Rolling Country 2022

With Chuck Eddy's permission, here's Best of 2021, from his blog, Eliminated For Reasons of Space:

Chuck Eddy
December 31, 2021 at 3:15 pm
No Nashville Scene Country Critics Poll in 2021. If there had been one, here’s what I expect I would have voted for (or at least considered):

TOP 10 ALBUMS: Carly Pearce: 29 – Written in Stone (Big Machine); RaeLynn: Baytown (Round Here); Walker Hayes: Country Stuff (Monument EP); Lainey Wilson: Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ (Broken Bow); Mickey Guyton: Remember Her Name (Capitol Nashville); Kalie Shorr: I Got Here By Accident (Tmwrk EP); Side Pony: Lucky Break (Mule Kick); Robyn Ottolini: The But I’m Not Always Sad Either EP (Warner Nashville EP); Ashley Monroe: Rosegold (Mountainrose Sparrow); Gary Allan: Ruthless (EMI Nashville.)

TOP 10 SINGLES (leaving out borderline-country cases): Carly Pearce “Next Girl”; Willie Jones “American Dream”; Parker McCollum “Rest Of My Life”; Walker Hayes feat. Ke$ha “Fancy”; Casi Joy “Namaste”; Brittney Spencer “Sober and Skinny”; Sasha McVeigh “God Bless This Mess”; Olivia Ellen Lloyd “Sorrow”; Shaela Miller “Big Hair Small City”; Breland “Cross Country.”

BORDERLINE-COUNTRY SINGLES (some of which I might have voted for instead): Funky Marys “Königin”; Nathan Evans “Wellerman (Sea Chantey)”; Caramba Express “Ding Ding Bier Pong (Ramba Zamba in Saloon)”; Swabian Beatz “Mississippi (English Version 2021)”; Stan Ridgway “Big Dumb Town.”

10 MORE HONORABLE MENTION SINGLES: Midland “This Town”; Side Pony “Heels”; Carly Pearce “Dear Miss Loretta”; Gary Allan “Sex”; Energía Norteña “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You”; Walker County “Bits & Pieces”; Andrew Sevener “2019 BC”; Charlie Worsham “Fist Through This Town”; Legendary Shack Shakers “They Won’t Let Me Forget (All the Things I Can’t Recall)”; Sammy Kershaw “Evangeline.”

All in all, a very good or bad year for TOWNS, depending who you ask.

It's at the bottom of this page, where you can comment---scroll way up past 2021 to see his Scene ballots for 2003-2020, via the same link:https://accidentalevolution.wordpress.com/2021/01/23/nashville-scene-country-critics-poll-ballots-2005-2020/#comment-808

Posts are still being added to RC 2021. This post is to make baby thread more visible for the moment.

OK, Rolling Country 2022: Please tell me your favorite country-focused/leaning labels that are on Bandcamp.

All approaches to country (traditional, mainstream, alt-, -rock, ambient, cosmic, Western swing, etc.) are welcome. Americana, bluegrass, folk and other twangy/acoustic/roots music, too. I'm following a bunch, but would like to follow more. Thanks!

My 2021 favs:

CREAM OF THE CROP
James McMurtry - The Horses and the Hounds
Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall - The Marfa Tapes
Carly Pearce - "Next Girl"
Jason Eady - "French Summer Sun"

SECOND TIER
Eric Church - Heart & Soul
Brandi Carlile - In These Silent Days
Sierra Ferrell - Long Time Coming*
Margo Cilker - Pohorylle*

HONORABLE MENTION
Emily Scott Robinson - American Siren
Bobby Dove - Hopeless Romantic
Charlie Marie - Ramble On
Sturgill Simpson - The Ballad of Dood & Juanita
Morgan Wade - "Other Side"
Sarah Jarosz - "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
Scott Hirsch - "Dreamer"
Hiss Golden Messenger - "Sanctuary"
Vincent Neil Emerson - "Learnin to Drown"*

NOT REALLY COUNTRY BUT COUNTRY ADJACENT SHOUTOUTS
Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood
Flock of Dimes - "Walking", "Awake for the Sunrise"
Allison Russell - Outside Child*
Adia Victoria - A Southern Gothic*
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof
Marisa Anderson & William Tyler - "News About Heaven", "Lost Futures"

*EOY list cycle discoveries

Sweet! Good way to organize them too. xpost Any time I hear about an inneresting artist or release, I've gotten to where I always check Bandcamp first---country-oriented label-wise, though, I can't tell you (for jazz etc there are several, like International Anthem and ESP-DISK, although Tompkins Square's Bandcamp does have some folk etc releases that relate to country vibes)

Just checking out some stuff from late last year. Dillon Carmichael, from Burgin, Kentucky, who put out an EP in 2021, Hot Beer, none of whose tracks he wrote, and an album, Son of A. The uptempo jokey ones, like "Hot Beer," are all about how he's too much of a bro to let women bother him--their craziness comes with the territory, but there's never any moment when he makes you wonder if maybe he's partly to blame. Nothing too spectacular. I do like "Son of A," though, which is his reflective, I-cussed-my-daddy-but-that-also-comes-with-territory, side, and good lush chord changes and, you know, a pretty nice vocal. Funny how the Revisionist Schlock of things like "Son of A" can beat the Montgomery Gentry Lite of country tryin' to rock...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6dnQ-6qWuc

Also relistening to Gary Allan's Ruthless which is as quietly, ruthlessly, bleedingly ominous as any of his other record's. Concentrated super-formalist country, little swoops of background female vocals that add to the air of something he can't get to, as in "Slide," complete with a 5-second guitar solo. "Do you still want me," even if he wasn't quite what she had in mind. Pretty fucking great. And it ends, suddenly "Slide..." Where's that dress, in his closet behind a box of another woman's clothes? "What I Can't Talk About" rolls around in a sorta Police-like way, somehow, and again, the songwriting teams he got do their job--the release hooks in on a chord change, he repeats a high note, and Allan cuts off his vocals. A great song about songwriting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hei0K3p8Cko

Morgan Wallen, Dangerous: now most of the way through Disc 2(finished while writing this), which Spotify has actually not interrupted with ads, not out of deference to somebody Dangerous in tight jeans---no, that song is like all the rest in recalling wild times with a girl and a bottle, but also, for the first time on this album, being in the back of a cop car downtown oops b-b-better not go down thar again while messed up thinging of yew---but never on here has he (yet) blamed the girl for his being hung-up on her and the bottle, nor is he doing music as therapy like some others, just brief views, scenes from a life in passing---there's a reliable continuity of musicality too, although on Disc 1, especially, it can be just okay, as brief highlights sink back into the steady background flow--don't buy the drank as much as rent it, eh podner--happens even to the Isbell cover here, so can be more about habits of delivery than writing, although some of that's pretty pro forma too. Some keepers though, making it all the way through their brief runs, often with a few more distinctive turns than expected--those stand out here among the humdrum for sure, as the mind is trained to be grateful for small favors. Not too small! The feel for fingerpicking as part of his reflective-to-rueful compulsiveness, and antsy squeezing of booze-damp tropes, looking back to last night or year---yeah, that's good, and he can seem like Kenny Chesney with an added sense of moments, drops adding up, tilting that nostalgia, suck it dry one more time, 'til it grows back tomorrow (on both discs. Already, on this Disc, he knows this shit can't go on, that he ain't ever satisfied, not long enough to call it that--just the little bittersweet afterglow coming back as regular as his rituals with new girls x drinks.

Disc 2 is much more often actual fun! At least for a while, getting to capital Country as a shirttail flag, sometimes also with a rolling-to-wavery cadence, like his hat-head is about to hit its face on the barroom floor, but then pops back up for another quip---more wavey than wavery after all, or pert near, like one of those balloon dudes in front of used car lots. Getting to hickhop as a given, or almost subsumed, but you can feel the feels. The yeehaw reaffirmation is always on the way to yet another funtime, and becomes explicitly presented, in at least one song (lotta words always going by in these tracks, people) as alkie pretext or shall we say personal solutionism to class struggle--- while him and his baby may getting sideways and sideeyed, "other people at the bar may have their own opinions, but Beer Don't."
After that, there's one where he finally does blame the girl, though more in fear than anger, sounds like. as he sings, "You like wine, and---me on whiskey." But he doesn't run away from the pile-on.
Album just goes on and on and on, 'til repetitiousness obtrudes even through the attractions of it as background music---although that does add the sense of his finding no way out, just going round and round and round through his behavior---and I *think* I would get that even if I didn't know about his personal history (a lot more than I want to, beyond the headlines, and I'm sure Edd has heard still more in Nville). So---it's expressive, and meaningful enough, even when it's not. Country as hell then, incl. tiresome at times, and I'm inclined to give it (for reasons of being a tad more conceptual, also bro-subgeneric, than consistently-enough enjoyable, also for keeping the sorry backstory so close at hand) a Semi-honorable Mention/B+ on my imaginary Scene ballot.
So, judging by all this, he seems like he never was Dangerous in the sense that some would like him to be, as a redneck Free Speech Jesus or cautionary A Face In The Crowd view of populist fascist media tool---he's a minor artist, strengths and weaknesses closely related, in this bro-unprecedented (far as I've heard) pile-up of tracks, taking scenes and themes to an extreme that I hope his many fans will come to hear as more than servicing, as more than media insulation, but dang this longass winding road does tend to blend like that, pulling at the penny-drop insights.

Mind you. speaking of hickhop (to rapneck) feels, I can almost hear "Country A$$ Shit," gettin down "with my country-ass friends, and my country ass band...and if you don't like that, kiss my county ass" blaring from a truck with a rifle rack and rows of MAGA and Rebel flag stickers, front and back, parading past pedestrian me on Main Street---b-b-but listen in context, kids!

Monday January 10 5 pm et zoom with country book authors ( Eric Weisbard twitter and email has zoom links)

Marissa Moss, Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, and Steacy Easton
Country Reinventions

Marissa Moss, Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, and Steacy Easton will be discussing their upcoming books Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Reinvented Themselves and the Industry to Become the Success Story They Were Never Supposed to Be (Moss, published by Henry Holt and Co in May 2022), Queer Country (Goldin-Perschbacher, University of Illinois Press in March 2022), and Why Tammy Wynette Matters (Easton, the University of Texas Press early in 2023). All three authors are concerned with country music’s problems of racism, homophobia, and misogyny--especially the continued erasure of women, queer folks, and people of colour from the canons of country music

As mentioned on RC 2021, was not in a hurry to check Pistol Annies' Hell of a Holiday, having heard every kind Christmas album, good and bad, while working in a CD store for far too long. But now I think it would have improved my holidays, for the most part. They mean to bring the Pistol Annies real talk and fun along with mellower, often bittersweet moments, though the unaccustomed piety (think it's all from Presley, but maybe not). though dignified and not too preachy, drags a little on its reserved (three) tracks. But opening and closing subsets of three work fine, also several others (and those three solemn ones aren't bunched together). Even "Come on Christmas Time," about having a crush on Santa, which seemed like would be too cute, is a discreetly yet seriously prowly shuffle--she means the guy who is playing Santa, like husband is to their kids---maybe---filling up just enough to weigh in between "Harlan County Coal" (better be good for goodness sake mf) and "If We Make It Through December." "Joy" is a PA and this-album microcosm: many shades of blue, incl. luminescent, though going back around a few times cos that's life and Christmas).
Even if I don't want to keep listening to this as an album, can see adding faves to playlist of their other albums; they're not seasonal only.

No Depression – Roots Music Journalism
@nodepression
In the wake of Morgan Wallen's
@opry
appearance, we asked
@BlackOpry
founder
@_love_holly_
if we could share her essay online about building community in the face of country music’s systemic racism.

You can also read this essay in our Winter '21 journal.
https://www.nodepression.com/journal-excerpt-black-opry-and-belonging

xp fell totally flat for me. Very disappointing actually. Favorite track was the only traditional one -- Monroe's take on "Sleigh Ride."

Really looking forward to the new album from Erin Rae coming out this Friday. I fell in love with "Modern Woman" a few months ago and the other songs I've heard from the album so far are quite good too. It's my first album of 2022 that I'm actually anticipating.

Pre-ordered the new Sarah Shook & The Disarmers record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKuJHLRx4AY

Really looking forward to the new album from Erin Rae coming out this Friday. I fell in love with "Modern Woman" a few months ago and the other songs I've heard from the album so far are quite good too. It's my first album of 2022 that I'm actually anticipating.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Tuesday, February 1, 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Not sure if this is even the best thread to discuss Erin Rae other than I think she is based in Nashville and her albums do feature a decent amount of pedal steel—though the overall vibe skews a little more indie than country.

In any case this is probably my favorite album of 2022 so far.

Lots of ree-markable stuff on and linked from this page---Keep Idaho IDAHO, and so much will follow: https://www.eastidahonews.com/2022/02/he-had-21-top-10-country-hits-now-hell-sing-in-idaho-to-raise-money-for-ammon-bundy/

Notes on Morgan Wade's Reckless: Yes, that is the album title, above blonde hair floating in the light a little, suggestion of a halo, face playing peek-a-boo with fingers, not unlike jail bars, if those had tattoos and tiny marks that might add up to coded sentences--and there is a song of that title, obligingly enough, but if this is a country Lolita, as might be, she's far down the path, maybe the self-supporting-by-dishwashing phase (in the novel), while watching and waiting and listening and speaking to all the options, relationship-wise.
Getting "Reckless" again, is one of the things she considers, wishes for sometimes, as the music moves around her---alt rock as the younger sort of potentially tops-of-the-pops country, young enough to take the 90s and early 00s over older artists' fascination with Petty and F.Mac: its an extension and reinforcement of Wade's own electrical tuning systems, under all those tats, flexing, always ready to go, as far as she and the guy she's talking to or around will take things--yes, and frequently it's to the limit, one more time, as stimulating prospect, because usually they have a history, and she certainly does, with and without him, alluded to with a sense of wonder, like can she beleeeve she did and was all whut---at one point recalls, maybe from the night they met, "Ah spoke mah truth, and yew got so upset"(oh the voice keeps it country, like the weight of personal relationship history, one tight-jawed syllable measuring itself out at a time).
Welp--he['s gotta get over it if they do try again---may be the guy she's out on an actual date with, as the music sounds atypically sedate, dinner-y, in the opening track: she's on her best behavior, sweetly murmuring, while observing, describing, thinking, "Ah wish Ah's known you in your wilder days." Probably, undertones of voice and lyrics and accompiment soon suggest, she'd feel like they had more in common back then---but, having heard all the songs and coming back to this one, seems like nostalgia for what might have been, the yen for a safe yet hot fantasy, which is so Morgan now, ditto the way she leans into wondering what his secret is---gotta have one; he's so Normal he must be nuts too, maybe in a program like her---maybe she'll peel back a few layers--
Soon it's "Matches and Metaphors," down the line with this guy or another, a booty call: "It's raining at my house, is it raining at yores?" But then "To hell with metaphors," she requests the comfort of his body, wonders if it will help, thinks it might, mentions a letter he wrote her, starts writing out loud her response, her script for how it might all work out for them after all---then back to the body ask, that's what it all comes back to, 'til she finally starts over, like a recording replayed, low-key intense, not gonna stop (digital not tape).
Of the very solid and vibrant original ten set, number 9, "Northern Air," is just okay, in this context--could be a high point elsewhere---about somebody who's stuck down here, in sordid Southern boredom, while he's up there---but the closer, "Met You"--not "Meet You," o hail naw, gotta be a history---is that comparatively rare kind of sequel that improves: it's her GodFather 2
The Jan. 2022 Deluxe Edition does more of that, takes it all deeper and darker, on a longer, more exciting chain-chain-chain, getting wrapped around and stretched. It's not all together doomie, or not in a depresso sense---also, even visions of flight are never too florid, because she is wised up, she has been down this lane before, in her head and elsewhere. But even the mellowest, "Through Your Eyes," which is where she wishes she could see---said kid, age three, has said "I want to be like you," which doesn't spook her a bit (as it does me, knowing her now as I kinda do), but touches her and makes her even wonder "if I should pray to you," as she moves from physical grace of the child to possible spiritual grace, also conflating "innocence" with "wild thoughts."
Another one has has her on the road from Tombstone, "holdin' hands with the band, six feet under," and something about "like Johnny and June": dead and loving it? Anyway rolling along, at least until "When The Dirt" all settles---meanwhile, there's "The Night," when she's hoping "the pills will work better this time," like the doctor says he thinks---I usually draw back from this kind of song, but she draws me in---eventually, there's the sole cover, providing a second of relief--something from the outside world--but it's "We're caught in a trap/I can't walk out"---yet, as in EP's original, still kind of a sense, in the verses, of feeling around, talking lower, see it feels like this, don't it, is it possible they could, like, work it or something out after all, one more shot---all surging along towards something, of course--so Morgan.

under all those tats: can't unsee the videos, where she looks concerned, careful, with vines snakes skank jailhouse roadmaps crawling out of the fabrics, arms sometimes seeming to pulse with power and infection. But that's her truth, and I may just have been not around young people in too long (covid alibi in a not very vaxxed red state).

