It’s late October, and we’re breathing chill, autumnal air, damp with death and lit by the blood moon. During these darkest of nights we while away our witching hours and pay homage to our devils. We reflect on fear itself, and what we realize to be the most frightening is not the bogeys, demons, and monsters outside–it’s the monsters on the inside. In other words, the ideal subject material for real country music.
Many moons ago, we parted the dark skies of time to become a member or log in.
Nearly two decades into their career, it makes sense that Drive-by Truckers would be releasing another live album, their first since 2000's Alabama Ass Whuppin'. Given that their catalog has grown to ten studio albums, there's a wealth of material to pull from. But 2015 has been an interesting year for Patterson Hood of DBT as well. He penned a well-regarded editorial for the New York Times over the summer in response to the church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina that gave the band a new bit of attention not seen before. Ahead of the release of their new live album It's Great to Be Alive this Friday, Patterson Hood sat down with Aquarium Drunkard to discuss the various versions of the band, the fine details of planning a live album, recording in the historic Filmore in San Francisco, his article for the Times and how a flag with Hank Williams Sr. on it may not be such a bad idea after all.
Aquarium Drunkard: You talked in the press release for this album about how much you love this version of the band. And as a fan of the band, given the member turnover, I think of this as Drive-by Truckers Mach 4.0. So how would you compare this version of the band to earlier iterations?
Patterson Hood: It's got a great chemistry, and the individual parts are all great, but it's got a really good chemistry. There's a lot of camaraderie, really close. It's like when you're in high school and you play in rock bands and you have this idealized version of how you think it ought to be. It's kind of the closest I've ever had to that band. Everybody is just smokin' good in the band. We actually enjoy hanging out and that's cool.
I guess, Mach 1 of the band - which honestly was kind of Mach 2 - but the first lineup that really toured, when we finally gelled into something we could take on the road, in 1998, '99, it was a four-piece version of the band. There were some elements of that band that I always really loved, and that I kind of missed in the later incarnations because we were stripped down, it was pretty lean and mean. We were out there in the van playing 250 shows one of those years - just a ridiculous number of shows and working really hard. But there was a good camaraderie about that. And when we did the reissue of Alabama Ass Whuppin' the other year, I was really loving just how stripped down and rockin' the arrangements were. It was really pretty primal and pretty fun. I think in later incarnations we'd gotten away from that for awhile. Everything got real crazy.
We had the line-up of the band with Jason [Isbell] which was a great version of the band and a very successful version of the band. It's the version that made a couple of our best records and really hit a lot of ground. But it also was a turbulent time. We had a hard time in that era - not just with him, but with life in general. That's when it became pretty serious and became kind of a business and we had to adjust to working with things like management and record labels and shit like that. All these things that take away time from the creative part of it. You kind of have to learn to navigate and not let it drive you crazy. And the era after that was the band trying to rebuild and become good again after losing as vital a part of the band as Jason was. And there were a lot of difficulties in that era. But we kind of landed on this and it's the best of a lot of different worlds. Everyone is really tight. It's corresponded with a time in our life that's a lot better, too. We're happy with our record deal. We have great management, a great booking agent. All the different moving parts work well. So, we're able to really focus on the good stuff, you know - being creative and writing and trying to make as good a record as we can without all the distractions. It's a pretty good time for it all.
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On Southland Mission, Phil Cook has hit his stride. The record, which found him weeping upon listening back to demos alone in a cabin in Gailax, VA is a testament to the community of inspiring and talented individuals Phil has reveled in and continues to give back to. After serving as musical director on I’ll Find A Way with longtime heroes The Blind Boys of Alabama, Phil had a revelation -- one that that has since provided the inspiration for a record that is pure in every sense of the word.
Speaking with Cook during a European tour opening for The Tallest Man on Earth, he speaks of nothing but gratitude for the team effort Southland has been. He tells us this record made life easier, clearer for him. Phil if you’re reading this, the feeling is mutual.
Aquarium Drunkard: Is this the first run of dates in Europe for the new record?
Phil Cook: I did some shows when I was opening for Hiss Golden Messenger. I was opening the show and then playing in his band in February. Doing these tunes, but the record wasn’t out, I was just like hey just so you know, I got a record coming out this fall. This is the first time I got to have the thing for sale, and playing the tunes and talking about the record and it’s really exciting.
AD: How has the response been over there?
Phil Cook: I love it so much. It’s been so fun. Tallest Man’s fans are fans of good music. They love what he does and I think they are coming out and have been really appreciative and kind and listening. They’re open to shit. I just want people to be relaxed and be themselves and have a good time. I try to make people feel comfortable right away. There’s no mystery to what I’m doing.
AD: It seems like you value the idea of building a certain degree of trust with your audience.
