The kings of country-rock and outspoken wisdom, Drive-By Truckers, returned this year with their 12th studio album, following 2016’s American Band and the 2018 release of the long-lost Adam’s House Cat album Town Burned Down, which featured Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley recorded before their Truckers days. “The Unraveling” arrives after a prolonged period of writer’s block for Hood and Cooley, easily one of the most impressive song-writing pairs in music’s recent history . On The Unraveling, they pick up right where American Band left off, with searing political commentary and a sharp look at the harsh realities of modern American life. “The past three-and-a-half years were among the most tumultuous our country has ever seen,” Hood said in a press statement, “and the duality between the generally positive state of affairs within our band while watching so many things we care about being decimated and destroyed all around us informed the writing of this album to the core.” And there you have it. It’s a new decade, but the Truckers remain dedicated to the same cause: relaying the truth—no matter how difficult it is to speak—by way of deep-rooted, multifaceted and, perhaps most importantly, southern rock ‘n’ roll.
The longest gap between new Drive by Truckers albums – The Unraveling was recorded at the legendary Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, TN by Grammy Award-winning engineer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price) and longtime DBT producer David Barbe. Co-founding singer / songwriter / guitarists Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood both spent much of the time prior doing battle with deep pools of writer’s block.
The songs that eventually emerged are among Drive-By Truckers’ most direct and pointedly provocative, tackling the myriad horrors of our new normal through sincere emotion and unbridled heart. Indeed, Armageddon’s Back in Town takes a whirlwind joyride through the whiplash of events we collectively deal with each day while the concluding Awaiting Resurrection dives headfirst into the despair and pain roiled up by these troubled times.
The remarkable songcraft found on The Unraveling receives much of its musical muscle from the sheer strength of the current Drive-By Truckers line-up, with Hood and Cooley joined by bassist Matt Patton, keyboardist / multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, and drummer Brad Morgan – together, the longest-lasting iteration in the band’s almost 25-year history. The LP also features a number of special guests, including The Shins’ Patti King, violinist/string arranger Kyleen King (Brandi Carlile), and North Mississippi All-Stars’ Cody Dickinson, who contributes electric washboard to the strikingly direct Babies In Cages.
Like 2016’s ‘American Band,’ ‘The Unraveling’ features a scaled-back Drive-By Truckers surveying the America around them. And for the most part they don’t like what they see. There’s anger (“Thoughts and Prayers”) and reflection (“Armageddon’s Back in Town”) here, but mostly there’s a renewed sense of focus and purpose after a few years of excess and bloat. Singers and songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley once again share the songs, lining up for a portrait of a country in serious need of healing – and this was before the coronavirus and George Floyd.
The Unraveling Drive By Truckers released thru ATO Records.
Katie Ellen’s debut album, 2017’s Cowgirl Blues, saw frontwoman Anika Pyle kicking against the traditions and norms that come with adulthood—namely, love, major life changes, cohabitation, and domesticity. She penned the anti-marriage anthem with “Sad Girls Club,” a standout track that featured the defiant heartbreaker of a chorus: “Sad girls don’t make good wives.” On the Philly band’s new, five-song EP, Still Life, Pyle is still trying to wrap her head around these things.
Was SO excited at the news of this EP, considering that Cowgirl Blues was among my favourite albums of 2017. “Still Life” is particularly resonant for me. It feels so different as Anika showcases her vocal skills even more, with a fuller band sound and even backup vocals, but the emotional quality and content of the song still feels 100% like Katie Ellen. On opener “Lighthouse,” Pyle reckons with warring thoughts—wanting to be brave enough to swim into life’s uncharted deep end, but feeling tied down by the anchor of fear and anxiety. Later, on the EP’s title track, she surrenders to the idea that love is more powerful and wild than our capacity to tame it: “You can’t make love stay / Do your best to hold it in place.”
Musically, Pyle flexes a few new tricks she’s trying out, like on “Still Life,” where her voice spirals into borderline operatic delivery, a far jump from the quick and dirty style she cut her teeth on in her former pop punk project Chumped.
Still Life from Lauren Records. originally released July 20th, 2018
This week Flock of Dimes, the solo project of Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, surprise released a new EP, “Like So Much Desire”, via Sub Pop. The five-song EP is her first release for the iconic Seattle label, which also announced her signing this week. The highlight is probably the title track, “Like So Much Desire.”