New Willie, some new originals, covers aren't really oldies either, far as I know---track list, credits incl. here, also an advance track:
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/willie-nelson-to-release-new-original-album-a-beautiful-time/
Release date April 29, his 89th bday.

New Cactus Blossoms is pleasant. They seem to be trying to move further away from the Everly Brothers pastiche but the result is they are sounding a lot like later-period Calexico. Which I guess is fine?

Rodney Crowell, on FB talking about that Willie single:

It was nearly thirty-five years ago that my band and I performed at a Minneapolis rock club called the Cabooze. After the show, I chanced upon a young woman with whom I fell instantly in love. (I mean that sincerely.) We spoke briefly and I invited her on the bus where I learned that she lived somewhere up on the iron range, made jewelry and ran a small catering business. Although, at the time, I was happily married to a well known singer/songwriter, I could clearly imagine spending the rest of my life with this person. But alas the roadies finished packing and it was time to say goodbye. The encounter lasted no more than thirty minutes, but I sensed the experience would last forever . . . or at least until I made it into a song. Even after Claudia Church became my life’s partner, I continued to tinker with the notion that the girl from the iron range deserved a song. Over the years I conjured the title and a couple of verse ideas, but never fully committed to the job of bringing them to life. And then, a couple of years back, Chris Stapleton dropped by the house to see if we could write a song together. He listened patiently as I explained how I’d always wanted to write this one particular song. When I finished telling him the story, he summed the whole thing up in these few words: “so it’s all about thirty minutes thirty years ago.” After that, we had I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die finished in less than an hour. No doubt the song was waiting for Chris to show up. And, of course, for Willie Nelson to sing it.

That is so Rodney, thanks---several more of his songs that I hope Willie gets around to, old and new.

New notes for soon-forthcoming imaginary country ballot & comments, to be blogged (most of it on RC 2021):

The perfect capper, nightcapper, to Joshua Ray Walker’s See You Next Time is its hello-goodbye title, before and after another loop, another spin, in his beeyoutiful music machine—celebrating, while light and bright enough to leave excess me-discover-beer yeeeha self-congratulation in the dust—as for instance “I Feel Sexy After Dark” exchanges and slides through highest frequencies’ goosebump skins of voice x instruments, among many other close encounters, well-timed, even or especially when making close skid mark calls on and in the honky tonk, also closed circuit eeevents on screen, which will dissolve for a while when it should, the better to savor more nocturnal air and midnight electric suns, also sons and daughters, waving—but it’s not all fun and games, though perspective on and refreshed enjoyment of such seems to have something to do with “Flash Paper,” which came from a cigar box left to him by his late father, with items of personal significance to them both, mostly paper, also a flash drive: Walker has since said that he’s still coming to understand the song and its contents, so that’s part of the spin and loop as well, the after-dark brightness that already seemed almost mystical? Like we’re going by the Liminal Lounge a few times—was the impression before I read his bio w comments on all this: turns about to be last installment of a trilogy, following Wish You Were Here and Glad You Made It: all three titles addressed in part to his Dad, maybe? As well as the rest of us, seems like. (His comments here: http://www.joshuaraywalker.com/bio)

10 songs, 33 minutes, and that's all he needs:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lhyY4SX9Sw4QRk-paHHqeQT9h8ww3XPtg

More picks from 2021, blog-bound:

Alan Jackson’s mild-mannered, measured vocals are especially appealing in contrast-combo with novelty songs, as I consider the masterfully melancholy, meta-appeal to trad country (please come home, darlin’) title opener of Where Have You Gone, and the boot-scootin', equally historical rallying cry, “Andy on the TeeVee, lovin’ on Aint Bee”--- “Back” also has prayer, prom queens, ice cream, and, I think, blue jeans in there, but also, though, as a listener, I don’t believe he’s ever imbibed anything stronger than a wine cooler, his meta-drinking tropes understand well enough, so the silver plattered “I can be your whiskey” ( but one of several discreetly confident suggestions in “I Can Be The That Something”) is startling as well; dang, he’s always got the cred. Ditto chiaroscuro x firm beat of econo-delivered “Ah don’t wanta know/What’s in your head,” before she goes, just apply lipstick to mirror, leave it “Written in Red.” He got The Bluegrass Album out of his system, except not quite: still (sparingly now) applies just the right tropes, a held note here, rope bridge of plot turn there, a touch of darkness, to his idea of well-preserved mainstream country, as does Rhonda Vincent on Music Is What I See (though she also ends w with a couple of big bg per se tracks). Even one of the wedding songs to his daughter is arresting in a good way, with fresh, non-soppy, concise phrases and sentiments (The opener of his Happy Valentine's Day EP I thought at first was yet another wedding song to one of his several daughters, yeesh—but no, it’s just presumptuous “gallantry” as come on—another one opens with mention of a young-sounding gal, among others included in his self-congratulatory, broad-minded attractions to otherwise utterly standard-sounding, video-suitable, country broads. But some other tracks are cool/acceptable).
Where Have You Been is long, with a few duds, like self-sentimental “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” aggh puke, so with not quite the tighter appeal ofAngels and Alcohol, which I Top Tenned in my 2015 country round-up, and may well be best place to start with him, though I’m still no AJ expert:
Alan Jackson, Angels and Alcohol: Starts with less than half-hearted best wishes/empathy for one leaving the nest---"Everybody's gotta live a little, before they die," and he can barely get the words out---then wheels around into a hearty chorus of reassurance, 'bout how you can always come home to big ol' generic slabs of bacon and gravy or whutever.
However, the overall theme of this set, convincingly expressed (tastefully, incl. with tasty details) is a healthy hats-off-and-on to the Uncertainty Principle and our need for same. Incl. in the title track, when it comes to "sooner or later you got to face what's hidin' in your mind", and the randy honky tonk encounters of "You Never Know," fender bender cum two daiquiri hookups and all. He and hitchhiking Jack Kerouac salute each other (along the alternative-lifestyles interstate of dreams, but still). They aren't too far apart in some ways:
stay-at-home AJ finally gets a bellyful of his wife with the flattening iron and the curlers and that little dog and "that damn perfume"--she's sick of his shit too, so good riddance, he'll just keep partying with "Jim and Jack and Hank"--which rhymes with "So take your black Mercedes, full of stuff for ladies, to me you're just a total blank"---damn, that's pretty hardcore, especially for Mr. Mellow Melancholy Blond Mustache. Spoiler: he doesn't cave! Thought surely he would, what with the cartoon-country-Stones tone of the thing, and he does eventually have misgivings, by the end is invoking more and more of his male musical inspirations, "cleanin' out my closet."
And this right after a pensive sensitive cocktail reverie, but he's not just flipping scripts, because he's still competing with, while trying to imagine, "The One You're Waiting On": must be an awesome guy, considering this awesome woman, who keeps drinking and waving guys away, checking her phone...wtf, darlin…(quietly, intensely focused, so considerate a bit creepy)
He also celebrates "Flaws": "Everybody's got 'em/The ones you came with and you caused/Scars and tattoos gone rotten...all the little things that make her unique...the pieces of the puzzle that is me."
I'm hardly an Alan Jackson expert, but, while this set doesn't have
any tracks with the downer power of "Monday Morning Church" or "The Little Man," it sort of doesn't need them: they've been done, and this hasn't, not by him, not this consistently (as far as I know).

The first Sierra Ferrell thumbnail I saw, I thought this was going to be some Days n Daze folk-punk thing but damn she's got a great voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umDhbp7YWMg

that face tat threw ya

95% accurate, the other 5% was that she was dressed like a 1930s hobo in the first video of hers I watched.

This has that jazzy country feel too, from RC 2021:
Melissa Carper's Daddy's Country Gold: title in part re her sonic sense of humor about her retrophilia,I take it---music folds and flexes bits of western swing, freight train boogie, bluesy inflections, in what is, yes, still trad country gold: tight, but didn't know there were drums 'til saw credits--steel and pedal steel are most prominent, answered by fiddle---no banjo, no uke, no horns (though accordion and guitar can fill in for those, passing through), occasional piano and/or organ, moving right along, following the boss's cute-enough, slightly worn little voice---some Texas dust in the pipes, Appalachian hardness at ends of lines, sometimes: it's a tad more simple-subtle than Sierra Ferrell, but one for her fans (and she contributes harmonies).

This album has gotten stuck in my head---another from the blog round-up:

Connie Smith’s The Cry of The Heart is named for her definition of and specialty in country music, the kind of relentlessly cyclical treks- on-gilded-splinters-of-the-heart trad, sometimes funereal, that I tend to resist, as seen below in comments on Lucinda’s urn ov same (wine-and-lipstick-stained butts incl., OK). Nevertheless, she picks songs about being knowing, struggling with being stuck inside a mobile, turning like a vane of dislocation in layers of strangely familiar, the stranger for it, weather: apologizes to her heart for being about to take another chance on prospect they both know better than; later, “I just don’t believe me any more—I wouldn’t trust my own eyes, if I saw him walking through the door,” and gets to overview, “There are three s-i-i-i-des, to ev-ery sto-ry: his side, her side, and the truth”: tricky, could get to truthie, jesting Pilate, sense of futility, reckless, even: interesting cusp—also, that chorus reminds me of “Love Is Strange,” including a possible cross-influence with proto-reggae, and my other favorites here also have that out of the box, 60s crossover appeal that her accompanists, mainly Mary Stuart & his Superlatives, are so good at—-another starts with an acoustic country suggestion of “Pinball Wizard”—also “A-l-l-l, The Time” could be Orbison singing Jimmy Webb or himself, likewise omg yall fave is “Here Comes My Baby Back Again,” with a kettledrum hook, even, also her voice, now reputedly shy of a few top notes of her 60s-70s commercial heyday, especially mighty and booming from the gut here, w/o overdoing it. This song rec also to Everly Bros., and eerie observational “Jesus Take A Hold” for Mavis (who will be doing some shows w Bonnie Raitt this summer btw). But some of the other, more generically constrained trad country ballads, are ballast, for sure, keeping whole thing bubbling just under my Top Ten. So far!

Here Comes My Baby Back Again (Official Music Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KFyguNe4Lc

full album playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZNM_kt9jwY

And speaking of Lucinda:
Lucinda Williams, Lu’s Jukebox Volume 4: Funny How Time Slips Away: A Night of 60s Country Classics: more like Classicks. Rips the thrift store brand substitute for a Band-Aid off, opening with a dingy little dirge, “Apartment #9”(“where the sun never shines”), a dump for the dumped to sit waiting and not waiting, hoping against hope, perversely enough, for you to come back, So don’t suggest subletting, or bloodletting: the austere pleasures of this track, complete with Lu’s generic not-Kleenex tones and her equally familiar quaver, which here is somehow as solid as her fire escape, if she has one, which I doubt, also the futile commiseration of the steel guitar and discreet timekeeping of the stick and struck thing–brave, dented, stalwart little tin soldiers of the heart, as Lu and crew are on so many of these tracks, somehow make this one better than it deserves to be: that’s art!
So is the immediate follow-up with another dirge, pretty much: this version of “Together Again” is the saddest reunion song…ever—”and nothing else matters” sounds like too much does, it really does. Ah, but then, “Make The World Go Away” slips into a dreamy dirge, a shuffle really, like so much else here, like Fats Domino might be playing, swaying not too far away—Jukebox Lu’s from Louisiana, come to think of it, like her other personae—sweeping up and around on the title phrase, a handful of stardust, wistful come-hither is her breadcrumb trail. I will try to make the world go away, yes Ma’am. “Night Life” bounces the shuffle and stroll a little, with its well-aimed, switchy tail, but then “Long Black Limousine, “ bringing you back to her, only dead, from some old wreck out on the highway, is the first dirge too far—whiplash back to “Fist City,” finally an uptempo bullseye yowl, could be on her Stones volume (which zig-zag cuts the roadmap, and a lovely “Moonlight Mile” of it too).
“I Want To Go With You” is a turgid dirge travesty rip of “Make The World Go Away”’s pattern, at least; c’mon! “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” just as boring, but “Gentle On My Mind” perks her up, even has her rushing the beat, while sounding worn—it’s a road song testimonial, soldier of love now bumping her comandeered bike wheels off road. “The End of the World” back on foot, shuffling, now almost majestically, and I’d never liked this song at all. “I’m Movin’ On” back on board, “Funny How Time Slips Away” the poignant, perfectly balanced unexpected encounter riposte, of mixed emotions and free-enough associations, but not too much of either, or of time. “Take Time For The Tears” (“Let them fall where they may”) could be good closing advice, but slogs way on here. So, although she’s one of my all-time favorites, this set isn’t quite top tier (I don’t always have much of a reason or motivation enough to work it up, but with her I do [compliment]).

full album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrR6s3S-L48

I don’t always have much of a reason or motivation enough to work *such a long non-Top-Ten report* up, that is.