Phil Cook: Luckily, the door that I’ve found into music was so pure. I feel lucky that it was just a love of the music itself. It was never, not once about getting chicks. It was never about that or magazines or pictures and posters. It’s just about records. I get older and I kind of meet more people from that funky old tribe of dudes where it really is just about the music. Music has given me my best friends in the entire world. It’s brought me all over the place. It introduced me to places and people. I have nothing to feel but grateful at the end of the day.
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You may never have heard the name Labi Siffre before but you’ve definitely heard his music. One of London’s unsung musical heroes, Siffre was born in Hammersmith in 1945 and, between 1970 and 1975, released some of the most expertly mixed blends of funk-jazz-soul-folk you’ll ever experience this side of Bill Withers. In fact, you have heard–consider, first, the fact that the slinky instrumental break from Siffre’s ‘I Got the…’ provided the hook on Eminem’s "My Name Is" (let’s, for the moment, leave to one side the fact that it has also helped shape songs by Primal Scream and Miguel). Next, consider the fact that "It Must Be Love," yes that song everyone thinks Madness wrote, was actually written by the same guy. Here we have a stretch, a spectrum of music-making perhaps unequaled by anyone but those we deem The Greats. See the genre-busting of Curtis Mayfield. See the crossovers of Carole King and Laura Nyro. Before his retirement at the end of the 70’s (and a brief resurgence, post-Madness) Siffre was a master of the same flexibility.
Which of course, made his albums hard to pigeonhole (and perhaps harder to promote). Bill Withers, of course, always had gospel underpinning his acoustic leanings–it was detectable and it had a category. Siffre, oftentimes underpinned his songs with English folk, cabaret, show tunes, a little jazzy Van Morrison, a little Cat Stevens. In 1972, a breezy proto-Paul Weller song like "Cannock Chase" just wasn’t going to fit comfortably on an R&B chart anymore than a Pop Chart (unless said chart was in an already kaleidoscopic musical landscape in, say, Holland). But damn if it wasn’t the airwaves’ loss.
Labi Siffre :: Give Me Just A Little More Line
Less to do with cocaine than a lover’s sense of autonomy, Siffre’s "Give Me Just a Little More Line" is the quintessence of his leftfield stance as a singer-songwriter. A majestic, melancholy blues chant that makes you want to weep with sympathy within the first few measures. A high-flying voice that shares as much with Peter Gabriel as Mayfield. The horns don’t punch, they underpin. At the forefront instead is a silky string section, sweeping up the emotional register of the song, making it pine even harder for that titular line to be loosened up.
Siffre also had the ability to pare things back even further, and one of the delights of listening to his albums is how quick he is to follow a killer groove (see "The Vulture") with the lightest of touches. Sometimes it can be a little coy, sometimes cheekily camp, but mostly these hot-cold tendencies settle into their own laidback acoustic languor. If you can imagine Janis Ian, Joan Armtrading, and Tracy Chapman all getting together for drinks, at least one of them would have to have a Labi Siffre record close to hand. It’s also saying something that you can look through the man’s back catalog and find songs taken up (not only by Eminem and Madness) but Kelis, Kanye, and Kenny Rogers.
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Lagniappe (la ·gniappe) noun ‘lan-ˌyap,’ — 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.
Diane Coffee (née Shaun Felming) returned to the fray earlier this year with his second full-length, Everybody's A Good Dog, following up his 2013 self-recorded solo debut. Like pals and bandmates Foxygen, Coffee's brand of psych-pop deftly mines the past, usually with a knowing nod and wink. Here, Coffee re-imagines become a member or log in.
With its pedal steel leads, Gram-and-Emmylou-style harmonies, and social realist imagery, Mark Jones’ Snowblind Traveler hitchhikes down some of the same highways as the LA burnout LPs of the early 1970s and Bruce Springsteen’s first three albums. Salem, VA-based singer-songwriter-producer Jones might not have been able to afford top LA session talent. Nor did he enjoy the backing of music industry machers like Mike Appel, Jon Landau, or Clive Davis. Yet he nevertheless succeeded in creating an appealingly ragged collection of songs that sounds as if they could have been recorded 9 years earlier and 2,460 miles further west, perhaps during one of Springsteen’s pre-Columbian trips to the west coast.
Jones’ stripped-down arrangements have more frayed edges than a thrashed Levis Type III. Still, not one of Snowblind Traveler’s eleven compositions would have seemed out of place on an early ‘70s Elektra or Asylum release. Jones’ lyrics, however, offered a blunt rebuttal to canyon rock’s pastoral yearnings. At the turn of that decade LA burnouts like John Philips and Gene Clark had temporarily traded habits for horses and groupies for domestic bliss, heading back to the land or out to the country in pursuit of solitude, authenticity, and redemption. The music that emerged from these rural retreats narrated their escapes from the sinful city and extolled the simple virtues of their new lives in their bespoke timber cabins or make-believe ranches.
