “rose pink Cadillac,” before moving on to the first hesitant robbery, then the string of bank robberies…and, despite being only Purdy’s voice and piano, the song quietly surges with tension until you find out—oh…everything ends up fine. Purdy delivers that fact of their safety not as a revelation and entirely without irony; it all simply happened that way.

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But my recent Purdy obsession came in the form of “Mary May & Bobby,” a love song about a couple that was always meant to be. The song sets its first verse in fifth grade, as an infatuated Bobby walks an oblivious Mary May home from school. Purdy’s narrator is limited to Bobby, who “was listening to every word she said / like it was the gospel of the prophecies” and “went home singing ‘Who Wrote the Book of Love’ and ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’”






Bobby is all innocence here—citing a nonexistent text (“the gospel of the prophecies”) perhaps because he doesn’t think that any actual text can capture the emotion that he feels toward Mary May. Purdy’s voice even trails off at the end of the "gospel" line with syllables that suggest the words "or something." Additionally, Bobby walks home singing two largely innocent love songs, especially the Monotones’ “The Book of Love.” In the second verse, Purdy quotes Bobby as saying that he and Mary May could “live out by the sea / like they do on the movie screen,” again drawing out that innocence; Bobby doesn’t understand love on his own terms, but he can reflect it outward through popular culture. (The “movie screen” thought, however, sticks with him through high school to his next proposal.)

The third verse introduces an actual high school romance between the couple, but a romance that is severed by Mary May’s collegiate aspirations. The first part of the verse is largely in Mary May’s voice and the second part is Bobby’s response, which follows into the  proposal chorus. That long snippet of dialogue is crucial because it temporarily removes the presence of the narrator from the story. When we return to the story, we have left Bobby’s perspective and have now been limited to Mary May. Purdy’s character development of Mary in this verse is not original or particularly inspired, but that is part of what makes the story work so well; he leaves so much for the audience to fill in.

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The fact of the matter is that the moment Purdy enters into his description of an “independent businesswoman,” you already have a full stereotype drawn out in your head. But once you start to consider her character, you realize that Purdy has literally told us nothing about her emotional life. She is lonely, yes, but that’s not much of a character trait when you consider it alongside Bobby; you’d need only to glance at Bobby’s befuddled joy on walking Mary home in the first verse to have a sense that you’re dealing with a real character. Mary May is far more one-dimensional than that.

The real shocker of this song, once you start thinking about the impact of its final verse, is that we never hear an answer from Bobby. Purdy only provides us an echo of the first verse: “It was a fine day in the fifth grade / when Mary May let Bobby walk her home from school.” Are we to take those lines as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ from Bobby to her marriage proposal? My gut reaction is to say that Purdy is making a stab for ambiguity, but it’s worth further investigating Mary’s reasoning in the previous verse.

Thanks to the limited omniscient presence provided by Purdy’s narrator, we know that Mary is motivated to go find by selfishness. She “is lonely beyond belief…[and goes] home looking for the only love she’d ever known,” admitting that whether or not she loves Bobby is besides the point; she doesn’t want to be lonely any longer. The idea that Bobby is still waiting for her after all this time is even admittedly speculation (on either the part of Mary or the narrator): “Guess he never really gave up hope.” So this entire situation might be a fantasy on the part of Mary; she "stopped writing years ago" and has no idea what Bobby's life is like. She fills in the gaps of his life...just as we, as listeners, fill in the gaps of her life. Purdy is clever because we never find out whether our suppositions hold any truth to them.

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These details that hide just beneath the surface of the song are exactly why Purdy proves himself such an excellent songwriter. The temptation with story-songs is to assume that they offer up their story at face value. Other equally worthy songs, such as Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day,” (#2) have similar telling details that more fully reveal the story going on.