Didn't know about her songwriting, did semi-recall that she and then-Bruce co-starred in a musical, Little Abner (he: Abner, she: Daisy Mae), Birmingham, https://www.al.com/entertainment/2015/04/bruce_jenner_on_stage_before_t.html (this from 2015, so no mention of Caitlyn). My friend's sister was in it, remembers Linda as gregarious, him as shy, but "stuck his head in the door, 'Hey, I'm Bruce.' ")

Linda also co-subject of this TV movie, which I thought was pretty good:
Elvis and the Beauty Queen

Memphis beauty queen Linda Thompson (Stephanie Zimbalist) recalls her five-year romance with Elvis Presley (Don Johnson).
Initial release: March 1, 1981
Director: Gus Trikonis
Starring: Don Johnson; Stephanie Zimbalist; Ann Dusenberry; Rick Lenz
Music by: Allyn Ferguson
Distributed by: NBC, Sony Pictures Television

Speaking of director Gus Trikois, He began his career as an actor and dancer, notably appearing in the hugely successful 1961 film West Side Story as Indio, one of the "Sharks",[1] as well as dancing with Debbie Reynolds and Grover Dale to the frantic "He's My Friend" in 1964's The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
...Trikonis was married to actress Goldie Hawn from 1969 to 1976; he was her first husband and they have the same birthday. His sister is Gina Trikonis, an actress who also appeared in West Side Story, as Graziella, Riff's girlfriend.[3] Way to go, Gus! (Hope he wasn't too bad, Goldie.)

Sorry, that was meant for ILE thread re marriages of directors and actors!

So here's what would have been my Nashville Scene ballot, expanded, as always
(posted w comments here, though lots are from prev and current RC, also some artist threads and Country Funk thread---it's called "Changed The Lox," cos so much Lucinda, incl. her Pettys cover set: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2022/03/changed-lox-country-etc-lists-comments.html

Thanxx In Front To Edd Hurt For Turning Me On To Jon Byrd, Paul Niehaus, and Loney Hutchins

Also To Ilxor.com's Rolling Country 2021 Riders Who Issued American Aquarium etc. etc. etc. ect. Advisories

(Most of these are on Bandcamp and/or YouTube)

My Strictly Personal Subjective As Hell But Whut Isn't Top Ten Country Albums Of 2021

American Aquarium, Slappers, Bangers & Certified Twangers, Volume One

Eric Church, Soul

Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall, The Marfa Tapes

Jon Byrd (feat. Paul Niehaus), Me and Paul EP

Joshua Ray Walker, See You Next Time

Kalie Shorr, Open Book Unabridged (Dec. 4, 2020)

Lainey Wilson, Sayin' What I'm Thinkin'

Mickey Guyton, Remember Her Name

Melissa Carper, Daddy's Country Gold

Morgan Wade, Reckless Deluxe Edition (Jan. 28, 2022)

Vincent Neil Emerson, s/t

More Good 'Uns

Alan Jackson, Where Have You Gone

Connie Smith, The Cry of the Heart

Flatlanders, Treasure of Love

Loretta Lynn, Still Woman Enough

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 4: Funny How Time Slips Away: A Night of 60's Country Classics

Natalie Hemby, Pins and Needles

Rhonda Vincent, Music is What I See

Sierra Ferrell, Long Time Coming

Willie Nelson, The Willie Nelson Family

For Further Study (everything here, but especially this)

Pony Bradshaw, Calico Jim

Fave New (To Me) Country Faces of 2021

Charlie Marie, Ramble On

Emily Scott Robinson, American Siren

Tom Williams, Glasshouse Children

Fave Country *Reissues/**Prev. Unreleased

**Billy Joe Shaver & Kinky Friedman, Live From Down Under

*Johnny Cash—Forever Words (Expanded Edition) (Various Artists)

*Jon Byrd, Byrd's Auto Parts

**Loney Hutchins,Buried Loot: Demos From the House of Cash & "Outlaw" Era '73-'78

Fave Country/Related Seasonal

Lori McKenna, Christmas Is Right Here EP

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol 5: Have Yourself A Rockin' Little Christmas With Lucinda Williams

Pistol Annies, Hell of a Holiday

Country Seasonal Semi-Honorable Mention

Alan Jackson, Happy Valentine's Day EP

Country Semi-Honorable Probationary Mention

Morgan Wallen, Dangerous

Country About Half Good (60-45%)

Carly Pearce, 29—-Written in Stone

Country Headscratcher

Steve Earle & the Dukes, JT

Fave Countryoid, Americana, Roots, Related

Allison Russell, Outside Child

Ashley Monroe, Rosegold

Brandi Carlile, In These Silent Days

Chrissie Hynde, Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan

James McMurtry, The Horses and The Hounds

Jason Isbell & 400 Unit: Georgia Blue

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 2: Southern Soul: From Memphis To Muscle Shoals

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol. 3: Bob's Back Pages: A Night of Bob Dylan Songs

Peter Stampfel, Peter Stampfel's 20th Century

Robert Plant & Allison Krauss, Raise the Roof

Rosali, No Medium

Tom Jones, Surrounded By Time (Hourglass Edition)

Valerie June,The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers

Willie Nelson, That's Life

Related Hon. Mention

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Barn

Rodney Crowell, Triage

More Keepers From Lu's Jukebox

Lucinda Williams, Lu's Jukebox Vol 1: Runnin' Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty Lu's Jukebox Vol. 6: You Are Cordially Invited...A Tribute To The Rolling Stones

Related Less Than Half Good

Barry Gibb & Friends, Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers' Songbook Vol. 1 (Keepers: BG with: Brandi Carlile, "Run To Me," Sheryl Crow, "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart," Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, "Butterfly," maybe more)

Related Blast From The Future Is Here

Contract Group, Varnished Suffrages (March 5 2022)

Fave Related Top *Reissues/**Previously Unreleased

**Alex Chilton & Hi Rhythm Section, Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street

*Country Funk Volume 3 1975-1982 (Various Artists)

*Dusty Springfield, The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971

**Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, Both Ways (The Great Lost 2017 Double-Album)

**Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Way Down In The Rust Bucket

dammit--that should be The *Contact* Group, Edd's very fun songdog troupe, which you can hear here: https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/releases

Did not know most of this:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/05/entertainment/lgbtq-country-music-orville-peck-patrick-haggerty-lavender-cec/index.html

New album Palomino out April 29
My new album Palomino takes you on a journey through songs. I hope y’all are ready to travel with us wandering spirits and meet some cool characters with great stories. – Miranda
"Strange" out now
https://ml.lnk.to/palomino

Good on Bobbie: knew about her husband's band, which incl. her & Wille, but not the aftermath, ongoing consequences; also, I've got her rollin' Audiobiography (Willie and Johnny Bush show up some), and one of the duet sets w W, the remarkable December Day, but will have to check these earlier albums, also still need the joint memoir:https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1086000679/bobbie-nelson-a-country-music-pioneer-and-willie-nelsons-sister-dies-at-age-91

Hank: I’m Gonna Sing: The Mother’s Best Gospel Radio Recordings contains rare performances of 40 gospel songs culled from these radio shows; many of which he never officially recorded.
Looks good: https://annecarlini.com/ex_cd.php?id=4187

https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2022/03/11/the-ernest-tubb-record-shop-a-downtown-nashville-landmark-is-closing-its-doors-after-71-years/

is there a catchall country thread? this is such a jam but from Cauthen's 2019 album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm5UZ0Ov9O0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ihKjq2iM5w like this tune from the new Hailey Whitters album, Raised

i don't know why this bothers me so much but it does, i hate how she undermines the rhyme in the chorus by stressing the first syllable instead of the second in "hometown."

new maren morris is about a billion times better than her last

i continue to be surprised that we don't have a thread for her

make one. i will stan

There's been a lot about her on previous Rolling Countrys, haven't heard the new album yet.
is there a catchall country thread?
O hell yes corrs, you've come to the right place.

Under xpost New (To Me) Country Faces on my imaginary 2021 Scene ballot upthread, I should have listed *Sam* Williams, not Tom (was I thinking of Thomas Lainer Williams AKA Tennessee? Or just a brainfart, more likely). And his mother just died---she was in the video for one of the fine tracks on his Glasshouse Children, where maybe he was discreetly alluding to their mutual(ly agreed on?) need for rehab. He's talented and insightful/talks a good game, reminding me of early Justin Townes Earle; here's hoping he does last as least as long.

catching up w email---excerpts from Maren press release:
Maren will perform on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” tonight, with appearances on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Howard Stern Show” to follow on March 28.
...Humble Quest features the much-lauded “Nervous,” “Background Music” and “Circles Around This Town,” which broke Amazon Music’s record for most streams for a country song debut by a female artist and is currently Top 20 and climbing at country airplay charts.
Humble Quest is receiving widespread critical acclaim…stupid blurbs follow, then:
Maren began writing the songs on Humble Quest in the beginning of the pandemic as a series of major life changes unfolded—new motherhood, an upended career, the death of beloved friend and collaborator Michael Busbee and more, further compounded by lockdown. She felt control over life quickly slipping until she had an epiphany—she was never in control in the first place. This inspired her to reckon with the concept of humility as she thought about how the goal of appearing humble puts artists, especially women, in a box with unrealistic demands. Humble Quest documents Maren’s journey to redefining humility on her own terms as a grounded state of understanding one’s own truth rather than the capacity to appear authentic to others.
Produced by frequent collaborator Greg Kurstin (Adele, Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters) and written alongside her husband Ryan Hurd, Julia Michaels, Jimmy Robbins, Natalie Hemby, Laura Veltz and Jon Green on Busbee’s piano, Humble Quest is Maren’s most genuine collection of songs, tracing her journey to embrace the imperfections in her life through snapshots of her rises and falls, overshares, lullabies, wine-soaked conversations with one old friend and a final goodbye to another one.
MAREN MORRIS LIVE doesn't look write in paste, see https://www.marenmorris.com/#tour Would most like to see one of those Midwestern shows w Hemby.

I look forward to listening to it, but man is Humble Quest a bad album title.

New Wilder Blue is great

March 28, 2022—10x GRAMMY-nominee Brandy Clark will embark on her international “The Art of the Storyteller Tour” this summer with headline dates in the U.S., Canada and Europe. See below for complete itinerary. Pre-sale tickets for the upcoming dates go on-sale this Tuesday, March 29 at 10:00am local time. Details for how to access the pre-sale can be found at www.brandyclarkmusic.com/tour. Tickets will go on-sale to the general public this Thursday, March 31 (UK/Europe) and Friday, April 1 (US/CAN).
Clark will also perform as part of “CMT Crossroads: LeAnn Rimes & Friends,” airing April 14 at 8:00pm ET/7:00pmCT in celebration of Rimes’ 25th career anniversary. In addition to Clark and Rimes, the all-female event lineup will also feature Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce and Mickey Guyton performing songs from throughout Rimes’ career.
The upcoming performances add to a landmark year for Clark, who is nominated for two awards at the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards: Song of the Year (“A Beautiful Noise” performed by Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile) and Best American Roots Performance (“Same Devil” featuring Carlile). The live awards ceremony will be broadcast Sunday, April 3 at 8:00pm ET/7:00pm CT on CBS.

“THE ART OF THE STORYTELLER TOUR”
June 17—Montgomery, NY—City Winery
June 18—Holyoke, MA—Race Street Live
June 20—Homer, NY—Center for the Arts Homer
June 21—Toronto, ON—Great Hall
June 23—Ann Arbor, MI—The Ark
June 24—Gary, IN—Hard Rock Casino
June 25—Minneapolis, MN—Dakota Jazz Club
August 28—Lutterworth, UK—The Long Road Festival
August 29—Bristol, UK—St. George’s
August 31—London, UK—Indigo at the O2
September 1—Manchester, UK—RNCM Concert Hall
September 3—Dublin, Ireland—Whelan’s
September 4—Glasgow, UK—Old Fruitmarket
September 6—Sunderland, UK—The Fire Station
September 8—Amsterdam, Netherlands—Melkweg Upstairs
September 9—Hamburg, Germany—Nochtwache
September 10—Copenhagen, Denmark—Vega Small Hall
September 12—Oslo, Norway—Parkteatret
September 13—Stockholm, Sweden—Bryggarsalen
www.brandyclarkmusic.com
For more information, please contact
asha.goodman at sacksco.com
catherine.snead at sackso.com
carla at sacksco.com

will definitely catch that, thanks!

Out May 6th on Paradise of Bachelors: the reissues of Terry Allen and The Panhandle Mystery Band's early 80s albums, Smokin' the Dummy and Bloodlines.

Smokin' The Dummy
Terry Allen, in a 1981 letter to H.C. Westermann

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title:

MY KID BUKKA GOT A CHARLIE MCCARTHY DOLL FOR CHRISTMAS ONE YEAR WHEN HE MADE UP HIS MIND HE WAS GOING TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST. HE IMMEDIATELY PAINTED IT UP TO LOOK LIKE A VAMPIRE ... AND I JUST AS IMMEDIATELY PUT ON A PAIR OF JO HARVEY'S SUNGLASSES AND THE SLEAZIEST JACKET I COULD FIND (western slime) AND SAT FOR FAMILY PHOTOS ... ANYWAY, I BLEW RINGS OF SMOKE ON THE DUMMY AND BUKKA SAID I WAS SMOKIN THE DUMMY.

I GUESS IT RANG SOME KIND OF DEMENTED BELL …

Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.”

Recorded at Caldwell Studios in Allen’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas during the summer of 1980, exactly two years after his masterpiece Lubbock (on everything) (released in 1979) manifested in the same jury-rigged room, the feral follow-up is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor. It’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll. This was by design. The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory.

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers—co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie—and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume—he was deaf in one ear from a near-fatal car accident—were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.)

Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted obsessions—especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch—and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace. In an echo of “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” which opens Lubbock (on everything), “The Heart of California (for Lowell George),” another driving song and the first track of Dummy, is dedicated to Terry’s recently departed friend, the leader of Little Feat, who covered Allen’s “New Delhi Freight Train” before he died.

As on Lubbock, many other songs are older, culled from a decade and a half of songbooks, demos, and worktapes. Allen wrote “Red Bird,” a deceptively simple ditty that combines two longstanding fascinations—New Orleans and bird symbolism—as an art student in L.A. in 1964 and performed it on Shindig! the following year. He considered it his first “real” song worth keeping, and it rates as the personal favorite of many of his oldest friends, including Bruce Nauman. “Cocaine Cowboy,” composed in 1968, lent its title to a 1974 play by Allen’s colleague George Lewis, starring Terry’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey and featuring his own dada-inspired costume designs, including a giant Gogolesque ambulatory nose wearing a cowboy hat. “Roll Truck Roll” and “The Night Cafe,” a diptych of automotive dramas, with counterpoint perspectives on the labor cultures of trucking and food service, both date to 1969. (During this era, Allen was a great enthusiast and denizen of diners, particularly Denny’s, and Jo Harvey wrote and performed a play called Counter Angel, based on her oral histories with truckstop waitresses.) The glowering, bruised 1975 rodeo song “Helena Montana” was inspired by his friend Dave Hickey’s fine rodeo number “Calgary Snow” and Terry’s impending participation in The Great American Rodeo exhibition at Forth Worth Art Museum the following year.

