Will Gray - Broke

Columbus friends, this is a reminder that filmmaker/hip-hop/Americana artist (yes, those ideas do fit together) Will Gray is at Wild Goose Creative tonight. That's 2491 Summit St. in Columbus. Doors open at 7:00; film at 7:30.

Will's film "Broke" will screen first, followed by a concert and Q&A. If you're a musician, or simply care about music, you need to check this out. With radio playlists as constricted as ever, with a traditional label system in the terminal throes of meltdown, what's a young, struggling musician to do? How do you simply get noticed? Here's more in the current issue of Columbus Alive. 

Paul Buchanan - Mid Air

Paul Buchanan, lead singer and songwriter of Glasgow mopesters The Blue Nile, is known as a meticulous craftsman. He’s released a grand total of five albums in a 31-year recording career. To say that he makes every note count might be an understatement. Considering the paltry output of his band and the minimal arrangements of his songs, he averages about a note per month.

Now at age 56, without a band, on his own musically and relationally, and possessing a lifetime of loss and regret, he’s released his first solo album Mid Air.

Buchanan has not lived an extraordinary life. He hasn’t staggered through decades of rock ‘n roll debauchery or careened from one high-profile jet-setting relationship to another. He’s merely lived in Glasgow, a mile or so from his bandmates of 30 years, and awakened day after day. And through the mysterious entropy of time and the vagaries of the heart, he’s simply grown apart from those who were closest to him. Friends have died. The love he swore would last forever and withstand the buffets of the harshest of circumstances has somehow, inexplicably, drifted like smoke in the wind. And so he sits down at the piano and tries to work it out, wondering what the hell happened:

The buttons on your collar
The color of your hair
I think I see you everywhere
I want to live forever
And watch you dancing in the air
All lies and make believe
The very thing that one day leaves
But I can see you standing in mid-air.


The girl I want to marry upon the high trapeze
The day she fell and hurt her knees
And only time can heal it
But it’s the wind that blows away the leaves
For everything that life was worth
The fallen snow, the Virgin Birth,
Yeah, I can you standing in mid-air.

Start with one piano playing blocked chords. Mix in a hint of ghostly strings from time to time. Add a cracked and broken voice that barely rises above a whisper. And there you have Mid Air.

I’m fairly certain that it’s one of the finest albums I’ve heard this year. Those of you who are familiar with Buchanan’s old band know that he has a quietly devastating, soulful voice. He uses that voice here – a little frayed around the edges, and all the more effective for it – to superb effect. The songs are sad but never lugubrious, tinged with regret but never awash in cheap nostalgia, and surprisingly, almost shockingly, full of hard-won hope and promise. It’s a flat-out gorgeous album, resplendently beautiful.

And it has nothing to do with rock ‘n roll. The musical antecedents here are Sinatra’s 3:00 a.m. ruminations from the late ‘50s (without the over-the-top string and horn arrangements) and Tom Waits’ beat poetry and anthems from the late-night saloon. Consider it a minimalist musical masterpiece that confronts the deepest and darkest chambers of the human heart, and finds a bit of light in the inner recesses. I’ll settle for that formula any time. Paul Buchanan is welcome to take as long as he likes and needs.

Double-Barreled Brooce

I offer a double-barreled dose of Broooce today,. with my review of Wrecking Ball, and a new monthly column in which I ponder Springsteen and the gospel. Both at Christianity Today Magazine.

Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas

My review of Leonard Cohen's superb new album Old Ideas is up at Christianity Today Magazine.

And All Who Believed Were Together

Apparently my friends and I are the subject of this week's cover story from Columbus' Other Paper. Thanks, Joel Oliphint.

Jesus Freak Reunion

Jesus Freak Reunion, at Image Journal.

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

This is a terrific, sweet, uplifting album. I've ignored it for a while, mainly because I thought that the debut offering Album was a promising mess, but still more of a mess than promising. But Father, Son, Holy Ghost is better in every way -- more focused, tighter songwriting, better production, and less beholden to influences.

On first blush, this album seems like just another retro throwback -- Beach Boys sunny pop, early '70s Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter navel gazing, the early '00s indie pop goodness of Beulah and The Shins, with occasional nods to '90s slacker guitar heroes Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. But the minute you start to play "spot the influence," lead singer/songwriter Christopher Owens has already moved on. And it misses the point. Owens is the kind of guy who has absorbed the DNA of 50 years of rock music. You can separate the strands if you like, but the reality is that he does what great songwriters always do -- rearrange those strands into something unique and compelling.