Nearly a decade after the rural rock exodus Jones appropriated its sonic palette to present a series of stark, documentary-style portraits of the sorts of places that the LA refugees had dreamed of retiring to. This wasn’t the American south that Delaney Bramlett had once reminisced about. Indeed, there is not a cotton field, ray of early morning sunshine, or sprinkle-faced lady to be found on Jones’ album. It was a landscape whose defining features were the scars left behind by the economic and environmental catastrophes of the mid-1970s. Like Springsteen, Jones confronted his listeners with arresting snapshots of abandoned storefronts, soul-snuffing factories, and working-class zeroes plotting their escapes from dying small towns. In doing so he affirmed the dignity of these places and people, replacing small-town caricatures with three-dimensional renderings of life in flyover America.
Snowblind Traveler is a collection of self-contained yet thematically-linked first-person accounts of small-town decay, confinement, longing, escape, failure, and survival. Its nameless characters describe their hometowns as “lion traps” and their jobs as “bad dreams.” In “What You Get” a blue-collar worker with a few in him explains the perks of his gig at the local lumber yard to the anempethetic accompaniment of Mike Calaway’s peppy pedal steel licks: “Though the hours are tough to take, the work’s too hard.” He goes on to recount a friend’s barstool confession: “Said I need to spread these wings and fly, leave this world behind.” Other characters likewise share half-baked fantasies of one-way tickets that will take them as far away as possible. Save for passing allusions to “southwest cities where the sun is guaranteed” or “the highlands,” destinations are rarely mentioned. The insinuation is that literally anywhere would be better than Virginia or the power plant or Harrisburg, where, according to the song of that title, “things that can’t be seen control you.”
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 408: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ The Beach Boys — Surf’s Up (solo piano) ++ Bedlam’s Offspring — I’ll Be There ++ The Emperors — I Want My Woman ++ The Blue Rondos — Baby I Go For You ++ The Graham Bond Organisation — Early In The Morning ++ Bo Diddley — Bo Diddley ++ Cat — Do The . . .
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Here in the west, it’s finally starting to feel like autumn. As the sunset comes earlier each evening, it’s been hard to get Joan Shelley’s beautiful Over and Even off the turntable. Deep hued and haunted, it’s built on simple blocks that add up impeccably: Shelley sings and plays guitar with accompaniment by guitarist/Alan Lomax Archive curator Nathan Salsburg (who recently released a phenomenal duo recording with James Elkington). Recorded live in Kentucky by engineer Daniel Martin Moore, there are lilting touches — Will Oldham adds his voice, Rachel Grimes adds piano — but nothing ever gets in the way of Shelley’s clear, impossibly warm voice.
Shelley spoke with Aquarium Drunkard on the phone to discuss roots music, songwriting challenges, and note taking.
Aquarium Drunkard: You wrote much of Over And Even in Greece? Did you draw specific inspiration from your surroundings?
Joan Shelley: I wrote almost all the songs while kind of stranded for a month in Greece. It was ahead of a tour in Ireland and the U.K. The most influential part [while writing] was that I was going to try this theory of writing one song every day — which I had previously been super suspicious of. I knew that if you wrote a song every day, they can’t all be good, or maybe I’d run out — that was a fear. So, I was just going to practice writing one a day that month there, which actually seemed to work. As far as the influences of the surroundings…because mostly everyone spoke English as a second language there, I wanted to communicate. I feel like that’s what influenced the songs the most: just wanting to feel human relationships I wasn’t having.
AD: You recorded this mostly live in Kentucky. What’s the story there?
Joan Shelley: It was this very nice, spacious house in Kentucky. It was a ‘70s, kind of freaky experimental architect’s house that my friend was renting. It’s in the woods near where I grew up just outside of Louisville. Daniel Martin Moore set up his mics and a few things and Nathan and I just went and banged it out.
AD: I feel like sometimes people call your songs “sad,” and I certainly can hear that in them, but not only sadness. I hear beauty, resignation, contentment, and melancholy. Do you ever feel sad playing them?
Joan Shelley: I don’t feel sad, no. There is a great lecture of Garcia Lorca called “On Lullabies.” There are lullabies in Spain he was noticing that were really dark and morbid: a mother telling a child, “You’re going to get lost in this scary world and a monster is going to eat you”; or, “You’ll fall from the tree and break the cradle.” He got to the point of saying that music is this soft bed we make to explore some of our darkest fears, because that’s where you make a safe space. I think that resonated with me in that what I’m trying to do is make that soft bed. I’m not trying to make anybody sad, but there are things we're all thinking about anyway, so what not show them the light?