The other four songs, like the aforementioned “The Heart of California,” were of more recent vintage. One of only two covers in Allen’s catalog (the other is David Byrne’s “Buck Naked”), “Whatever Happened to Jesus (and Maybeline)?” interpolates Chuck Berry’s automotive lament within a skewed gospel song of Allen’s own devising, a characteristic imbrication of sacred and profane gestures. Allen completed the furiously frayed album closer “The Lubbock Tornado (I don’t know),” about the devastating 1970 tornado (still a painful local memory ten years later), in a hot Texas Tech practice room during the recording sessions. It takes the American vernacular tradition of disaster ballads into sinister and hilarious spaces, implicating governmental, religious, and alien conspiracies—including the Lubbock Lights—as possible meteorological motivations. In 1980, as in 2022, we can rationalize any calamity with conspiracy theories.

In other words, this is deathless American music. Play it again.

Terry Allen and The Panhandle Mystery Band

Bloodlines

Paradise of Bachelors

6 May 2022

I’ve never heard such a consistent assortment of unpopular styles.

– Dave Hickey, to Terry Allen, regarding his album Bloodlines, 1983

Since 1970, when they met in Allen’s studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York-centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves—brothers in blood—and Hickey’s wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery of Bloodlines, the album Terry released in June of that year. Dave stood among the chorus of singers on the reprise of the title track that ends the record. Terry reprised the album cover concept, a detail of a painting of Jesus carrying a lamb that he found in the gutter outside a Lubbock botánica and manipulated, for Dave’s 1989 collection of youthful short stories, Prior Convictions—but with Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 bloody-bathtub painting “The Death of Marat” as a replacement savior. Hickey wrote the tour de force catalog essay for Allen’s 1983 solo exhibition Rooms and Stories, which featured, two months before the release of Bloodlines, the premiere of his theater piece Bleeder. Finally, there’s Hickey’s sardonic quip about the dim commercial prospects of Bloodlines. Buckets of blood and ink were spilled.

Hickey’s commercial doubts notwithstanding, critical recognition was not in short demand. In a 1984 review of Bloodlines, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen “one of the most compelling American songwriters working today … making the most unique art-pop of our time,” elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allen’s records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following—they weren’t easy to find in those days, so sometimes they existed only as a words-in-mouth—that began among fellow artists and within the rarefied air of the art world, and then, following the 1979 release of Lubbock (on everything), circulated farther afield, among musicians and fans of “outlaw country,” a loose (in all ways) subgenre and scene named in part for Hickey’s 1974 essay “In Defense of the Telecaster Cowboy Outlaws.” Allen’s early audiences included an outsized contingent of potters and bikers, due, respectively, to enthusiastic ceramicist friends and an unexpected endorsement of Smokin the Dummy (1980) in Easyriders magazine. The Rooms and Stories opening reception at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art was packed with leather-clad bikers.

On his manifold fourth album, Allen contemplates kinship—the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society—with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines, which compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical, is itself kin to its predecessor Smokin the Dummy (chronologically and in terms of its Panhandle Mystery Band personnel and its wide-ranging subjects) and to its descendant, 1993’s The Silent Majority (Terry Allen’s Greatest Missed Hits) (which similarly anthologizes stray and orphan songs). Recorded piecemeal at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, in sessions spanning August 1982 through January 1983, Terry self-released it, like all his previous records, on his own Fate Records imprint. Despite his frustration with the protracted timeline and some anxiety about the correspondingly higher budget, the production on Bloodlines—courtesy, once again, of master guitarist Lloyd Maines—is slicker, cleaner, and more dynamic than prior efforts, and it reached a broader audience than ever before. UK label Making Waves reissued it in 1985, facilitating semi-reliable European distribution for the first time as well as a 1986 UK tour, on which the great BJ Cole filled in for Lloyd on pedal steel.

Allen wrote two songs as themes for plays: the Pasadena idyll “Oh What a Dangerous Life” for Joan Hotchkiss’s 1982 play Bissie at the Baths and the gospel-coughing hymn “Hally Lou” for his wife and collaborator Jo Harvey Allen’s 1983 performance piece of the same name, in which she plays the titular revival preacher. Bloodlines is the first of several albums to revisit selections from Terry’s 1975 debut Juarez with full-band arrangements: a comic take on “Cantina Carlotta” that inhabits the tone-deaf tourist’s perspective of the hapless narrator, and a terrifying road-rage, burnt-rubber rendition of “There Oughta Be a Law About Sunny Southern California” featuring Jesse Taylor, in his final Panhandle Mystery Band recording, on “asphalt vendetta guitar” (Maines Brothers guitarist Cary Banks deftly handles lead guitar elsewhere). The irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely), in which Jesus steals the narrator’s car and beer for a joyride to the hereafter, remains a fan favorite. Terry wrote the final verses in a Texas Tech practice room the day they recorded it. “Manhattan Bluebird,” a surprisingly earnest (and unexpectedly moving) lament for the cultural insularity and provincialism of a New Yorker deluded by her own alleged cosmopolitanism, boasts one of Allen’s most beautiful minor-key melodies. On tour in Belfast in 1996, Allen’s tourmates feared “Ourland,” a thinly veiled satire of the IRA’s hypocrisy amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland, would incite a riot and urged him not to play it. Of course, he didn’t listen.

Lloyd Maines wept when Terry first played him the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape, which sounds as ancient and eternal as a psalm. But that didn’t stop Lloyd from complaining about having too large a chorus on the album-closing extended version (he’s a notorious stickler for tuning and pitch). Twenty-five friends and family members packed the studio that day, including Dave Hickey, Joe and Sharon Ely, and Stubb of BBQ fame. “Bloodlines II” represents the recorded debuts of the Allens’ sons Bukka and Bale as well as Lloyd’s eight-year-old daughter Natalie Maines, later of the (Dixie) Chicks—a true testament to the power of blood. In 1998 Lucinda Williams covered it in a spookily spare version on Allen’s soundtrack for Jane Anderson’s film Baby Dance, starring Laura Dern and Stockard Channing. As the credits roll, the river runs through the mountains, under the moonlight. Hear the song.

Terry reprised the album cover concept, a detail of a painting of Jesus carrying a lamb that he found in the gutter outside a Lubbock botánica and manipulated, for Dave’s 1989 collection of youthful short stories, Prior Convictions—but with Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 bloody-bathtub painting “The Death of Marat” as a replacement savior.

Two advance singles ("The Heart of California (for Lowell George)" and "Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy") are out now on all DSPs and no additional singles will be released ahead of May 6th.

"The Heart of California (for Lowell George)" https://lnk.to/PoB65

http://lnk.to/PoB65

"Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy" https://lnk.to/PoB66

http://lnk.to/PoB66

Sorry, thought that would show the videos---follow these links for those, and for the audio streams on various services.

i meant to post this a week or two ago — Maren Morris covered Fiona Apple’s Criminal in her NYC showcase that aired on Amazon Prime, Twitch etc on March 26

this clip isnt the best quality but god she killed it

@MarenMorris covering #FionaApple Criminal is something I didn’t realize I needed in my life. What a cover! pic.twitter.com/FiuwfjXKW7

— Scott Rosen (@DaScottyMac) March 27, 2022

Thanks VG! Maybe Fiona will return the compliment.

Country-adjacent

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 14, 2022

AMERICANA RAILROAD, A COLLECTION OF SONGS CELEBRATING THE HISTORY OF TRAINS SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE VIA RENEW/BMG ON JUNE 17.

The album features tracks from John Fogerty, Dave Alvin, Rocky Burnette, Dom Flemons, Stephen McCarthy, Carla Olson and more.

Album promo video featuring multiple tracks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7GEf2fmg1Y

LOS ANGELES, CA -- The idea of a new album of traditional and contemporary railroad songs had been percolating for a decade or so before recording began for Americana Railroad. After talking about artists and songs and label partner possibilities every few years producers Carla Olson and Saul Davis decided to just begin and see what was possible.

The first artist asked was Stephen McCarthy (Dream Syndicate, Jayhawks, Long Ryders) to see if he would be interested in such a project, followed by Robert Rex Waller Jr (I See Hawks In L.A.), John York (Byrds), Dave Alvin, Rocky Burnette, Gary Myrick and James Intveld. Rock’n’roll, Rockabilly, Americana ~ the genre or category is for the listener to decide. The goal was simple – railroad songs performed by great expressive artists.

After recording the nine tracks that Carla produced, the thought turned to locating a record company partner.

Executive David Hirshland noted, “When Saul brought this to me for possible release by Renew / BMG it instantly made sense. There is such a deep history of trains in the American musical canon I felt that we should expand the project and get more artists on board. Every artist we subsequently approached was eager to join in.”

Since the overwhelming number of train songs requires hard choices, this anthology’s selections attempt to cover significant historical ground. Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight” Train is covered lovingly by A.J .Haynes in a style evocative of the ‘50’s in which it was written. Dom Flemons takes the true story of ex-slave and Pullman porter Nat Love (aka Deadwood Dick) and spins it into a narrative of spiritual survival and ultimately triumph via original track “Steel Pony Blues.” Steve Goodman’s epic “City of New Orleans,” a portrait of the disintegration of an entire way of life, is given added poignancy by John Fogerty’s vocals and Micky Raphael’s harmonica. Peter Case’s treatment of “This Train” echoes Woody Guthrie and the world of depression era America. Americana Railroad is thus meant to entertain and educate albeit subtly.


Prior to Americana Railroad’s June 17, 2022 CD and digital release, it was issued as a limited edition vinyl piece for Record Store Day in November 2021.

Producer/performer Carla Olson observed that “Growing up in Austin, Texas during the 1950s the fascination with trains was the stuff childhood dreams were made of. Walking home from school the temptation to put your ear to the track to hear if the train was close was a daily routine. We lived five blocks from the railway and heard the whistle of the trains well into the night. For some the call was a way to escape small town blues, for others thoughts of exotic destinations lured many to hop a freight and disappear over the horizon. The Americana Railroad album is a collection of both history and metaphor for your listening and thought provoking pleasure.”

Full track listing with songwriter credit notated in parenthesis and performers and special guests:

Here Comes That Train Again ~ (Stephen McCarthy)
Stephen McCarthy & Carla Olson

The Conductor Wore Black ~ (Chip Kinman, Tony Kinman)
Robert Rex Waller Jr with Chip Kinman on guitar

Mystery Train ~ (Herman Parker, Sam C. Philips) ~
Rocky Burnette with Barry Goldberg on piano

This Train ~ (traditional, arranged by Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
Peter Case

City Of New Orleans ~ (Steve Goodman) ~
John Fogerty with Mickey Raphael on harmonica

Marrakesh Express ~ (Graham Nash)
Dustbowl Revival

Train Leaves Here This Morning ~ (Gene Clark, Bernie Leadon)
Kai Clark with Byron Berline on fiddle

Train Kept A-Rollin’ ~ (Tiny Bradshaw, Howie Kay,
Sydney Nathan)
Gary Myrick

Southwest Chief ~ (Dave Alvin)
Dave Alvin


500 Miles ~ (Hedy West)
Alice Howe

People Get Ready ~ (Curtis Mayfield)
Deborah Poppink

Steel Pony Blues ~ (Dom Flemons)
Dom Flemons

Runaway Train ~ (John Stewart)
John York

Waiting For A Train ~ (Jimmie Rodgers)
Paul Burch & Fats Kaplin

Freight Train ~ (Elizabeth Cotton)
AJ Haynes of Seratones

Whiskey Train ~ (Keith Reid, Robin Trower)
Carla Olson & Brian Ray

Mystery Train ~ (Herman Parker, Sam C. Phillips)
James Intveld with Barry Goldberg on Hammond B3 organ

Midnight Rail ~ (Steve Young)
Robert Rex Waller Jr with Todd Wolfe on guitars

I Remember The Railroad ~ (Gene Clark)
Stephen McCarthy & Carla Olson

Chr*s Richards in Washington Post re new Jason Aldean: he kinda likes the album, while disliking Aldean.

Some excerpts--

This has to be the most handsome music of Aldean’s career. Hunched over some neon-drenched bar, the singer narrates a variety of pressing-the-bruise ballads with a lucidity that makes his previous signatures — the rock-tinted bluster of “Hicktown,” the halfhearted quasi-rapping on “Dirt Road Anthem” — feel teeny-tiny in the rearview. As a pair, “Macon” and “Georgia” don’t feel leaden and ponderous like a “mature” album might. They’re focused. So much so, that a rare glimpse of the outside world comes halfway through “Macon” during “Story for Another Glass,” when Aldean says he’s willing to make chitchat about “politics, religion — man, anything, I don’t care,” so long as he doesn’t have to talk about “why I’m here and why she ain’t.”
....There’s a tail-chasing poetry to someone who speaks out against mask mandates donating millions to a hospital — and that dissonance feels even sharper in the cool shadow of Aldean’s anodyne new music, let alone the slick pleasantries of country music writ large. Why does modern country music, a musical community that purportedly celebrates everyday American lives, not do more to protect those lives?....

He’s shrewd to let his wife, a tenacious Instagram influencer, do the heaviest lifting. Among the various T-shirts Brittany has peddled on Instagram, one reads, “THIS IS OUR F-ING COUNTRY.” Are we supposed to believe that these “Let’s go Brandon”-types mean what they’re saying when they’re too afraid to use the actual words? And who’s the “our” in that sentence? Even if the shirt weren’t a racist dog whistle, it still caters to the ugly idea that America belongs to some, not all.

And it clashes with Aldean’s tidy musical self-image, too. In a news release hyping the arrival of “Macon,” Aldean gave thanks for the musical influence of his multicultural hometown: “Growing up in an environment that was a crossroads between country music, Southern rock, blues and R&B, it was just natural to blend different sounds in my own way.” So inclusion is good for the Aldean family when they’re turning it into royalty money, but not so good when they’re trying to make merch money....

This music doesn’t necessarily sound hypocritical, though. It appears to have no ideology, no agenda, ...In his heartsick confusion, the song’s narrator is deflecting responsibility for what might happen next. I can’t decide whether it’s funny or sad how credible Aldean sounds singing these words.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/04/22/jason-aldean-album-review/

Enjoying the new Charley Crockett covers album

saw Charley recently and could not believe how many people were there, how far in advance it sold out, and how many people were online desperately seeking tickets.

my takeaway was that he is somehow a couple years away from playing theaters/amphitheaters?!

dude's traveling on a couple of sweet tour buses, too.

He is apparently going to be featured on CBS Saturday morning show tomorrow - pretty prominent national coverage! Funny that it's on the occasion of a covers album though.

Here’s that Charley Crockett profile - lots of details about his life I didn’t know. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/charley-crocketts-hard-times-inspire-soulful-genre-defying-music/

Crockett's kind of the Roots/Americana guy _we need_ right now.

Seeing that footage of him in his early days busking on the subway, and also hearing his earliest albums which are much bluesier... man I am really glad he found his voice/persona.

yeah it was really interesting / weird seeing him out of the persona that we know ... a testament to how well he plays it, i think.