Saturday Songs – Jan. 21

1. “Everything Has Changed” – William Fitzsimmons

I’ve featured Fitzsimmons previously on Saturday Songs and the more I listen to his work, the more I respect the immense sensitivity that he pours into every lyric and every line. Take this song, off his 2006 album Goodnight, which openly deals with personal issues that arose out of his parents’ divorce. Like any decent emotionally turbulent album, Fitzsimmons is careful not to apply the schmaltz too thickly; he keeps it in reserve and then injects you with it at the exact right moment.

This song pushes the envelope in terms of schmaltz, but Fitzsimmons manages it partly because he turns the final minute or so into a densely layered web of voices and delicate piano and guitar. For a song where there isn’t very much sonic input, the mix sounds monumentally large and—put your earphones in—creates the impression of an aural cocoon until everything fades out and Fitzsimmons leaves you with a final haunting image, echoing the beginning of the song, in which he comes across his father in the graveyard looking for his mother’s grave. 


The last, breathy incantation is almost better not divided into separate lines, coming across instead as a stream of images: “Last night I had a dream, I was in the graveyard, looking at my father, buried in the ground, swear that I could hear him, tell me he was sorry, and everything has changed.”

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2. “Red Travelin’ Socks” – Malcolm Middleton

Of all the Scotland-derived indie music I’ve so far explored, nothing has quite caught my fancy the way this first track of Macolm Middleton’s album Waxing Gibbous has. Starting off with a furious burst of guitar that could come straight out of The Cure, Middleton and his band pull together one hell of a power pop jam. Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit remains my favorite Scottish singer, but Middleton (a forerunner of the indie scene in Scotland with his band Arab Strap) certainly has the critical edge. Boasting a clean, warm voice, Middleton, like Hutchinson, also sings with a noticeable Scottish accent.

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3. “The Prettiest Thing” – David Childers and the Modern Don Juans

One of the regular cover tunes canvassed by the Avett Brothers in their live shows, “The Prettiest Thing” is a simple, twangy country song at heart, especially in its original version. There’s not a lot to offer about this song; it’s an unassuming tune that most of you won’t have a hard time warming up to. Maybe Childers’s gravelly accent will throw some of you for a loop, but I think his presence helps us place the song as something that might be played in a seaside bar with a special on PBR.

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4. “Born With A Broken Heart” – David Wax Museum

Blending Mexican music traditions with an American folk sensibility, David Wax et al craft hooky pop tunes with some unusual instrumentation. How exactly an accordion, a horn section, and some very-nearly-tribal-sounding drums all end up on the same track remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but I can only offer that the group pulls it off. The mad shuffle of this song should grab you from the opening seconds.

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5. “Voices” – Espers

Suggested to me by flatmate Josh—who hails from Kansas—Espers is an interesting find. Although several websites called their style of music “psychedelic folk” (maybe approaching certain aspects of Jefferson Airplane’s “Embryonic Journey” area?), I think that it might be better to place them alongside British folk heroes Fairport Convention. Although the styles of both bands have clear aesthetic differences, I think the attention paid to instrumental detail and the willingness to delve deep into a melody are highlighted in the work of both bands.

A main difference lies in the choice of Espers to investigate an almost more Baroque sound, incorporating a classical sensibility in terms of how the songs move, weaving in and out of separate melodic thoughts and introducing new ones in almost a suite-like format. Of course that’s not idiosyncratic in terms of the history of popular music, but the modern folk scene hasn’t exactly warmed to…how to put it?…a more scholarly, "trained" approach to music. This song and others by Espers are clearly the work of a real songsmith; someone behind the scenes understands which strings to pull to make these songs work the way that they do.

Rhoda's Cosmonaut Story In "Another Earth"

Another Earth was merely an interesting film up until the moment in which Rhoda (Brit Marling) tells John (William Mapother) the story of the Russian cosmonaut. Rhoda—for those unfamiliar with the film—put John into a coma and killed his wife and son in a drunk driving accident when she was 17. A minor when the accident occurred, her name was withheld from court proceedings and John never found out who destroyed his family. Released from prison four years later, Rhoda seeks out John to apologize, but finds herself unable to tell him who she is while standing awkwardly on his front step—instead telling him that she is from a cleaning service offering him a trial run. Entering into a rich and symbolic relationship, Rhoda begins cleaning John’s house. Romance, as you might have guessed, soon follows, along with the inevitable complication.