Wasner released her debut full-length album under her Flock of Dimes solo project, If You See Me, Say Yes, in 2016 via Partisan. This is the follow-up release. Wasner wrote and produced the EP in her home in isolation and it was mixed by Ari Picker and mastered by Ryan Pickett. Drummer JT Bates recorded his parts from Minneapolis and the strings were recorded in New York by Paul Wiancko, Michi Wiancko, and Ayane Kozasa.
A couple of months ago, like many people, I was alone, lost, and feeling powerless to contribute to the world in any sort of meaningful way. Music has always been how I process existence, how I make some kind of sense out of my life. But in those moments, especially, I was reawakened to the power it has to transform a space, create a mood, to comfort, to heal. The songs I loved took on new meaning, they were a lifeline that slowly brought me back into my body.
This moment in time is not about ME. And I don’t want it to be. I’m eager to be a part of this collective awakening, a joining of forces to fight for a world that values and protects the most vulnerable and marginalized among us.
But at the same time, I know that we need the release that art provides for us, to be inspired, and comforted, and have the energy to persevere. I don’t have illusions of grandeur about this—I’m just a small piece of the puzzle, and I like it that way. But the ability to create and share the things I make with others is what gives my life a sense of purpose. And If anything I make provides any comfort to others along the way, it’s a net positive.
About the songs—they are all about the inseparable nature of desire and grief, joy and loss–two sides of the same coin. They’re linked and they always will be. Don’t let your fear of grief keep you from opening your heart to the beauty that is (still, even now!) all around us. Desire is the first step to imagining a better world.
Thank you so much for listening.
JW
Wasner will be performing a Flock of Dimes livestream concert on Tuesday, June 30th at 7 p.m. ET. Tickets are available here.
Wye Oak (Wasner and Andy Stack) released a new album, The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs, back in April 2018 via Merge Records.
‘Like So Much Desire’ (Release Date: June 23rd, 2020)
Bristol-based musician Fenne Lily announces “Breach”, her second album and first for Dead Oceans Records, out September 18th. It presents a newly upbeat and urgent streak to her songwriting, immediately evident with lead single “Alapathy,” and its accompanying video directed by Benjamin Brook. Breach is an expansive, diaristic, frequently sardonic record that deals with the mess and the catharsis of entering your 20s and finding peace while being alone. It’s the follow-up to 2018’s On Hold, a tender collection of open-hearted songs written during her teenage years which deemed Fenne “a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss” .
Fenne wrote Breach during a period of self-enforced isolation pre-COVID, after a disjointed experience of touring Europe, followed by a month alone in Berlin. The album deals largely with “loneliness, and trying to work out the difference between being alone and being lonely.” Although its subject matter is solitude, it sounds bigger and more intricate than anything Fenne previously released. She recorded with producer Brian Deck at Chicago’s Narwhal Studios, with further work at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini who helped flesh out her sound with vast, rich guitars.
The insistent percussion of the album’s first single, “Alapathy,” mimics the anxious racing thoughts Fenne deals with as an overthinker and chronicles how she “started smoking weed to switch off [her] brain.” The title is a made-up word that merges “apathy” and “allopathic” (as in Westernized medicine). “Western medicine generally treats the symptoms of an illness rather than the cause,” explains Fenne. For Fenne, taking medication to improve her mental health didn’t solve her problems — she felt like she was only treating the effects of her discomfort, not the reason for it. Its stylized accompanying video features Fenne enjoying solitude in various ways.
It’s that journey to find peace inside herself that underpins the whole of Fenne’s second album. Its title, Breach, occurred to Fenne after deep conversations with her mum about her birth, during which she was breech, or upside down in the womb. The slippery double-sidedness of the word – which, spelled with an “A”, means to “break through” – drew her in. “That feels like what I was doing in this record; I was breaking through a wall that I built for myself, keeping myself safe, and dealing with the downside of feeling lonely and alone. I realized that I am comfortable in myself, and I don’t need to fixate on relationships to make myself feel like I have something to talk about. I felt like I broke through a mental barrier in that respect.” Even though it also carries implications of awkwardness, rebellion, and breakage, it’s a wide-reaching word, representing new beginnings and birth.