That was an interesting feature on Crockett. Nice

PATTY GRIFFIN
TAPE
(PGM Recordings/Thirty Tigers)
Release Dates:
Friday, June 10 (CD, Digital Download, Streaming)
Friday, June 17 (Cassette)

“At some point in the pandemic, I was digging through my own music streaming to relearn some of my own oldies and found something that had been compiled (perhaps by a computer algorithm) that was titled as a ‘rarities’ or ‘deep cuts’ collection,” Griffin says. “I looked of course, and it was a pretty boring list for the most part. I later dug through some recordings I had done on cheap home recording apps, including my favorite one called TapeDeck which I’m not sure exists anymore. I really liked some of the songs. They were better than I had remembered. I dug around some more and found things from some GarageBand recordings, and then also a couple of things from an in-studio demo session in Nashville that were pretty interesting, including a duet I did with Robert Plant when we first met. It all seemed worth listening to. Back then I didn’t think so, but I do now.

“The sound quality on the majority of things on TAPE is pretty low, but the performances are what really matter to me. My home recordings are almost always my favorite recordings, as far as capturing a fresh, direct feeling. The shy introvert’s dilemma…I’ve always had a hard time creating that same feeling in a studio full of people whose talent is in sound quality. These songs have a feel you can only get when you’re by yourself at three o’clock in the morning. To listen to the bulk of these recordings, you do have to let go of the idea of good sound quality and just listen to the performance. I feel better getting some true rarities out there for people to listen to…not compiled by a computer algorithm.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U2kkSByUsY

“Don’t Think Jesus” is one of five Hot 100 entries this week bearing Wallen’s name, tied with Doja Cat for the most of any artist. Oh, and lest we forget, well over a year past its initial release, Dangerous is still No. 2 on the Billboard 200 — perhaps just a Tyler, the Creator vinyl shipment delay from returning to No. 1 this week for the first time since March 2021, for the 11th total frame.

https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/morgan-wallen-dont-think-jesus-five-burning-questions-1235063588/

So, via WaPo syndication in Birmingham News, I came across the whole long xpost Chris Richards review of Aldean's latest, and maybe I'll give it a listen, maybe---hesitation is not about his current out-of-studio political stance, but prevalence of thinkin' and drinkin' songs---Wallen does find something unexpectedly ear-grabbing in some (some) tracks of the longass Dangerous, but Aldean isn't that crazy, at least publicly. I knew I was tiredass of this classick approach when I couldn't even make it all the way through my first listen to the long-awaited-by-me 2021 Gary Allan album. Should try again, but mainly I guess I was spoiled by Gary Stewart in the 70s, and stayed that way, as described in my ancient Voice piece, when he'd just killed himself, right after the release of Live At Billy Bob's (overall effective, in a way that was spooky even before his death was announced):

Once upon a time, he was Dr. Fun and Mr.
Doom (and self-awareness, and headlonging), simultaneously. Stewart still sounds impossibly corny, truly inspired, while flourishing and flinging single notes and phrases all the way through Out of Hand/Your Place or
Mine, his two best LPs on one CD. Songs flash by like whole lives, but really
they're just his moments, ticking away.
Billy Bob's cuts like "An Empty Glass (That's the Way the Day Ends)" turn the tides
down like blankets, till I'm bathed in (pace tua, St. Sade) the *truly* sweetest taboo (of self-pity).
Tiring, soothing. I just stare through his stare, on the rocks, as he
imagines/avoids/follows her stare. "Maybe you feel cheated, for having married so young,"
he mutters to self and/or significant other (wed in their mid-teens, forty-odd years ago now), while shifting on his bar
stool, in the still-rousing "Ten Years of This." ("A million nights alone!") So:
Mebbe getting married is cheating? No! Not always!

Yeah, flashbacks getting intense---the drinkin'-thinkin' songs on Alan Jackson's 2021 return album, Where Have You Gone mostly work, helped by title track opening with theme that is up front meta-country: He's calling out to his kind of hat trad country, him and the steel guitar, so it's also an effective demonstration of what he's missing in today's country---which of course is also a familiar meta-theme, and his thinkin' drinkin' songs play the angles effectively, like good trad product should, while his vocals and the Nashville Cats apply seductive salesmanship---even though his neat, discreet delivery has me skeptical about how much drinking he's ever done, in a risky way---he still sounds so clean-cut---but if it's more thinkin' about drinkin' while measuring, that's okay too, for this sly one: "I Can Be That Something" soon slips in, among the suggested options, "I can be your whiskey," like he's the one staying sober enough to time this right: he can be your blond-mustached rehab or at least maintenance love guru: transfer to him, darlin', not that ol' cocaine or mary jane.
I did like "Hicksville,"but somehow I don't think the somewhut grunty Aldean is up to something comparable in sheer ear appeal or conceptual interest to any of this, though maybe I'll give his latest a try.

One of my nieces is at Stagecoach fest. Her IG story said she enjoyed Maren Morris

https://www.billboard.com/music/country/stagecoach-2022-day-one-highlights-thomas-rhett-maren-morris-1235065213/

Chxckx Eddyx says YEA: Miranda Lambert: Palomino (Vanner/RCA) 8; Priscilla Block: Welcome to the Block Party Mercury Nashville/InDent) 7;

riyl Jason Molina / Songs:Ohia / MEC

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mj-lenderman-boat-songs/

one of my favorite albums of the year so far ^^

stunned/happy to see it get BNM

On Billboard Music Awards tonight a Miranda Lambert & Elle King raw ( or sloppy depending on pov) duet; Dan & Shay; and Morgan Wallen first appearance on an award show since before his n word incident. He did a 2 song medley

Wallen also won an award for best male country singer

bleuch

Wallen's thank you speech was bland and made no mention of remorse or learning anything from his recent past.

Sean P-Diddy was the host and he insisted that Wallen and Travis Scott both get to appear and perform

Discovered via Spotify algorithm, so I feel a little dirty, but I’m enjoying this new album by S.G. Goodman.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5fXIv2d6FP5hSTYThKREZH?si=D40IRlq2Tz2gY90gFJB4Fg

can relate to that feeling

sounds good

Thanks - didn't know there was a new one. "Space and Time" from the last album floored me on first listen.

I'll search that out, thanks Indexed

"When You Say It" is the one that's really getting me on the new one.

Yeah, looking fwd to new alb---here's my RC comments added to blogged version of Scene ballot re 2020:

Good'uns Added After Ballot Deadline/Subjects For Further Study:

S. G. Goodman: Old Time Feeling---Appalachoid high lonesome--associated pitch and power rising bullseye from the persistent and fully occupied folds of fog-smog topography: like The Croz before him, on Joni Mitcherll's debut, Goodman's co-producer Jim James refrains from loading this launch with heavy big-name guests---just close mics That Voice and jumps back. Oh, it gets a bit of echo sometimes, and the swirl of low-reflective resonance also brushes by reverb-y guitar (which can come apart sideways when appropriate), pedal steel, bass, drums (she told Rolling Stone she was inspired by Link Wray's '71 s/t, one of his chicken coop sets)---but mainly That Voice, which is youthful but also one of experience, like debut Joni, with plenty to remember and offload, seeking some relief, but not miserabilist nor wrecking ball, just personalised fragments, scenes, phrases coming toward the brink of clarity---somewhat like early Neko on Bloodshot, when she was covering and writing between Loretta Lynn and Scott Walker. Could imagine Goodman working with Brandi Carlile, the Highwomen, whomever, though for now is still Murray KY collegetown-based apparently. (Before this solo, worked as The Savage Radley with a collaborator who was also a drummer; she's gotta have a drummer, as do my ears)

Also, she sent this out in 2021; hope it'll be on the album:

My Townes Van Zandt cover of "Lungs" is now available to stream everywhere!

I'm not normally one to do covers, they often scare me. I feel it's easier to do a cover poorly than to add to something that was already probably perfect. So when the good folks at Amazon Music offered for me to take part in their Amazon Music Origial series, I was honored, but at a loss for what to do, I chose Townes Van Zandt's "Lungs" because of the odd connection he has to where I live.

Like all small towns, we have our legendary stories, and one story from Murray, KY could be found in a little lemonade stand in the middle of town. You'd drive up to Mr. Jimmy Gingles, ask for a Ginger (Fresh squeezed Lemonade, Orange Juice, and Lime) and you would see a picture of Townes hanging over Jimmy's head while he made your drink. Mr. Jimmy and Townes were friends and running buddies. He's often tell you about all the times Townes vistied him in Murray and how he'd passed out on that very floor in the lemonade stand. Townes also play a few times in a bar where I cut my teeth as performer. It was a thrill to record this with my band and Matt Ross-Spang at the legendary Fame Studios. Hopefully I added to the story of Townes and my home with this cover, but like I said, it's hard to put your spin on something you've always felt was perfect.

Thanks, really liking this. All My Love Coming Back to Me puts me in mind of the Gun Club.

Pitchfork review by GHC: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sg-goodman-teeth-marks/

Thanks all for the rec. I'm playing the shit out of it this morning.

The Brennen Leigh (songwriter for LAW, Rodney Crowell, Sunny Sweeny) album with Asleep at the Wheel is as good a traditional 40s/50s western swing revival as you're going to find.

“I’ve been obsessed with western swing music since I was a kid and it’s always been an influence. My records in the past have ranged from bluegrass to country music to folk, but I’d never fully explored swing until now.” So says genre-busting Fargo-born, Austin incubated, Nashville resident Brennen Leigh, whose new collaboration with the kings of modern-day western swing, Asleep at the Wheel, Obsessed with the West (Signature Sounds, out May 6th, 2022) is a showcase not just for The Wheel or Bob Wills fans, but for anyone who’s ever curled up with Lefty Frizzell, Billie Holiday, Willie Nelson or even Louis Armstrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R7CzT4vikQ

Always feel like I have to caveat before posting...not a fan of the guy and his writing, but his nose is undeniable.

Haven't heard most of these:

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/the-best-country-roots-albums-of-2022-so-far/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/a-rising-country-singer-tries-to-win-over-nashvilles-gatekeepers

Thanks, will read. I like her. Punchy, well-written heartland country with real sticky melodies. Her vocals are pretty thin though and can grate after a dozen tracks.

I guess I'll listen to it at some point, but prev Whitters I rated Less Than Half Good and said why in Scene ballot comments:

Hailey Whitters, The Dream: Unless Musgraves is increasingly your go-to guru, and/or The Golden Hour is your touchstone or wellspring or Sgt. Pepper's, I'd say not to waste time with most of this---although "Red White & Blue" is a keeper: here she actually seems to push back against her chronic sluggishness, in a way I don't think I've ever heard (that wordless, rec cry is not a hook in the usual sense, but keeps me waiting for its return), and "Dream, Girl" is a little sneaky, and "The Devil Always Made Me Think Twice" has that stalkin', smokin' beat and riff, the kind of thing she needs way more of---or a sax solo, steel guitar, hick-hop beats--anything to distract from the drab vocals, trite tunes, triter advice, that the people who might possibly benefit from are not likely to hear, because not enough sweetening for the pill to go viral---also, does she really listen to herself? "Happy people don't cheat"? Well, maybe if the cheatee has already made them happy and ready to take things further---but then, also, just to touch all the bases, "do whatever makes you happy"---so that includes, I dunno, cheating, mass murder, shoplifting, gtfo Some say RIYL: Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert, Lori McKenna, Brandy Clark, etc I do, but this don't...But if'n you really like recent Musgraves and that side of McKenna's writing, Whitters is okay, although we agree on the thinness of her voice, the need for more production solutions.

"we agree" re that year's RC and some email conversations.

This song got my attention

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

that’s a good tune there

lately i’ve been doing some country writing on the site i moonlight for and bc the audience is predominantly not country fans sometimes i gotta get a little elementary but people seem to kinda like this dolly parton primer i put together, check it out if you’re so inclined https://www.treblezine.com/dolly-parton-best-albums-beginners-guide/

Has anyone heard the Randall King?

xp thanks for sharing -- have never listened to Hungry Again and will give it a spin

Awrightawrightawright yall

Caught up with @nodepression and talked about reissuing and remastering my album ‘Balls’ 15 years after its release! Check it out! ✨ https://t.co/cs49CrATsw

— Elizabeth Cook (@Elizabeth_Cook) June 27, 2022

Oho----Stoney Edwards finally added to a bunch of streaming services:
https://stoneyedwards.lnk.to/Stream?utm_source=dotmailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=217444_UMe%20Newsletter%20-%206%2F27%2F22_231803_US&dm_i=4YUZ,4NS4,9J3W9,MLOJ,1

https://linkstorage.linkfire.com/medialinks/images/64f92cae-864e-4ebd-b2f0-bb665e117cdf/artwork-440x440.jpg

Edd Hurt turnt me on to his LPs----here's xgau, with too low a grade for the second album, but fair-enough takes on both:

Mississippi, You're on My Mind [Capitol, 1975]
Scandalously underrecorded, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that he's black, Edwards remains firm in his allegiances. "Hank and Lefty Raised My Country Soul," he announces, and though he sounds more like Lefty than Hank and more like Merle than either, he's got a right. The voice has Haggard's swing and melismatic burr, but it's more powerful, an advantage except when it gets too thick. And though Edwards literally can't read or write, he makes up good songs and picks better ones. Between "We Sure Danced Us Some Good Ones," a believable account of a good marriage in a music that reserves its honesty for the bad ones, to "Summer Melodies," about innocent fun, he touches all the bases without sententiousness or whoop-de-doo. Country soul indeed. A-

Blackbird [Capitol, 1976]
In which well-meaning producer Chip Taylor provides Edwards with a wonderful title tune about "a couple of country niggers/Stealin' the rodeo" while nudging him in a rockish, folkish direction, probably in the belief that he has a better shot at an audience over there. The results are hardly disgraceful, though Joe Cocker didn't get away with six minutes worth of "Bird on a Wire" either. But the straight country album Edwards did last year was a lot tougher. When people in Nashville get serious, they have a tendency to fall for pretentious schmaltz--that's the story of Mickey Newbury's life. A lot of this, straight country and folkish-rockish both, is too damn close to the edge. B+

Jake Blount's Spider Tales got a good RC reception---The New Faith(9/23) takes his kind of tales further:

This record features ten reimagined and reinterpreted traditional Black spirituals across twelve tracks in addition to two original spoken word pieces...The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Most importantly, it snaps us out of our tragically limited historical vantage point to better understand our actions and culture as they exist in deep time...
"I have long felt a powerful draw to the old spirituals passed down in my community," writes Blount. "I am an unlikely devotee; I only rarely attended church as a child, declared myself an atheist at the tender age of eight and developed a strong antipathy toward Christianity when I began to understand my queerness. Nonetheless, spirituals are the songs I bring to communal singing events. They are the songs I teach. In moments of homesickness, sorrow and fear, they are the songs I turn to for solace."