Rhoda tells John this story just before they fall for each other. Marling and the director Mike Cahill clearly went to great pains to draw a subtle but vivid contrast between this moment and the rest of the film that comes beforehand. Suddenly, Marling's character is animated, a somber veil lifted from her face—her eyes clear, her voice musical. In contrast to the somber grays and blues of the film's prior cinematography, the warm colors in this scene emphasize the melting of Marling’s character and the dissolving, if you’ll forgive the pun, of the bitter chill she had exuded up to this point.

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In fact, this scene is the most words that we hear from Rhoda the entire film. Largely, we view her while in silent contemplation. To witness her break the seal of her thoughts—not only so enthusiastically, but so brilliantly—is a cinematic revelation. Cahill heightens the emotional rhythm of the moment through his use of neat camerawork and editing. For instance, rather than simply flick back and forth between the two actors, Cahill chooses to focus on details, especially Rhoda tapping the knife and John massaging his temples. This care is particularly evident during the moment when both characters have closed their eyes and “entered their imagination,” as Rhoda would have put it, and Cahill paces the moment beautifully, zooming into Marling’s face as she opens her eyes.

The pleasure of the scene is the revelation of the story itself—how the Russian cosmonaut takes this tapping noise, which has been driving him crazy for days, and fits music to the beat and “spent the remainder of his time sailing through space in total bliss.” Perhaps the conclusion is trite—or even historically inaccurate, I’m not familiar with Russian space history—but the implications of that revelation are devastating when seen in light of John and Rhoda’s relationship. “The only way to save his sanity,” Rhoda tells John, “is to fall in love with this sound.”

While I fall prey to the beauty of that sentiment every time I watch this scene, I cannot help but be reminded of a line from another film that I recently saw: “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.” The romance between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain is, given the societal acceptance of homosexuality, impossible. The pitfalls of their 20-year relationships steadily resound from scene to scene in the film, much like the maddening tapping for the Russian cosmonaut. So why should we be any happier about this scene in Another Earth? I grant, obviously, that we are dealing with two different plots, but I think that the “impossibility” of the relationship between Jack and Ennis is certainly similar to the “impossibility” of that between John and Rhoda. As dark of a reading as it may be, I think it’s worth noting that no matter how pretty the overlaid music may be, the underlying beat will never dissipate. You will always hear it pushing and pulling you through the music. 

Listening To Sigur Rós In Scotland

Having now listened to Sigur Rós’s Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust several times in the past few days, I am struck by my aural “blindness” and craze for lyrics. As some of you may know, I have a tendency to dismiss songs with terrible lyrics. Some of my dismissals aren’t entirely forgivable, but I’d be more than happy to battle for a few of them. (“Are we human / or are we dancer?”—really, Brandon Flowers, what the f—k does that mean!?)

The first time I really struggled with “letting go” of the lyrics was with Bon Iver. Justin Vernon has probably the worst elocution of all time. In fact, for a long time, I thought the lyric was “jagged fingers thick with ice”…not “vacance.” Vacance, by the way, isn’t even much of a real word. But the words, as it turns out, are never terribly important when I listen to Bon Iver. They are merely carriers for the power of the melodic message. Jonah Weiner, on Slate.com, explained it well when he said,

This is actually kind of the way that I hear, and appreciate, Bon Iver’s music—his words are painful on the page, but in Justin Vernon’s delivery they’re far too gauzy to really register, much less annoy me and get in the way of my enjoyment of, say, that insistent, plaintive riff on “Holocene,” which only gathers intensity as the song goes.