“Alapathy” the new song by Fenne Lily off ‘Breach’ out September 18th on Dead Oceans.
Tom Petty’s solo masterpiece, “Wildflowers”, will be getting an expanded release. The news was confirmed by his daughter, Adria Petty, in an interview (June 25) on the Tom Petty Channel on SiriusXM. The collection, still referred to as “the Wildflowers project,” “is still not ready,” but a first release – a home demo of his “You Don’t Know How it Feels” – was premiered on the channel during the interview.
With some reported estate squabbles settled, the project is being overseen by Adria and her sister AnnaKim, in conjunction with Petty’s widow, Dana, and the Heartbreakers. Though the LP’s 25th anniversary passed in 2019, fans will likely savour what’s to come. Adria Petty was careful not to make a hard promise on a specific date for the release but the team is aiming for 2020. In the years since Tom Petty released his landmark Wildflowers album, much has been said about the Rick Rubin-helmed sessions and how much unreleased material was left behind as the album evolved. Petty originally had enough songs to release Wildflowers as a double-album – reportedly with at least 26 songs – but was persuaded against it. In 2015, he released a preview track, “Somewhere Under Heaven,” for the release provisionally entitled Wildflowers: All The Rest. But the collection was shelved after his death.
An expanded release of Wildflowers has been discussed for quite some time. Adria Petty said, “[We look forward to putting] this masterpiece in the framing that it deserved.” The finished set will include home recordings and demos. The team decided to put the “You Don’t Know How it Feels” demo out now because “fans have been waiting for this for such a long time,” she said.
“We don’t have my dad’s brilliant ears and eyes,” she said, “but as we were playing the demos, this one put everyone feeling really good. We get to [hear] my dad unpolished. This song is really cool because you see it coming right out of his notebook.”
The long rumoured projected had often been referred to as Wildflowers and All the Rest.
The news had been teased on Petty’s website and on YouTube, which featured an image of a wolf-like figure dressed in human clothing with the phrase “Most Things That I Worry ‘Bout Never Happen Anyway,” a lyric from the album’s “Crawling Back to You.” As a result, the members of the Facebook group Tom Petty Nation spent much of Thursday afternoon speculating on what the release would entail.
Tom Petty died on October 2nd, 2017, one week to the day after he and the Heartbreakers completed their 40th anniversary tour.
“Wildflowers”, was called Petty’s “finest hour as a recording artist and darkest as a songwriter.” The November. 1st, 1994 release was his 10th album and first under a new contract with Warner Bros. Records. Among the original’s 15 songs are such Petty favorites as “You Don’t Know How it Feels,” “You Wreck Me,” “Time to Move On,” and the beautiful title cut “Wildflowers”.
The sounds of Himalayan winds, sacred mantras and water rippling in the holy river Ganges, invite us to “Peradam”, the transcendent new album by Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith. The album, which features guests including Anoushka Shankar, Tenzin Choegal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, will be released 4th September via Bella Union Records.
Peradam takes as its entry point René Daumal’s early 1940s novel Mount Analogue: a Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, in which the French writer, critic and poet mapped a metaphysical journey to “the ultimate symbolic mountain” in search of meaning. In it, Daumal introduced the idea of the “peradam”, a rare, crystalline stone – harbouring profound truths – that is only visible to seekers on a true spiritual path. The band have shared a hypnotic video to the title track, directed by Stephan Crasneanscki and with editing and visual collage by Jenn Ruff.
Peradam arrives as “the final stone”, says Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki, in The Perfect Vision, a triptych of albums that evoke and explore the sainted spaces of thought and creativity opened by the three French writers and poets. After albums devoted to Antonin Artaud (The Peyote Dance) and Arthur Rimbaud (Mummer Love), Peradam expands on “the living space”, says Smith, that Daumal left for future seekers to enter and create out of.
Daumal’s spiritual quests ranged wide and deep. Part-influenced by Rimbaud, he also identified with the Pataphysicians, followers of the avant-garde absurdist Alfred Jarry. Daumal experimented with hallucinogens to the detriment of his health, though he would later transfer his passions to the purity of work as he nurtured a fascination with Hindu philosophies and taught himself Sanskrit; Peradam features some of his translations.