"The destruction of a way of life entails both loss and growth. The traditional songs I adapted for The New Faith originally developed among a people who had but recently been robbed of home, history, family, culture, and society. The unique history of African American people made our musical tradition an ideal candidate for my ambitious task. The New Faith is a statement of reverence for our devastating, yet empowering past; of anticipation and anxiety toward our uncertain future; and of hope that, come what may, something of us will yet survive.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3p20tC2k-w

https://folkways.si.edu/jake-blount/the-new-faith?mc_cid=f5a7e542c8&mc_eid=b45ecb38a9

His and other tour dates:
https://folkways.si.edu/tour

From New West, Sept. 2:

Recorded live on September 15, 1981, Live At Gilley’s captures Kris Kristofferson at a time in his career where he and his band were firing on all cylinders. Kristofferson was with a full band out on the road that featured Stephen Bruton, Donnie Fritts and Billy Swan. On this night, the band stopped by Gilley’s Honkytonk in Pasadena, Texas to deliver a once in a lifetime performance featuring the hits, “Me And Bobby McGee”, “The Pilgrim” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”

“What a great album this is! Classic Kristofferson songs throughout, and live!! Kris was in his prime and his vocals were outstanding and very soulful as always.” - George Strait

His vocals, hmmm.

More about that album, from No Dep---don't think I've ever heard a live album from Gilley's, although

“Gilley’s could hold several thousand people, but the club was very intimate. You were right there on the stage with people all around you. You could bend down and shake hands with people,” recalls Mickey Gilley in liner notes written a few months before he died last May. “Right next to the club was the recording studio, and we recorded everything that was done onstage. We could record onto the 24-track machine that we had in the studio, then we would do the mixing … We booked a lot of shows around that time, including some people I didn’t think would want to play the club. We got some acts that made me think, ‘Are you kidding me?’ … Kris Kristofferson was one of those artists that I didn’t think would want to play Gilley’s, because he was such a big name and a tremendous talent.”

Me and Bobby McGee
Here Comes That Rainbow Again
Casey’s Last Ride
You Show Me Yours (And I’ll Show You Mine) / Stranger
Nobody Loves Anybody Anymore
Darby’s Castle
If It’s All the Same to You
The Pilgrim
For the Good Times
Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down
The Silver Tongued Devil and I
Smile at Me Again
Same Old Song
Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)
Why Me

Of all the dumb things I’ve seen on the internet today, and it’s a very competitive group, this is by far the dumbest. pic.twitter.com/DBPaZbmmXK

— Trey Wilson (@treywilson757) June 29, 2022

If you’ve spent time in rural sub Saharan Africa one thing that might shock you is the popularity of American country music to the point where you can’t go to a bar, party, or wedding without avoiding it 🧵 pic.twitter.com/gpYC7fdq78

— The Zimbabwean (@RisenChow) June 30, 2022

Up close and personal at the @sbBowl!! 😆 Thanks for hanging out with us Santa Barbara! We'll see you tonight @ShorelineAmp!!! https://t.co/XClILe0u7u#CHX2022 pic.twitter.com/BD8MoccKHP

— The Chicks (@thechicks) July 30, 2022

@thechicks you did not disappoint Santa Barbara ❤️ pic.twitter.com/RonYaUvNMx

— Nick Smay (@nicks4445) July 30, 2022

When the Newport Folk Festival approached Black Opry founder Holly G last November about curating a set at the 2022 fest, her initial response was disbelief. At that point, her organization only had one live show — the first-ever Black Opry Revue at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York — under its belt.

“It felt like a very big deal, especially because we were new,” she says. “That was a lot of trust they had to put in me, based on very little information that they had about who I was and what I was doing.”

A lifelong fan of country music who did not feel safe going to country shows, Holly created Black Opry in April 2021, envisioning it as an online space to celebrate the music she loved and offer a refuge for like-minded fans. Almost immediately, her website began attracting the attention of artists from all corners of the country, Americana, and roots world, and Holly became determined to create real-world opportunities for artists who had been tokenized or outright excluded.

Last September, the Black Opry hosted invite-only gatherings at an Airbnb in East Nashville dubbed the “Black Opry Outlaw House” during last year’s AmericanaFest, and the ideas and camaraderie there led to the first Black Opry Revue in New York. Less than a year later, Black Opry has put on more than 30 live revues across the country, featuring dozens of artists, with as many more events scheduled through the end of the year and a spot on next year’s Cayamo roots music cruise.

Reminding me I still need to check out those Dirty Laundry comps recently received

I wrote this month's @guardian music essay on African country music, Jamaica and my family's history with country. With shoutouts to @dustyandstones Uchenna Ikonne @lloydbradley @SoulCountry1 @BlackOpry @outsidechild13 @NTSlive and more. https://t.co/svHUFc63yD

— Jamal Khadar (@khadarfi) August 13, 2022

Live Forever: A Tribute To Billy Joe Shaver, out Nov. 11 on New West:

TRACKLIST:

Willie Nelson Feat. Lucinda Williams - "I’m Gonna Live Forever"
Ryan Bingham Feat. Nikki Lane- "Ride Me Down Easy"
Rodney Crowell - "Old Five And Dimers Like Me"
Miranda Lambert - "I’m Just An Old Chunk Of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be A Diamond Someday)"
Edie Brickell - "I Couldn’t Be Me Without You"
Nathaniel Rateliff - "You Asked Me To"
George Strait - "Willy The Wandering Gypsy And Me"
Amanda Shires Feat. Jason isbell - "Honky Tonk Heroes"
Steve Earle - "Ain’t No God In Mexico"
Margo Price Feat. Joshua Hedley - "Ragged Old Truck"
Willie Nelson - "Georgia On A Fast Train"
Allison Russell - "Tramp On Your Street"

oh shit that looks so good

YEAH Hello in There is a SAD SONG, but what YOU don’t realize is it’s actually a crushing indictment of the AMERICAN DREAM- the couple did everything you’re SUPPOSED to do, but at the end they’re LONLEY & FORGOTTEN! It’s really a more cogent takedown than The Great Gat pic.twitter.com/XK55if6gt2

— OH BOY Records (@ohboyrecords) August 17, 2022

All Roads Lead Back To Red: A Pedal Steel Mixtape / Volume 2 https://t.co/A7GnO8pUs5

This mix picks up where All Roads Lead To Red: A Pedal Steel Mixtape left off, delving deeper into the sessionography of the Velvet Hammer, Orville “O.J” “Red” Rhodes. pic.twitter.com/XJGyRlyhnq

— aquarium drunkard (@aquadrunkard) August 20, 2022

from Omnivore:

http://omnivorerecordings.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Owens-Bakersfield-Gold-OV-485-768x768.jpg

Buck Owens And The Buckaroos
Bakersfield Gold: Top 10 Hits 1959–1974
Release date: September 2, 2022

Forty six Top 10 Hits (including 19 #1’s) on double-CD, triple-LP, and Digital.
Buck Owens is a country music icon. As one of the best-selling artists of the 1960s, he accumulated numerous Top 10 hits with 19 of them reaching the #1 top spot on the charts. Now all of Owens’ Top Ten hits from 1959–1974 have been compiled on Bakersfield Gold: Top 10 Hits 1959–1974.

Collecting 46 tracks, this release is available as a double-CD, triple-LP, and Digital release. Featuring new liner notes from Grammy®-nominee, Randy Poe (author of Buck ‘Em: The Autobiography Of Buck Owens), this is the first collection to compile Buck’s Top 10 hits on vinyl, with a limited edition gold vinyl version for independent retail.

Bakersfield Gold is the ultimate collection of Owens’ biggest hits, with The Buckaroos, Rose Maddox, Buddy Alan, Susan Raye, and more. With its availability across all formats, this is a perfect introductory collection for the new fan, and an incredible ride for those who already love the magic of Bakersfield.

2-CD / 3-LP / DIGITAL TRACK LIST:
DISC 1:
UNDER YOUR SPELL AGAIN
ABOVE AND BEYOND
EXCUSE ME (I THINK I’VE GOT A HEARTACHE)
FOOLIN’ AROUND
LOOSE TALK – Buck Owens & Rose Maddox
MENTAL CRUELTY – Buck Owens & Rose Maddox
UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF LOVE
KICKIN’ OUR HEARTS AROUND
YOU’RE FOR ME
ACT NATURALLY
LOVE’S GONNA LIVE HERE
MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT
TOGETHER AGAIN
I DON’T CARE (JUST AS LONG AS YOU LOVE ME)
I’VE GOT A TIGER BY THE TAIL
BEFORE YOU GO
ONLY YOU (CAN BREAK MY HEART)
GONNA HAVE LOVE
BUCKAROO
WAITIN’ IN YOUR WELFARE LINE
THINK OF ME
OPEN UP YOUR HEART
WHERE DOES THE GOOD TIMES GO
SAM’S PLACE

DISC 2:
YOUR TENDER LOVING CARE
IT TAKES PEOPLE LIKE YOU (TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE ME)
HOW LONG WILL MY BABY BE GONE
SWEET ROSIE JONES
LET THE WORLD KEEP ON A TURNIN’ – Buck Owens & Buddy Alan
I’VE GOT YOU ON MY MIND AGAIN
WHO’S GONNA MOW YOUR GRASS
JOHNNY B. GOODE
TALL DARK STRANGER
BIG IN VEGAS
THE KANSAS CITY SONG
THE GREAT WHITE HORSE – Buck Owens & Susan Raye
I WOULDN’T LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY (IF THEY GAVE ME THE WHOLE DANG TOWN)
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
RUBY (ARE YOU MAD)
ROLLIN’ IN MY SWEET BABY’S ARMS
I’LL STILL BE WAITING FOR YOU
MADE IN JAPAN
BIG GAME HUNTER
ON THE COVER OF THE MUSIC CITY NEWS
(IT’S A) MONSTERS’ HOLIDAY
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Cat: OV-485

Ken Tucker on the ff reissued, heretofore elusive ,except as quickly removed playlists and and pricey eBay-bait, A Trip In The Country: Roger Miller bomb in 1970, when audiences were expecting more like "Dang Me," "King of the Road" and so on. None of the other excerpts quite come up to the level of the best-known track, "Invitation to the Blues," maybe because his singing isn't quite as strong as his writing, at least in the more serious, trad country vein, at least not in excerpts, but good coverage, and the album seems worth checking out: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1117092882/this-reissue-proves-roger-miller-was-more-than-just-a-novelty-act
---Although the 37-track King of the Road: A Tribute To Roger Miller is the best place that I know of to get into the full (or at least a good) range of his writing.

We apparently don't have a Maren Morris thread — which we should! — so I'll just post this here. She and Cassadee Pope calling out Jason Aldean's wife for anti-trans bigotry, with Candace Owen piling in in predictable ways.

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jason-aldean-wife-brittany-transphobic-post-reactions-1235131821/

Too bad (though totally understandable that) they took the bait. She doesn't deserve the attention. And of course SCM is on it like flies.

Meanwhile---any of yall heard this?? I hadn't heard of it.

I’m so lucky to have a fabulous sister..she’s inspiring to watch and see..
Jan. 2003 Allison Moorer recorded a LIvE album and asked me to join her and one of the best bands I’ve ever heard and played with.. if you haven’t heard it.. do it.. the album is called SHOW. It’s badass. pic.twitter.com/uWnF8AsbKK

— Shelby Lynne (@ogshelbylynne) August 29, 2022

Brittany Aldean may not deserve the attention, but "Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie" is a quality zing.

Rolling Stone Top 100 Country Albums

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-country-albums-1234581876/margo-price-9-1234582269/

(Surprise! No Mick Jagger!)

Oops, scroll up to see entries 100-82

New Tyler Childers project - sounds great

https://pitchfork.com/news/tyler-childers-and-the-food-stamps-announce-new-triple-album-share-new-song-angel-band-listen/

Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps have announced a new triple album. Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? is out September 30 via Hickman Holler Records and RCA. The self-produced project features eight new and traditional songs performed in three different ways—the Hallelujah version was recorded live; the Jubilee builds on those recordings with additional instruments; and Joyful Noise version will be revealed on release day. The Hallelujah and Jubilee versions of “Angel Band” are out now—Watch a video for “Angel Band (Jubilee Version),” directed by Bryan Schlam, below.

Also want to make sure to plug the Wilco/Jeff Tweedy poll here for the Uncle Tupelo-heads

Lotta good replies (oft incl links) on this thread:

What are your favorite country-inflected songs by folks who don't primarily play country? I'm thinking Pavement's "Range Life" and half the Silver Jews catalog.

— Ana (@_motherslug) September 8, 2022

Mine so far:

The dB's--"She Won't Drive In The Rain Anymore": another highlight of very good reunion album (aren't many of those). The true story, as told by Holsapple to https://t.co/FFDmM25VjU:
"It's about my wife evacuating New Orleans during Katrina..." https://t.co/l7PbOcJuhF

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 8, 2022

also: The Bangles (from Sweethearts of The Sun)
As I said on Nash Scene ballot: In " I'll Never Be Through With You," with Greg Leisz on steel, Hoffs calls like she's called, compelling and compelled: a standoff mebbe, strutting in need and testimony.https://t.co/eSGFcZYgGu

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 9, 2022

I don't even own a Twitter, so can I just:

Johnny Winter: "Ain't Nothing To Me"
ZZ Top: "She's A Heartbreaker"
Steely Dan: "Pearl of The Quarter"
Sleater-Kinney: "Restless"
Humble Pie: "Theme From Skint (See You Later Liquidator)"

Oh, and Dave Edmunds: "A.1. On The Jukebox" and "Worn Out Suits, Brand New Pockets", which I can't believe wasn't a Buck Owens song to begin with.

Yeh mang, that there Winter comes through my head pretty often.

G./McC. also picks ZZ Top's "She's A Heartbreaker." I'll add more Stones: "Dead Flowers," "Memory Motel," "Wild Hosses," mebbe "Daddy You're A Fool To Cry" ("OOO-ooooo") https://t.co/mWGB2SzClS

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 9, 2022

Thanks for the shoutout!

In other news, Kill Rock Stars is adding a Nashville imprint. Trans singer-songwriter Mya Byrne first signee.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/mya-byrne-autumn-sun-kill-rock-stars-1234588530/?

Haven't read the thread but a few that come to mind: the Stones' "Far Away Eyes", Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down," The Smiths' "Vicar in a Tutu," The Shins' "Gone for Good," Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher Than the Rest," Fleetwood Mac's live version of "Say You Love Me," Talking Heads' "Creatures of Love,"

Something similarly fun I was thinking of lately was great rock song covers by country artists, such as Justin Townes Earle's cover of "Can't Hardly Wait" or Sturgill Simpson's cover of "In Bloom."

Stones did about an album's-worth of country, didn't they? Hint hint to somebody.

Can't find it now, but on their ancient CMT Crossroads, some performances from which are on YouTube, Willie Nelson plays coruscating guitar all over Sheryl Crow's crowing "Every Day Is A Winding Road" (if crossover duets count).
He and Sinead O'Connor also did a credible cover of "Don't Give Up," originally recorded by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, not the easiest thing to pull off: it seems intentionally, is at least appropriately, resistant to resolution, being about a couple in recession.
Songbird, his album with Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, sounds pretty wild, kinda precarious, but it works, I think, as cranked-up country rock, esp. "$1,000 Wedding," also a good "Stella Blue." That there Coldplay cover on Willie's Heroes lets fly too.
He and Waylon did "Whiter Shade of Pale," and Waylon did that whole posthumously released basement album recorded by Shooter, with "White Room" etc.