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I find—no matter how much attention I pay to the lyrics—that this is exactly how I connect with Vernon’s music. I don’t connect with the lyrical content so much as the delivery of that lyrical content. As it turns out, because Sigur Rós’s lyrics are either gibberish or in Icelandic, there’s a whole lot of space for appreciating that delivery if you’re an English speaker. Perhaps the experience is different as a native speaker of Icelandic (or gibberish?), but all I know is that I have an experience of complete melodic understanding.

And Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust hits hard on all kinds of melodic levels; although it maintains a steady exoticism (it is in Icelandic except for closer “All Alright”) and an extraordinarily clean production, the album hits a huge range of emotional notes. “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” touches on a restrained exuberance; “Við spilum endalaust” maintains a solemn, celebratory bombast. But then “Festival”—which leads off with singer Jónsi’s aching, almost fragile falsetto sailing over shimmery keyboards for the first four minutes—drops into that tremendous bass line and then takes off for outer space. It’s a cautious, beautiful tune for the first half and then an arena rocker the rest of the nine minutes. The almost equally long “Ára bátur,” replete with choral voices, a string section, horns, and orchestra percussion, might pass as a movement from a symphony.

But I’d have to look back to “Festival” as my favorite track on the album—especially given that it was struck in my head for some 48 hours while in the midst of traveling to and being oriented about Edinburgh, Scotland. Perhaps the repetitive bass line sounds like a bit of a chore as something to have careening around your skull while racing through Heathrow Airport, but the song was anything but dull. Once you have some adrenaline going, even the memory of the epic last half hits you like a freight train.

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Anyways, part of the point of this entry is to explain my long and somewhat egregious absence from the blog—6 days being (surprisingly!) the longest stretch yet without a post since the establishment of the somewhat followed Pueblo Waltz. Anyways, I think you all have something of a treat in store, because I will be spending quite a bit of time this semester roaming the more musical of the Edinburgh pubs, searching out fun music that I can pass along to you. Also…no Saturday Songs tomorrow. I haven’t had much time in the past week for listening to new music, but I do promise an installment next week. Cheers!

Saturday Songs – Jan. 7

I'm late! Whoops!

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1. “Down In The Valley” – The Head and the Heart

This song is my latest obsession. I heard the last 30 seconds of the song over XM radio (no one announcing the song names!) and committed the lyrics to memory—“California / Oklahoma / and all the place that I’ve never been to / but down in the valley / whiskey rivers…” One week later, I remembered the lines and typed them into Google and voilà! there was the song on YouTube! Turns out, with 250,000+ hits on one of the videos, that I’m somewhat behind the curve on this folky band.

The latest folky incarnation coming out of the Seattle area, The Head and the Heart captured hearts throughout their hometown area in the past few years—and rightfully so. Their debut album nails down not only some topnotch songwriting, but also some crackerjack playing. You can hear the band channel all this on this best song off their self-titled album.

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2. “Winter Cows” – John Gorka

A phenomenally subtle song from New Jersey songwriting extraordinaire Gorka, “Winter Cows” examines the life of…you’ve got it!…cows as they sit around in the snowed-in fields. Gorka projects all variety of thoughts onto the cows: “Some dream of India, where their cousins are stars, / but they don't like the crowds, so they stay where they are.”

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3. “Old Gin Road” – Ponderosa

Beginning with a heavy, crunchy guitar line, “Old Gin Road” is a simple slab of classic southern rock. Taking a page from the country-fried melodies of Little Feat and the energy of the Black Crowes, Ponderosa might someday sit right alongside the Drive-By Truckers in the canon of modern day southern rock. Then again, they’ll have to turn out several more albums as good as Moonlight Revival.

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4. “Doubting Thomas” – Nickel Creek

For some reason, I avoided Nickel Creek for years. That was partly because I used to have an aversion to bluegrass and partly (read: ridiculously) avoided Nickel Creek because their band name sounded/looked like Nickelback, which is just a different band. Yes. I suppose we all have our bad reasons, but that reason is probably worse than most. Anyways, I got over my insensible, irrational distaste a week ago and am now a convert.