While Daumal embraced the idea of self-abnegation as the key to internal awakening, he was also drawn to the syntheses of Eastern/Western thought in Greek-Armenian philosopher GI Gurdjieff’s teachings. Daumal’s greatest works include the novels A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue, which – though unfinished at the time of his death from TB at 36 in 1944 – inspired psychedelic magus Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain as well as the creative journeys undertaken by Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith.
Peradam will be released 4th September via Bella Union
Nonesuch Records announces the digital release of two Natalie Merchant albums, previously unavailable: “Butterfly”, a studio album featuring four new songs and six reinterpretations from her catalogue arranged for string quartet, and “Rarities”, a collection of 15 rare and previously unreleased tracks recorded between 1998 and 2017. For Rarities, Merchant curated a selection of unique home studio demos, album outtakes, live tracks, and collaborations with diverse artists like Billy Bragg, David Byrne, The Chieftains, Cowboy Junkies, and Amy Helm (complete track list below). Both albums were created for inclusion in The Natalie Merchant Collection released by Nonesuch in 2017, and previously only available as part of the deluxe ten-CD box set.
“Since 2010 I’ve performed mainly as soloist with string ensembles and chamber orchestras. I love the subtle emotional quality strings give to my songs and it’s such a pleasure to reinterpret them in this way. In 2015, we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of my first solo album, Tigerlily, with an album featuring string quartet versions of that material; with Butterfly, I was able to give ‘My Skin,’ ‘Frozen Charlotte,’ ‘Ophelia,’ and ‘The Worst Thing’ the same attention,” Merchant says.
“There are four songs on this album that I think represent some of the best writing of my career: the title track, ‘Butterfly,’ ‘She Devil,’ ‘Baby Mine,’ and ‘Andalucía’,” she continues. “Written over a period of twenty years, these songs represent such different phases of my life and career. What they all share is that none of them fit into previous albums or I was unable to capture a performance that did them justice. Listening to them today, I hear how they truly belong together.”
Merchant notes, “We have all found ourselves living through a very frightening period of history. Our rare and exceedingly beautiful planet is in peril and all the creatures (our species included) feel on the brink of chaos. In the face of crisis, we still search for meaning and reach out for beauty. I hope that Butterfly is received as my offering of beauty and meaning for these times and that it gives solace to anyone willing to listen.”
Merchant’s career began in 1981 when, as a college student, she joined the seminal alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs. As lead vocalist, lyricist, and sometimes pianist, Merchant released six critically acclaimed studio albums with the band. She left the group in 1993, and in 1995 released her multi-platinum solo debut, Tigerlily, followed by the platinum Ophelia (1998) and Motherland (2001). In 2003 she independently released an album of traditional and contemporary folk music, The House Carpenter’s Daughter. In 2010, Merchant returned with a double album, Leave Your Sleep, her debut for Nonesuch Records. In 2014, Nonesuch released Natalie Merchant, her sixth solo album and first of entirely original songs in thirteen years. Nonesuch most recently released Paradise Is There: The New Tigerlily Recordings in 2015, and the Natalie Merchant Collection box set in 2017.
Over the last few decades, it’s becoming increasingly harder to talk about the life and legacy of Uncle Tupelo without the conversation falling down one of the many rabbit holes of the band’s ever-expanding mythos.
By now, most everyone knows the more substantial high points of the band’s dynamic yet short-lived arc. Founding members Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn started playing together in high school in a mid-’80s Belleville, Illinois, band called The Primitives that eventually became Uncle Tupelo after their lead singer (Farrar’s brother, Wade) quit the band and headed to college. The trio played heavily around Illinois and Missouri (especially at St. Louis staples Cicero’s and Mississippi Nights), eventually got an indie label record deal, released three celebrated albums, expanded to a five-piece, got picked up by a major label, released their fourth album, and subsequently imploded due to the mounting creative differences and personal tensions between co-frontmen Farrar and Tweedy. In the aftermath of Uncle Tupelo’s breakup, both artists went on to form the highly influential (and still going strong) bands Son Volt and Wilco, while their original work with Uncle Tupelo has garnered the legacy of being —depending on whom you ask — either just one of a number of genre pioneers that carried forward older music to younger generations or the standalone patient zero for the entire alt-country/Americana/modern roots music movement.