Elizabeth Cook did a good "Sunday Morning"---on Twitter, I called for a country duet of "Pale Blue Eyes," and Kelly Hogan sent me hers with Alejandro Escovedo. She's great, but I like him better in bands, playing guitar more than singing.

Lee Ann Womack does a deevine "Out On The Weekend," although that's kinda country to start with, isn't it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtcx-zv-ijg

This is the only country song I've ever heard Bonnie Raitt do: "Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes," written by Nan O'Byrne (would like to hear more of hers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtcx-zv-ijg

Sorry!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRQgdEO1-M

It's not a sing-along with all those guys, just last song of the Calgary show, so they get together at the end.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. Know the rock-cover-by-country-artist is relatively common (Cash's American Recordings, Willie's Stardust probably counts, et al.) but was specifically curious about favorites. I should also note Emmylou's "C'est La Vie" rendition. Funny you should pick that LAW cover, as I just listened to "I Have Not Forgotten You" from the same album, a truly lovely Bruce Robison penned tune that was bizarrely cut from the vinyl release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1lQOnqIECI

Yeah, she did a good "Tougher Than The Rest" and "Wrecking Ball" too. The ones I mentioned mostly were faves---could live w/o "Whiter Shade" and "White Room" (they're ok though)

Also! Willie's "Halluejah" is by far my fave version of that over-recorded, over-featured-in-cop-shows-as-they're-zipping-up-body-bags-etc. toon, and was also more than pleasantly surprised by his covers of "American Tune" and "Graceland"---could see him doing whole albums of Simon and Cohen ("Tower of Song" is on his latest, awright)

https://mcusercontent.com/1755f680a94812878dab15b5b/images/43be8f93-9e45-292d-8035-77c54e6d1e08.jpg

omg clutch the pearls thought that was Suzi Quatro/Leather Tuscadero w The Residents @ first! Wade's Reckless Deluxe Edition (Jan. '22) demanded to be in my 2021 Top Ten. Get it if you haven't, listen again if you have. https://t.co/1Cf35KZ3HY

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 16, 2022

Oh Wow---speaking of my Top Tens, here are Willis, Carper, and new-to-me (good rep) Leigh---intriguing--- https://t.co/DthecgirqA

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 16, 2022

Brennen Leigh did nice old school duets record w/Jessie Dayton back in the 2000s.

she also just made a good western swing album with Asleep at the Wheel: https://brennenleigh.bandcamp.com/album/obsessed-with-the-west

That Brennen Leigh & A@tW album is fantastic; she did a whole album of Lefty Frizzell covers a couple of years ago, too, and it was definitely worth checking out. And I've been a Willis fan since her major label run in the early 90s. She's long been one of the very best there is.

New Ashley McBryde out!

I just finished the (excellent) Her Country book, and it's hard to conclude anything other than that we are in a golden age of excellent female country or country adjacent singer-songwriters. Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, Mickey Guyton, Ashley Monroe, supergroups like the Highwomen and Pistol Annies, Brittney Spencer, the new Plains super-duo, Yola, Ashley McBryde, Hailey Whitters, Morgan Wade ...

mentioned this on the Waxahatchee thread but I find the Plains album very lopsided, owing in large part to my love of Waxahatchee and general unfamiliarity with Jess Williamson.

But also, it doesn't feel like a real group - I can't tell in any way that Waxahatchee's presence enhances Williamson's songs, nor vice versa. It's more like a split and the songs are just shuffled rather than a-side/b-side.

hey Indexed here’s one of those Tyler Childers songs

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

Joy Oladokun ft Chris Stapleton "Sweet Symphony" is a nice vocal showcase but on first listen feels like a Grammys Awards tv show showcase . Maybe it will grow on me.

Oh thank you TH! Didn't realize that was out yet. What a tune!

Yeah it’s good! Like a dixieland hillbilly mashup. All that old footage from Appalshop is like catnip to me. There’s even a little clip of John McCutcheon playing hammer dulcimer. He used to come by my parents’ house sometimes in Knoxville.

Agreed that the Plains record feels like a split, but I do think Williamson's songs work just fine next to Crutchfield's. I mean ... they have different writing styles, but to me they blend pretty well.

(That said, Crutchfield is on an incredible hot streak right now. Hope a new Wax record is coming sooner than later.)

New Ashley McBryde out!

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 30, 2022 7:45 AM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just getting to this, and am surprised there hasn't been more discourse here. I did not foresee her making a Dennis Linde-inspired world-building concept album about fictional town of misfits. Going to let this soak in.

Great closing run with the make-Linda-proud version of "When Will I Be Loved" > "Bonfire at Tina's" (Can anybody write a singalong anthem with more depth than McBryde?) > "Lindeville". Great record. Should be on the radar of those who like the small town stories of Brandy Clark, early Kacey, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1JAjbpZG4

Don't think this has been mentioned here.

https://easyeyesound.bandcamp.com/album/something-borrowed-something-new-a-tribute-to-john-anderson

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/john-anderson-tribute-album.jpg

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. don't find the dudes compelling as singers. More troubling is how uninhabited this so-called town is: all the details amount to the kind of "color" I expect from a creative writing workshop.

I don't mind the separate vocalists -- reminds me of Anais Mitchell's Hadestown -- but know what you mean about the concept. Would have expected you to at least fall for a "When Will I Be Loved" this true to Ronstadt's version.

trying to revive the Keith Whitley thread if anybody's interested. deeply under his spell right now

Luke Bryan brought Florida governor Desantis onstage to push hurricane relief, and while the Jacksonville, Florida audience was happy to see the guv there, lots of folks on twitter are not

that Tyler Childers song is a joy

New Wilder Blue is great

― Mule, Tuesday, March 29, 2022 5:32 AM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Only 8 months late but to this but it is indeed. A very spirited, musical, and sharp update on the classic country rock sound of The Eagles. Love the playing and harmonies.

How does ILM feel about Zach Bryan's American Heartbreak?

i just discovered it today (i am a rap dilettante) - seems... too long? but the "vibe" is good. are any of the songs ~actually~ amazing? "orange" almost gets there, but...

I listened after hearing so much about it and thought the songwriting was just OK ... some sort of amateur-ish lines? and i generally don't care about lyrics very much ... admittedly, I gave it like one listen while raking leaves and texting with my brother, so probably not a full and fair assessment.

2 hours is A LOT to wade through, so this is an admittedly rushed take, but I'm completely floored by/enamored with it -- the sheer industry is a marvel. Albums like this -- Sandinista, 69 Love Songs, The White Album, Emancipation?? -- are usually made by established, successful artists and say something about their restless, relentless artistic energy and talents. They communicate an ability to do anything.

While all these tracks slot within established country and heartland rock traditions, this is no less wide-ranging or ambitious. There are arena-ready rockers, acoustic sketches, radio sing-alongs, red dirt Americana numbers, and a cover of "You Are My Sunshine" for good measure. That he appears to have written every note and lyric aside from that one cover is so incredibly at odds with the vast majority of two decades' worth of male-dominated country...it makes me giddy.

I also like most of the production and playing -- the restraint especially. A lot of it just lets Bryan be, with his vocals and guitar front-and-center, instead of stuffing the thing with too-bright drum fills and the like. But there's also a free-spirited, "try everything" approach throughout, with fiddle, horns, electric guitar, backing vocals, and even a song with auto-tune, and hell, most of it works pretty dang well.

The most obvious antecedent to my ears is Turnpike Troubadours. His earnest rasp can sound awfully similar to them at times, especially on those more Americana-tilted tracks. I'm also reminded of Tyler Childers in places. But Bryan isn't nearly as literary or pretentious as those artists can be. His lyrics are more rudimentary, but I guarantee they are far more relatable to the average kid in rural America than a lot of what else they're spoon fed.

Caitlin Rose finally released her long-time-coming third album. More country-adjacent, but figured some of you would know her and be interested.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caitlin-rose-cazimi/

oh man this is so good, thank you

This song came out in February (album in April) but is new to me, and I don't believe she has been mentioned in this thread -- it is the most stunning country song I have heard this year. The patient way it builds to its ripping climax, her fiery vocals percolating throughout.

Whole album is very very good -- crazy sharp lyrics and stories, super well constructed songs. Dabbles with cosmic country and outlaw country; lots of twang; produced by Oran Thornton who co-produced Angaleena Presley's Wrangled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSeCpIg6llI

You go too far
And you get too close
And you hide your scars
When you put on your show
There's nowhere to run
You run through my veins
And I hold my tongue
Swallow my pride
And stay

Blood you're the jury and judge
The tie that binds
And pushes and shoves
Forgives and forgets
Bonds and cements
A counterfeit love
Blood, merciless flood
Draggin' my name through the mud
And awful things swept under the rug
For blood

sounds great, thanks for the tip

Been listening to this on repeat, and cannot get enough. Could one word -- "stay" -- do any much work in telling a story? The way they use the double-instrumental solo instead of a bridge stretches time and allows her to start the final chorus from a lower dynamic before building up to the utterly righteous Draggin'.

this is nice

holy shit

that's a good song but it didn't really hit me until i clicked through to this live version. man.

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

Ah that's great and didn't know Angaleena cowrote it!

Think the verse melody is more or less a lift from "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"

We don't usually talk about reissues here, but this is worth a mention (Steve Young could sometimes *over*-over-sing-mebbe incl. title track of this 'unbut I still 'ppreciate that he pushed past the boundaries of taste, unlike what the tag of "singer-songwriter" was so often soft-selling in late 60s & 70s especially). From Real Gone Music:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0810/5567/products/fe3df88f429a2ffe5f2bdc188b0e86c5_1024x1024.jpg?v=1663960284

Folks can argue if Steve Young’s debut Rock, Salt and Nails is the first “outlaw country” album, but there is no argument that it’s one of the best. Featuring a star-studded line-up of like-minded players like Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, James Burton, Chris Ethridge, and Bernie Leadon, this 1969 record starts out with Young’s impassioned interpretation of the O.V. Wright/Otis Redding classic “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” which offers an emphatic bookend to Parsons’ own country-soul masterpiece “Dark End of the Street,” recorded the same year with the Flying Burrito Brothers. The rest of the record (produced by Tommy LiPuma) is a beautifully-paced blend of covers and originals, highlighted by Young’s immortal “Seven Bridges Road,” memorably covered by The Eagles among many others. Rock, Salt and Nails has somehow never been reissued on vinyl in the U.S.; our pressing comes in natural, “rock salt” vinyl.

Whoah---Oklahoma Red Dirt Country Singer Jake Flint, 37, Dies A Few Hours After Getting Married! Was he good? And what is a Red Dirt Country Singer?

Red Dirt Country is contemporary Honky Tonk Country from Texas/Oklahoma, named for the soil in the latter state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dirt_%28music%29?wprov=sfla1

Saw that Caramanica picked American Heartbreak as his AOTY. Would be interested to know if anyone else here took to it (or not) and why.

He loved it. I still need to listen to Zach Bryan more.

Not from an end of year list , but in a concert review Washington Post ‘s C Richards calls Kelsey Waldon his fave country album of the year

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/12/06/kelsey-waldon-concert-review/

About half of the new Waldon is seeming pretty strong musically, but the rest tends to be settings for tired platitudes (making her Appalachoid voice go positively quaint at times), which she seems to regard as hard-won wisdom, shared with us in a down-to-earth way: she's always had that likable manner, and whatever gets her through the night--she's mentioned problems with the bottle---but as a listener, I'd rather she didn't rely entirely on what sound like originals. Previously, as discussed on Rolling Country over the years she's had a way with covers, even did an all-oldies EP: a tad uneven, as always w her, but bracing enough, and certainly more substantial than typical quarantine stopgaps.

Good melding of covers and originals on Melissa Carper's Ramblin' Soul: yes, she's ramblin' through Nashville (with for inst. Chris Scruggs and Sierra Ferrell), Memphis, NOLA, Austin, Houston, and San Antone (or anyway I can imagine Doug Sahm singing all of this): musically, and that's where it counts. Her voice and the overall honky tonk shothouse living room space heater indie budget atmosphere keep it ramblin' country soul. She sounds *kind of* like Parton w/o the hard sell, relaxing on the axis, but reflecting, even yearning a bit, with memories and insights all coming back around to the present,swirling like whatever's in her glass. I'm also thinking about the better originals of Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks, Asleep At The Wheel, although there are a couple of clunkers, pro forma retro. But most of it works for sure, without reaching the sneaky imaginative peaks (among other peaks) of last year's Daddy's Country Gold. Strong closer and theme song: "And when we're holdin' each other so tight/It's like a romantic old movie/That only comes in black and white/No, they don't make 'em like they used to/That's why I'm holdin' on to you."
https://melissacarper.bandcamp.com/album/ramblin-sou

sorry, here's the link: https://melissacarper.bandcamp.com/album/ramblin-soul

Also greatly enjoying current Willie, Miranda, Caroline Spence, (most of) Sunny Sweeney. The very consistently sombre-to-low-key production style of Humble Quest pulls even one of the best songs, "Background Music," toward the background of my attention/sympathy span(yes, Crisso/McCain and I value her poptastics of yore)(or at least get a little louder, faster, something, sometime).

"sombre"? Sombrero? Oui, but make it 'somber."

As Tipsy Mothra posted on Rolling Obits:

Longtime Nashville country music writer (and musician) Peter Cooper, at just 52 from a head injury.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/12/07/peter-cooper-acclaimed-country-music-journalist-and-musician-dies-at-52/69707124007/

I previewed the show when he and Eric B. came to Columbus OH in 2010---good, and good alb"

Eric Brace and Peter Cooper
Saturday @ The Red Door Tavern
Singer-songwriters Eric Brace and Peter Cooper have fancy resumes in journalism, but don’t hold that against them. You Don’t Have To Like Them Both finds the intrepid reporters tracking a community of frequently melancholy, always observant and opinionated souls, walking space and time after midnight. The vocal and instrumental harmonies of Brace, Cooper, and others gleam like headlights, while their rolling country stroll can get droll, though never really laid back. “We used to fly like we had wings/When we were easier to please.”

Brennen Leigh did nice old school duets record w/Jessie Dayton back in the 2000s.

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, September 15, 2022 10:01 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

she also just made a good western swing album with Asleep at the Wheel: https://brennenleigh.bandcamp.com/album/obsessed-with-the-west

― alpine static, Thursday, September 15, 2022 10:54 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

That Brennen Leigh & A@tW album is fantastic; she did a whole album of Lefty Frizzell covers a couple of years ago, too, and it was definitely worth checking out. And I've been a Willis fan since her major label run in the early 90s. She's long been one of the very best there is.