Of course, Nickel Creek skews pretty close to mainstream country for my tastes, but, despite their winning commercial ways, they are progressive bluegrass enthusiasts and consummate musicians through and through, especially mandolin/songwriter/singer Chris Thile. While all three members have an important share in the band, Thile clearly emerges as the leader by the third album, Why Should the Fire Die?. His post-Nickel Creek career includes not only the formation of the Punch Brothers, along with similar minded bluegrass musicians, as well as a fantastic bluegrass album with Michael Davies and several solo albums.

My favorite tune off Why Should the Fire Die? is the religious tumult of “Doubting Thomas.” As some of you might remember, I’m a sucker for songs about struggling with belief (see #2) and I was immediately taken with Thomas’s spiritual turmoil captured by Thile et al in this beautiful tune.

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5. “Spit On A Stranger” – Nickel Creek

Yes. I just discovered Nickel Creek. Given that, I can’t help but pick out two tunes from their three albums. Then again, I did choose one original (see above) and one cover song. One thing that is so fascinating about Nickel Creek (and Chris Thile) is their (his?) willingness to tackle non-traditional bluegrass material. Thile’s band is known for taking on Radiohead tunes in concert (including “Packt Like Sardines…” and “2+2=5”). So maybe taking on a Pavement song isn’t exactly scary territory for Thile, but the fact is that Nickel Creek does this song maybe a little better than Stephen Malkmus and friends. (Hopefully my brother won’t be too angry at me for that assertion.) Nickel Creek’s rendition of this song is crisp and poppy and to the point. I love it.

Lyle Lovett's "L.A. County" Changes Lives

Partly because Lyle Lovett played three Townes Van Zandt songs (alas, no “Pueblo Waltz”) during his set at Belly Up in Aspen, CO the past Sunday night, I feel compelled to drop a mention of it. But not only that, Lovett also explained some part of his relationship with Van Zandt—and his ardent admiration of the late singer-songwriter. He described his first interaction with Van Zandt: after an afternoon set at a small acoustic festival in Texas, Lovett descended the stage stairs only to come face to face with Van Zandt, who stuck out his hand and needlessly introduced himself. “I haven’t heard you play, but, according to the opinions of people I respect, I hear that you’re okay," Van Zandt said, according to Lovett. Apparently Van Zandt's descriptor “okay” was enough to set him into thankful ecstasy.

But beyond Lovett’s excellent performances (and stellar set-list), there was one other aspect of the concert that grabbed me. As you may know, one of my favorite Lyle Lovett tunes is the bizarre, love/murder ballad “L.A. County” (featured on Saturday Songs – Dec. 10). It’s a delicate balance between straightforward romantic jealousy and insanity. You feel a smidgeon of compassion for this narrator, but still desperately want to set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for him.

So while the performance of the song was riveting, what was even more riveting was the couple beside me. This husband and wife were jumping up and down, belting out the lyrics—the husband gave a few ill-placed whoops and yippee-ki-yays—and were breathless and cheering by the end of the song. Somewhere in the middle of the song, the husband had noticed my consternation at their enthusiasm (although it’s not as if I was staring them down for their indiscretion—I was singing along hoarsely myself) and, at the end, he turned to me to explain.

We played that song at our marriage, he told me, pointing to his wife. “She walked down the aisle to that song.” The husband related how they had met Lyle several years ago before they were married and told him about their wedding plans. His response to the couple who wanted to play this murder ballad that takes place at a wedding during their own wedding? “That’s true love!” Lovett told them, according to the husband. I laughed along with him—not only because it was ridiculous and whimsical, but because it’s great to see people connect so deeply with something like a country song on a level that you cannot. I love "L.A. County," but I will never connect with it quite the way that this couple does.


So those wedding bands on the hands of this whacko husband and wife glinted all night in the stage lights during the Lovett show. I love enjoying music all on my own…but it’s also nice to see other people enjoy it.