However, on this occasion, the 30th anniversary of Uncle Tupelo’s debut album, No Depression (released June 21st, 1990, on Rockville Records), there will be no attempts at encapsulating all of the “which came first, the genre or the band” equivocations. Instead, we decided to mark the milestone with some specificity, foregoing the conventional family tree retrospective in favour of a reflection on what is arguably one of the most shadow-casting records of the 20th century. To do so, we went directly to the source, speaking with Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy to get their insights and recollections on three decades of their career-starting (if not career-defining) debut release.
“Has it only been 30 years?” laughs Tweedy, a little stunned, a little tongue-in-cheek. “Like most important events, it somehow simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and also … boy, that went fast!” Perhaps underscoring the “opposites attract” theme that is at the most foundational level of their complexly layered relationship, Farrar’s reaction to the anniversary is delivered with a bit more middle-of-the-road measuredness: “Honestly, some time has passed but it doesn’t really feel like it’s been that long. It’s just gratifying that anyone wants to talk about what we did 30 years ago.”
While that last comment might elicit a chuckle from anyone familiar with the everlasting supply of appreciative wistfulness and heated debates that has surrounded the individual and collective impacts of Farrar and Tweedy within the roots music community, there is a point to be made about the “subject to change” legacies of landmark albums and the fickle nature of pop cultural attention spans. There will always be a certain element of musical fandom that is asking “What’s next?”, while another, competing thread is turning the conversation from present-day movements back to the music that came before them. In the case of Uncle Tupelo, and especially their No Depression album, the attempt to address both can be found in their unconventional hybrid of self-penned song writing and encyclopedically referential musical influences that were blended together in ways that allowed the band to function as both creators and conduits.
“We didn’t come up with that whole ‘Woody Guthrie meets Hüsker Dü’ thing. That was probably some publicist along the way,” Farrar says. “Although, it wasn’t that far off. We were fans of Hüsker Dü and certainly there were musical similarities. Lyrically, from Woody Guthrie and essentially Bob Dylan too, we were inspired to think about societal issues and what was going on around us. So, we just put all those things into our songs.” Prime examples of this amalgam can be found on No Depression tracks like “Graveyard Shift,” “Factory Belt,” “Outdone,” and “Train,” where the band mixes the growling guitars and aggressive start-stop rhythms of their punk and indie rock influences with the country and folk-influenced lyrical themes of working-class desperation, economic struggle, anti-war sentiments, down-and-out isolation, and alcohol-soaked small-town blues.
“There were lots of bands — X, The Knitters, Jason and the Scorchers, Green on Red, so many more — already kind of fusing these two worlds that we were straddling,” says Tweedy. “I think our approach to it might have been a little bit more isolated and unrefined. Maybe it came out more punk rock or something, but I think anybody that credits us with inventing anything is wrong.” To further make the point, Tweedy points to the genre-blurring activities of some of his favourite ’60s bands: “We thought there was something boldly punk rock about The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Rolling Stones. To us,
Shortly after inking a record deal with Rockville Records in late 1989, Uncle Tupelo kicked off 1990 by traveling to Boston in the dead of winter to record their debut album at Fort Apache recording studio with famed alternative/college rock producers Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie. At the time, the celebrated production duo had already amassed an impressive recording resume that included Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Blake Babies, and more. (After recording No Depression, Slade and Kolderie would go on to produce Uncle Tupelo’s second record, Still Feel Gone, as well as multiplatinum albums for Radiohead, Hole, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and others).
“Of all the records that Paul and Sean had worked on to that point, I think the Dinosaur Jr. stuff would probably have been the biggest persuader for us,” admits Tweedy. “Being a production team that had worked on records that we actually owned, I think we were really surprised that they would want to work with us. I remember running through the first take of whatever we tried to do on the first day in the studio and Paul coming out and saying ‘Oh, good. You guys can play.’ I don’t think anybody had ever said that to us before.”