― jon_oh, Friday, September 16, 2022 7:26 AM

Leigh and Carper's hooks have been duking it out in my head all weekend--time to set them both against xpost Live Forever: A Tribute To Billy Joe Shaver Sandy voice x adhesive accompaniment of the pop master in hobo's clothing were adequate & then some on his original tracks, so this is one of those tribs where it's more about what the songs can do for cover artists (incl. those who could use some better material) than vice-versa/just wanna hear something new by reliable faves.
In the first category, Edie Brickell and Nathaniel Rateliff are so far seeming a tad too merely modest & hopeful; in the second, Miranda's kinda close to that vocally, but does present quite rollicking studio band. Amanda Shires seems like she's going to do likewise, but after the pickers launch into a yowly tomcat hoedown, she jumps on top, getting louder and stronger.
Willie Nelson's fiery, exhorting his fellow organisms and himself all through "Live Forever" and "I Been To Georgia On A Fast Train," ditto Margo Price & Joshua Hedley, on the subtly building "I'm gonna rig up my old truck," and take ass to town, to carouse or whutever: point is, agency is refound, or looked up in the phonebook of mind, at least.
Deepest takes: Rodney Crowell's fluid "Old Fivers and Dimers," Allison Russell's slow burn "Tramp on Your Street."

absolutely terrific album just recently released ... surprised to see no mention of it here, given the recent feature story in the New York Times:

https://adeemtheartist.bandcamp.com/album/white-trash-revelry

this is gonna cause late-season trouble in my 2022 top 10!

^ nice. Thanks for the tip.

damn - definitely into this. Thx!

Yeah---and even if the songs weren't good, the autobio is excellent in itself.

Also thanks to this thread, I just now listened to all of xxxxetcpost(s) Zach Bryan's American Heartbreak for the first time. 34 songs, 2 hours and 1 minute by Spotify's count, so I thought I might break it up into two (or more) sessions, but no prob. Detailed turns of words and music---sometimes plot twists, ripping the Band-Aid off---replenished and pulled me right through it all, like it does the semi-beautiful loser narrator---sometimes alarmingly, when I get the impression that he's throwing himself once again at and through (also at) a bright blue winter sky wall---with relationships like vines, and space heater electrification: country as hell, and with a musical valentine to closing time itself, "when the world gets close," looping through "a wild man's weary ways" to a spot of morning light when you're always/so far looking good and "The Road I Know" as his final reward (on the album).

And I 'ppreciate that he doesn't blame other people more than himself--it's much less about brooding on a barstool than keep a-goin', one hand on the wheel, the other holding a drink (phone on in holder, so can record life's demos on the fly).

From Big Ears Festival newsletter:

Rarely do we find Big Ears Festival artists featured in year-end lists for best country albums. Adeem the Artist is an exception, landing on many end-of-year lists including Billboard Magazine staff picks for 2022 for their new record "White Trash Revelry." As a resident of Knoxville, Adeem's singular talent captured our attention a while back and now the whole world is catching on. A couple of weeks ago, Grayson Currin penned a wonderful profile for the New York Times.

xp+xxp, great posts! It's sprawl is a big part of its appeal for me. Unruly in the best sense of the word. Take its 12 best tracks, and it may not make my top ten of the year. As it stands, it'll definitely rank.

Wilson's 2021 album is one of the decade's best.

Who Wilson? Lainey Wilson? Or someone else I'm overlooking?

Lainey's 2021 album was def. in my Top Ten, as I think I listed and described way upthread. still gotta check this year's follow-up.
Also need to find my copy of this 2012 Top Ten pick, which got its Tenth Anniversary reissue this fall:

James Hand's Mighty Lonesome Man tracks the fine print white line of life's little ups and downs with mighty fine timing--unafraid to venture beyond deft wordplay into details that could easily keep him orbiting in mental and emotional rituals eternally--but 12 items, 34 minutes, as Windows Media Player sums up, hand him off, pass him along in the alone-together jukebox of honky tonk pop (where he can be alone-together with Billy Joe Shaver, for instance). Good in the background or foreground; I'm tempted to say he'll be there when you get there--he's a stand-up guy--but whatcha say James? "Let's do it now, before they use a plow, 'cause then I won't be no earthly good to you."

Oh yeah: came out Oct. 14, up to 15 tracks now, and he's also on this Johnny Cash trib, with Austin Lucas, Chuck D feat. Bob Log III, Left Lane Cruiser, Charlie Parr, and a bunch of people I never heard of, which isn't unusual for tribs:
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/johnny-cash-tribute-james-hand-reissue-coming-from-hillgrass-bluebilly/

Another one that works in the foreground and background (somewhut simultaneously, since headphones suddenly expired and I'm listening on tiny laptop speakers), is the new Lainey, whose voice thrives on rockin'-country/not country-rock sound designs, which also inform well-paced ballads, poignant enough despite titles like "Weak End"(with "leak in" and "bleed in" enhancing been-there tone), "You And Me and Jesus," and even "Heart Like a Truck."

Yeah, Lainey.

the new Lainey, whose voice thrives

Pony Bradshaw has an album coming out 1/27/23, will tour---more info, links here:
https://mailchi.mp/eca127076fe9/new-album-north-georgia-rounder-15596832?e=57613df00d
What I said last year, on the first annual not-ballot (since Himes fucked up)

For Further Study (everything here, but especially this)

Pony Bradshaw, Calico Jim: "I'm a time-traveling bush in a barrel of poo"? He could be singing that, in this context, but he doesn't sound worried about it, maybe because he's still traveling; he does mention "wrecked in a tireless life" a couple of times soon after, but doesn't say who's wrecked, though maybe he means it in a vehicular, not narcotic sense; one is likely as the other here, but he always sounds lucid, in a usually murmury way, but also like a more dynamic Jackson Browne, usually with toe-tapping, fingerpicking melodies (while insisting that the counterpoint under those "has to breathe": not hearing any in the usual sense, think he's thinking about a stubborn way of life, counterclockwise even to itself at times, it seems). Voice and arrangements can rise, grow drums, hard chords; steel and/or slide answers the call for a "Sawtooth Jerico." The people in these songs of shamelessly flamboyant Southern Gothic environments, seeing and raising expected themes and terms, try not to fall off of or slide down "Dope Mountain" 'til they want to, and it's a real place, with stolen copper wire stashed in the old mine, finally good for something again, and lots of vines and lines and lives to get tangled.

Spirituality is another common interest. A hillbilly preacher sucks poison from the ankle of the young widow, as their faces turn different colors—he's a snakehandler, and apparently prepared to do that in certain cases, although seems like it defeats the point in church? But they're on a date,, and I guess she just stepped where she shouldn't have been stepping (further study needed; all this precarious detail makes me want to be careful too).

Things get ecumenical in "Guru," where we start out bonded "in the bowels of a coma." Must be good stuff, also leaving room for (true-to-life)'billy self-awareness: "Stretch out your vowels, son, and show your pedigree." But soon enough, maybe by the next course, "We got high as Heaven, tweaked on God and crystal meth," oh yeth. Also mellow moments of romance, out under the North Georgia stars; "I ain't no shaman, " but bring it on babe. Hmm. So many lines, images rippling by, it seems impossible to bring up a satisfyingly representative dipper, so far.

I expect us to get burnt out on the road. I even welcome it. The edge is where we find truth. I always seem to be looking for a human/mankind truth more than a personal truth. Personal truths are shaped by our own ego, our own wants and needs, and I just don’t find myself that interesting or trustworthy. I hope to see y’all out on the road next year. We’ll be carving out these songlines across the country, singing our world into existence.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-country-americana-albums-2022-1234648516/kane-brown-different-man-1234648559/ A fairly wide-ranging round-up, and some of these I agree with, some I really really don't, several that I haven't yet heard seem implausible, based on previous offerings, but several more are intriguingly described, will check.

A few more appealing possibilities I hadn't heard of, w reminders of others, and some I have heard: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1134907922/the-best-roots-music-of-2022

One of the Stone picks, Paul Cauthen's Coming Down Country. does have the "funk 'n' twang" arrangements, as promised, but these usually seem earthbound, keeping Cauthen's wobbly Waylonisms on a short leash, though he manages to sound out of breath anyway. 10 songs in 30 minutes usually seems like a good idea, though here it may be that the tracks aren't given enough time/pressure to develop--either that or they're mercifully brief. However, "Til The Day I Die" works as what I think of as International Country, with *kind of* a Romance Language 50s-60s phrasing brushing by, as written, but the short leash keeps it from being lavishly oversold, and Cauthen is poised here, in an unpretentious way---ditto on "Roll on By," with Elton-McCartney piano hooks, and "Country Coming Down" relaxes the Waylonism into warm, sing-along descending melody. But usually, he's fronting. "Country as Fuck" seems to work alright, though, wobbles in the trailer park-associated imagistic entrophy and all (he sounds old or worn here,but still got tattoos and whiskers by cracky.)

Have not heard the Crockett album at 2 on the RS list. Any good?

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/the-best-mainstream-country-albums-of-2022/

Have not heard the Crockett album at 2 on the RS list. Any good?

― Indexed, Wednesday, December 21, 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, it's good. Given how prolific he is I have other albums by him that I like a lot more, though it might just be that I heard them first and the novelty is beginning to wear off. I don't think the actual quality has dropped off at all.

Some of these lists are the EOY content I was most looking forward to. But they also are coming at a point where my ears might be a little too burned out on binging other lists to give any of it a fair shake.

xpost The Charley is very good in its way but yeah, I feel more detached from this particular set than I want to be, so far (will listen more). Variations on, maybe scenes from the fantasy life of someone who would kinda like to be The Red-Headed Stranger, but mainly he's thinking about heading to/through Texas (he's from Waco, but passing through Atlanta etc.?). with this Pioneer Days/rocking horse Western cadence (at one point singing about "Cowboy Candy"), and I like the way his gruff voice rolls around in his head, not that tight dry Texas thing, and sometimes he goes sideways into a 60s-type Black jazz-blues-folk groove like Oscar Brown Jr. meets terse Ramsey Lewis and makes it fit thematically---but the revenge-ish themey-ness is very persistent and something I have limited interest in to start with.

Although the protagonist's limited enthusiasm is entertaining and credible (in a mostly conceptual, limited way): sounds like he knows he reallly isn't gonna get any satisfaction from this relationship, even if he goes through with his plan of sorts

Well I scanned through the Rolling Stone and NPR lists and the one that's really jumped out at me is Anna Tivel, Outsiders, totally up my alley. She's got a lot of albums--this looks to be her fifth or sixth--but I've never heard of her before. Really enjoying it.

She is, indeed, great, but is best known in the Northwest, for sure.

Her significant other (unless things have changed) is Jeffrey Martin, who is also a terrific folk singer based in Portland. This is my favorite record of his, and the first track is (imo) a stunner: https://jeffreymartinportland.bandcamp.com/album/one-go-around

Listening to the Adeem record. Can't believe "Books & Records" isn't a Lori McKenna tune.

that is a terrific record ... good the first time, and growing on me, too.

Yeah, I wanna check Tivel too, thanks for the encouragememt!
Good point about McKenna, wonder if she's heard Akeem? The word is spreading among Akeem-inclined listeners, for sure.
Reminds me:the McKennaesque combo of kitchen sink realism x dynamics has been growing on me every time I listen to the Kaitlin Butts EP.
(Warning! Do not do this on a Windows 7 Dell laptop---go straight to the library and TURN IT UP on a Dell Windows 10 desktop. On the former, her voice sounds little and thin and crowded by the band.)

Properly heard (via new $30.00 Koss over-ear cans), she has no prob finding room, even when in the nasty, roiling, rippling regular guitar and steel guitar hallways of "Jackson." The band even saves the one substandard script, the title song, which is as static as the life it describes. The backing drone and guitar break of "She's Using Again" have a narcotic trace, and Butts esp. scores w mention of "getting straight," getting normie functional enough to do whatever you gotta do, esp. re: scoring again, and again. This not so much scolding or even complaining, just once again observing (to someone who really isn't listening) how you're doing this again: the observer, who seems to have a close connection (now changed) to the user, has to some extent become part of the routine, the normalization.
Which goes well with "Blood"'s "You're in my veins, " as the cyclic music rises, like xpost "So This is Christmas" ("And what have you done"), yes, and "Stewball" before it. This is the one where I also started hearing her as filling the Iris DeMent gap---suffering a little by comparison, since she doesn't have DeMent's somewhat impulsive way with phrasing, like she's thinking about driving the County Bookmobile somewhere way off---but Iris ain't here, so I'll take it, and would anyway.

Nevertheless, also can't help noticing, from the first minute of the first listen, that Ingrid Andress sounds like nobody I can think of but herself, while leaping from peak to peak on Good Person (she's suddenly struck by that phrase, even wheels around to ask somebody what that's like, and did they ever do anything bad [sounds like she's wondering if you can do that and what is it if you can also still be good, as considered by yourself and others: she does give you room and inclination to think about stuff like that, with breadcrumbs in the whirlwind).

Also bounces phrases off intractable and/or impassive love-hate objects (and even ones that ask wtf: well, since you've asked, she'll come out of her shell)(for instance busting a steady for cheating on her with her younger self), also bouncing them off intractability itself: "My parents have lived in the same house for almost 40 years now, and the only time they were ever on the same page, it was in their high school yearbook." Ha, good one, next (what are they gonna say to that? "No!" "I tried!" "Duh!" Anything?)

But the real test is, will the country pop sonic revelry (sorry, Akeem) turn to mush when she starts being breadcrumbed back to the new love experience? No. Although I won't say just how that goes (Merry Whatever, Happy New Year, and good luck to all concerned, as always).

This is the one where I also started hearing her as filling the Iris DeMent gap---suffering a little by comparison, since she doesn't have DeMent's somewhat impulsive way with phrasing, like she's thinking about driving the County Bookmobile somewhere way off---but Iris ain't here, so I'll take it, and would anyway.

Well I'll be..

Wow, yall right about Anna Tivel, damn. People at a crossroads, living there, wherever they go, incl. back to bed. Despite some small electric appliances with the finger-picking, sounds less like Americana per se than Oregon country: the rain, the city, timberland, desert, roads, schoolbook images of the Trail not too far away. Wondering if some songs will seem too similar, but so far I notice that each one has its own details, as written, performed (incl. by uncredited players), recorded. Bandcamp has the lyrics, which aren't strictly necessary--what a sound---but good to get more detail right away:
https://annativel.bandcamp.com/album/outsiders

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/zach-bryan-drops-live-album-titled-all-my-homies-hate-ticketmaster-while-vowing-to-find-ticketing-work-around-for-2023-tour/ar-AA15EJDi

No Dep Readers Poll:
https://www.nodepression.com/no-depression-readers-50-favorite-roots-music-album-of-2022/ 50! That's a lotta unpaid work.

Their Writers Poll:
https://www.nodepression.com/critics-poll-nd-writers-favorite-roots-music-albums-of-2022?utm_source=No+Depression+Newsletter&utm_campaign=212c25f0a4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_12_27_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_659325596f-212c25f0a4-226384157&mc_cid=212c25f0a4&mc_eid=b850f832a1

Hot on the heels of our annual Readers Poll, we checked in with No Depression’s staff and contributors to get their takes on the best roots music albums released in 2022.

As usually happens, there’s only a little overlap between the two polls, but the good news is everybody’s right, and everybody wins.

Put cursor over title, see vid:
https://folkalley.com/top-25-favorites-of-2022-listener-poll-results/

Heard Anna Tivel's "Heroes" on the Saving Country Music SOTY playlist -- truly excellent, and am excited to dig into the album.

Have spent more time with Adeem -- can't shake this feeling that a few of his tunes are straight Lori McKenna knock offs.