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Amid a now decades-long glut of roots music reissues, reappraisals, and deep cuts, one would think the keg would eventually kick. But that sure as shit isn’t the case with Legends of Old-Time Music: Fifty Years of County Records–there’s so much going on in this 4-CD box set that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Co-produced by Grammy-winning music historian Christopher King, an impossible amount of research went into this collection, both in the music and the meticulous liner . . .
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Will Toledo, the 23-year-old songwriter behind Car Seat Headrest, is not sweating the release of Teens of Style, his Matador Records debut.
He’s excited, sure, but these songs – culled from his massive discography on Bandcamp, where he’s uploaded songs since 2010 – are well broken-in for Toledo. The album will introduce his fuzzed pop to a wide audience, but he’s already started thinking about the next record as his proper “debut.”
“It’s intended to be sort of a compilation,” Toledo says from Seattle, belying the cohesive sound of the new record, for which he re-recorded older compositions with his band. “If definitely takes the edge off the debut when it’s not anywhere near the actual debut,” Toledo says. Fittingly, Teens of Style reads like a greatest hits record. Songs like “Sunburned Shirts,” “The Drum,” and “Los Borrachos” bristle with energy, like prime Pavement or Guided By Voices, with traces of the Beach Boys’ sunny pop and Animal Collective’s endlessly looped melodies. Toledo’s songs are often compared to those of the Strokes, and while they share spiky elements with that band, Toledo’s freewheeling narratives are more akin to those of Courtney Barnett – hilarious, sharp, and whip smart.
Car Seat Headrest :: Something Soon
Toledo began fooling around with GarageBand in high school, inspired by records by Deerhunter, Panda Bear, and Leonard Cohen. The band’s name serves as an origin story: Too embarrassed to record vocals at home, he’d take his laptop to parking lots and record in his parent’s car. These nascent recordings are still available at BandCamp. Rather than scrap them, he figures they might as well be there for anyone who wants them.
“I remember spending a lot of time with the Nirvana boxset,” Toledo says, of the rarities and B-sides collection. “For me, there’s no reason to hide that away until you’ve got a legacy. You might as well leave the story open to whoever wants to check it out.”
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Via Strut Records, Souljazz Orchestra returned last month with Resistance. Compared to previous albums, this one has a very strong French / Caribbean influence, placing it in some of the same territory as label's Sofrito and Haiti Direct releases. To mark the occasion the band put together a mix of vintage French, Caribbean and African material that influenced the record's sound. Notes on the mix, and sonic provenance, via Souljazz's Pierre Chrétien, below.
Souljazz Orchestra is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and Gatineau, Québec, twin cities on each side of the Ontario/Québec border, and a very bilingual area of Canada. Coincidentally, our band is also half Francophone and half Anglophone, and this duality does come out especially on this album. We’ve always had songs influenced by la Francophonie, it’s really a part of who we are as a group (“Secousse Soukous” on Freedom No Go Die, “Tanbou Lou” on Solidarity, “Sommet En Sommet” on Inner Fire, etc.)
Some people, especially those unfamiliar with Canada, don’t get how we got into this stuff. I guess I never really thought about it before, but I'll try to explain...
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Happenstance. Last week while in New York I caught a short ride with a West African cab driver in Brooklyn. Upon entry there was music. "What is this?" I asked. "It's African - Bembeya Jazz National. 1970's. West coast." And while the name was familiar, via a compilation, the sounds were not.
Originally from the Ivory Coast, the driver had been in the states two years, and in his thick patois began to recommend artist after artist, album after . . .
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"[Tom Carter] is tearing a giant hole in the sky right now at @3lobed Hopscotch Fest day show," Yo La Tengo's James McNew tweeted back in September of 2013. And anyone who was there or listening via WXDU's live stream (or heard the NYC Taper recording of the performance after the fact) had to agree. The ex-Charalambides guitarist was making scary-beautiful sounds.
Two years later, we can all finally . . .
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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can now be heard twice, every Friday — Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.
SIRIUS 408: Jean Michel Bernard — Générique Stephane ++ Alain Goraguer - La Femme ++ Carsten Meinert Kvartet - One For Alice ++ Mad A - Aouh Aouh (AD edit) ++ Larry Ellis & The Black Hammer - Funky Thing, Pt I ++ Los Holy’s - Psicodelico Desconocido (Cissy Strut) ++ Bo Diddley - Another Sugar Daddy ++ Harare - Give ++ Jingo - Keep Holding . . .
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Dig into an assortment of choice live recordings from Neil Young's peak 70s period -- the period that will presumably be covered by the next volume of the songwriter's Archives series ... whenever that comes out. Drawn mostly from vintage audience tapes, the focus here is on unreleased tunes (of which this is just a small sampling) and interesting re-arranged versions of classics, such as a solo acoustic "LA" from 1973, or Crazy Horse's raggedly glorious version of "Helpless" in 1976. A master at work... words / become a member or log in.