“As soon as we met Sean and Paul, there was such a good working camaraderie between us,” Farrar says. “They helped us get some really good guitar sounds and helped us flesh things out in terms of the finished recording being more than just doing what we normally did live. We were blown away when they brought in Rich Gilbert to play pedal steel on ‘Whiskey Bottle’ because that was an instrument that we hadn’t had the opportunity to record with before. He’s also playing that apocalyptic noise part at the end of ‘Factory Belt’ — just doing sweeps up and down the pedal steel with his slide.”
When it came time to package their newly recorded songs into a proper album, the band once again chose to wear its influences on its sleeve. Not only did they create a minimalist album cover aesthetic that mimicked releases from Moe Asch’s midcentury Folkways Records catalogue, but they also titled the album No Depression after the traditional Depression-era folksong “No Depression in Heaven” that is often attributed to the legendary Carter Family. (While they were the first to record it, there is some speculation that A.P. Carter “found” the song more than “wrote” it himself). Uncle Tupelo had also recorded a cover of the song for the album, surprising many by foregoing the buzzier, bombastic side of their sound for a more true-to-form acoustic folk number. The folksy, back porch singalong vibe can also be found on No Depression tracks “Life Worth Livin’” and “Screen Door,” with Farrar adding mandolin to the former and Tweedy swapping out his bass for an acoustic guitar on the latter.
When asked where they got the idea to cover “No Depression,” both Farrar and Tweedy tell the same origin story and make the same point of clarification. Remembers Farrar, “I was digging through my mom’s record collection and found this old folk compilation that had ‘No Depression’ on it. I thought the song really resonated with the themes of Midwest isolation that we often explored, plus it passed the test with Jeff and Mike since it sounded like something Woody Guthrie would’ve done. Though, I should add this was the New Lost City Ramblers version.”
Tweedy gives a similar account, adding, “We really owe a debt to the first folk revival wave from the late ’50s, early ’60s. Years later, I actually got to thank John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers for that when we crossed paths at Newport for this Harry Smith anthology reissue benefit show that Wilco played.”
Since the release of No Depression, both Farrar and Tweedy have each built impressive catalogues of releases between their respective bands and solo albums. Both are also still extremely active in the scene they helped to shape; just last year, Son Volt released Union, Wilco released Ode to Joy, and Tweedy released his second solo album, Warmer. However, there’s a good chance that neither artist will ever fully outstep the larger shadow of what they created together on No Depression. This seems true for both their live shows — “‘Graveyard Shift’ is one that’s been requested a lot over the years,” says Farrar; while Tweedy admits “‘Screen Door’ still gets requested quite frequently when I play solo shows, and although I’m not a big fan of the song, I’m also pretty sanguine about the notion of something surviving that long” — as well as for how the album seems to be a template by which all of their other works are somehow measured in various ways.
In fact, that “long time” Tweedy references might’ve been the majority, if not entirety, of Uncle Tupelo’s run; as the band’s highest accolades and genre pioneering respects only started popping up in the wake of their breakup in May 1994. As Uncle Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn told the Los Angeles Times in early 1996 (at the time, he was playing drums in Farrar’s new band, Son Volt), “Uncle Tupelo is bigger now than ever… I guess death is a great career move.” These days, Farrar expresses some of the same sentiments on that post-mortem timeline: “It must’ve started to some degree around late ’94 or so when we had this vague understanding of an online chat group that had been built around mutual fans of the band.
Both Farrar and Tweedy acknowledge they haven’t sat with No Depression, the album, in quite some time, with the latter even stating, “It’s hard for me to really embrace the first record because I don’t think I had found my voice yet.” However, they both seem to take a mutual sense of pride in the hand-me-down musical ambassadorship inherent in their earliest work’s legacy. Reflects Tweedy, “In hindsight, it’s a thrilling thing to feel that you got to be a part of the actual tradition of sharing this particular knowledge with people that might not have come to it as quickly or maybe would have not even been introduced to it at all.”
In the case of Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression turning 30 years old, Tweedy seems to get the most impassioned when thinking back on not what they were making at the time, but what they were learning — both about themselves and also about the world around them.
“I just remember this overwhelming feeling that Jay and I would talk about getting from listening to folk music and country music, and speaking for myself personally, it was like having the veil pulled back and realizing that the world has always been weird. The world has always been scary. So, when people choose to express themselves with music, it can also be completely untamed. It’s not always shaped by fashion or commercial viability or anything like that; people just want to express themselves with words and noise and sound. That’s what I think we were discovering in Uncle Tupelo.
Not five minutes into the new Will Hoge album and he’s nodding to Black Sabbath.
“First rat off a dead ship / see you sinking like a stone,” the Americana rocker snarls over tense palm-muted chords on punk-metal rager “The Overthrow.” “TV preacher with a fat lip / crying in the pulpit all alone.” By and by the tension breaks, the song launches into a headbanging sprint, and an insistent Tony Iommi-style electric guitar riff cascades like white water.
“The Overthrow” is one endpoint of the continuum comprising Tiny Little Movies, the follow-up to 2018’s fiercely progressive My American Dream. Elsewhere on the spectrum, we have R&B-tinted Americana (“Is this All that You Wanted me For?”), heartland story song (“Midway Motel”), and saccharine Nashville balladry (“All the Pretty Horses”). Rock and roll may be Hoge’s native tongue, and he gives himself to that form’s release and untethered id with unmistakable abandon, yet he’s consistent and fluent in a respectable range of sonic languages.
Indeed, he speaks many on Tiny Little Movies.
“You can’t burn bright in a town this dark,” Hoge sings on the particularly Springsteenian “Even the River Runs Out of this Town,” rust and resignation and sincerity in his voice. “You can’t hitch your wishes to a one-horse star.” Its sparse instrumentation and gorgeous yet lonesome washes of ambient organ chords nod to The Boss’s Tom Joad era, though the straightforward poetry of small-town isolation exemplified by the song’s hook and title is Hoge’s own.
Tiny Little Movies skews toward punk-rock on “Con Man Blues” and folk-rock psychedelia on “Maybe this is Ok,” while “That’s how You Lose Her” evokes the late Tom Petty. “I’ve seen the lights of New York City / I’ve seen the wildflowers bloom,” Hoge sings on the blissful, weightlessly enamored “Likes of You.” “I’ve seen a man go next to crazy / but baby, I ain’t never seen the likes of you.”
For two decades, Will Hoge has carried the torch for American rock & roll, carving out his own blue-collar sound rooted in amplified guitars, melodic hooks, southern soul, and rootsy stomp. It’s a sound that nods to the best moments of the past – the punch of Tom Petty’s anthems; the countrified twang of Buck Owens’ singing; the raw, greasy cool of the Rolling Stones – while still pushing forward into new territory, with Hoge’s storytelling and larger-than-life voice leading the charge. Trends come and go. Yet Will Hoge remains a mainstay of the Americana landscape, hitting the road year after year, turning new pages of a career whose twists and turns – including No. 1 hits, a near-death experience, major-label record deals, and hard-won independence – sound like stuff of some long-lost movie script. Maybe that’s why Tiny Little Movies, his eleventh album, feels so cinematic.
Maybe ‘Tiny Little Movies’ is a rock record. Maybe it’s an Americana record. And maybe — okay, this is more likely — each tune is its own self-contained unit. Unlike its conceptually unified predecessor, this record is comprised of 11 distinct nuggets, each immersive in its own fashion.”
Will’s new album Tiny Little Movies available June 26th
Brendan Benson is one of American’s best songwriters. Sure, he might not be the best-selling, but in terms of sheer melodies crafted, lyrics excelled, and wonderful songs released he’s up there with the greatest. Back in April, Brendan Benson unveiled his latest set of tracks away from The Raconteurs, with whom he serves as co-songwriter along with Jack White. Benson discussus his first solo LP in seven years, as well as the emerging live streaming industry in the wake of the then-novel coronavirus.
His last single ‘Half A Boy (And Half A Man)’ manages to shuffle reflective masculinity into a three minute country-tinged power pop song and make it work. Immaculately conceived, ‘Half A Boy…‘ is driven by acoustic guitar chords and crunching lead overdubs, but at heart its a gentle beast.
A tale of split personalities, Shot from Brendan Benson’s home studio in Nashville, TN.
Made this with my friend Brad from The Whirlwind Heat. Back in the day, I engineered their album “Do Rabbits Wonder”. Little known fact. Dear Life is out now on Third Man Records.