It's the sweetness that ultimately wins me over, and makes me smile. This is a guy who writes not one, but two songs about his mother. It sounds as if he likes her. And "Forgiveness" gets it exactly right. I have no idea what this guy believes or does not believe. But it's refreshing to encounter someone who holds out the notion that bitterness, cynicism, and recrimination are not the answers. What a lovely second album.

Reunion

It is happening again. And because it is happening again, it is time to resurrect an old blog post.

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Every December 28th a group of about 50 middle-aged geezers, a few of them now slouching past middle age, meet at a friend’s house to catch up on life. Thirty years ago the geezers were just hippies, and they all lived together in what passes for the ghetto in Columbus, Ohio. They bought a handful of houses on 17th Avenue, crammed husbands and wives and kids and single folks together, along with homeless people off the street and cats and dogs and goats, shared their stuff, pooled their incomes, and set up shop as an official New Testament Church, living in community, guaranteed to get it right this time, correcting the errors of 2,000 years of church history, ministering to the poor and needy, focusing on loving one another and the world around them. I was one of those folks, and spent eight years in their midst. I met my wife in that ghetto. The best man and ushers at my wedding all came from those motley crusaders.

Thirty years later, it’s evident that they got it wrong. And thirty years later, given the sizable turnout that will show up at my friend’s tonight, and given the fact that many of these people will travel great distances to be there, it’s evident that they got a lot right.

It was a silly, naïve notion. “Stupid,” as my friend Jeff told me a couple weeks ago over lunch. Jeff and his family are now firmly established in a nice denominational church. He wears a suit on Sunday mornings, and his hair is short, and he prides himself on being part of a long and vital church tradition. “I look back on those ‘Let’s all hold hands and be the church’ days with some embarrassment,” he tells me.

And I understand. I recall the interminable wrangling over every theological issue imaginable, the need to re-invent every single doctrinal stance and claim it as our own, the inevitable hubris that accompanies any attempt to be “the New Testament Church,” and the underlying disdain for all the poor brothers and sisters who have had it wrong for lo these two millennia. It’s not a shining legacy. And it wasn’t all peace and love. Some of the naïve hippies got robbed at gunpoint; a couple of the women got raped. Camp’s Carryout, across the street from the first apartment I shared with my wife, was held up almost every Saturday night.

It turned out to be a pretty lousy place to raise a family. And the naïve hippies grew up and got married and started having kids, and they figured out pretty quickly that toddlers and crack dealers on street corners weren’t the best combination. One by one, they left. Why? Because they could. Because they had the education and the job skills and the wherewithal to abandon the sinking ship. Four families pulled up stakes and moved out to the country, where to this day they’re still living in community and raising goats and growing grapes for wine. Everybody else scattered, some across the country, some to the relative comfort and safety of Columbus suburbia. The irony isn’t lost on me when I realize that from that tiny house church a suburban megachurch of 7,500 people emerged, and that the massive parking lot is filled with SUVs and minivans. Old hippies never die. They just become Republicans, and put W stickers on the back bumpers of their Beamers.

And so I wonder about the legacy. Is my friend Jeff right? Was it all for naught? Was it all just a silly, idealistic, misty vision that faded once people grew up and got some sense? Did we dabble in radicalism, only to become dreaded Average Americans?

Maybe. But I don’t think so. The fifty people who will show up tonight tell me No. They are doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, along with those who have never been able to hold down a steady job, and those who have suffered from debilitating mental illness, and those who have lost their marriages, and those who have watched their children walk away from everything good and important and choose addiction and enslavement. Life has a way of battering the shit out of you, even if you are the incarnation of the New Testament Church.

Every one of them will be on equal footing. They will be greeted warmly. They will laugh and remember together. They will be cherished as people who shared a common life together, as friends and brothers and sisters in perhaps the best and most inclusive sense. I would like to think that this is something different from Average America.

I look forward to this time, as I do every year. And I feel challenged, as I do every year, to work through what our common vision now means in middle age, in the midst of a successful career. I desire and pray for the generosity of spirit that characterized those turbulent, wonderful years.

Favorite Albums of 2011, With a Bit of Commentary

Here we go again:

Ambrose Akinmusire – When the Heart Emerges Glistening
The Black Keys – El Camino
Richard Buckner – Our Blood
Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Dropkick Murphys – Going Out in Style
Peter Gabriel – New Blood
Josh Garrels – Love and War and the Sea in Between
Joe Henry – Reverie
Van Hunt – What Were You Hoping For?
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
Lydia Loveless – Indestructible Machine
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
The Milk Carton Kids – Prologue
Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender
Paul Simon – So Beautiful or So What
Southeast Engine – Canary
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
tUnE-yArDs – Whokill
Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls
Gillian Welch – The Harrow and the Harvest

A bit more commentary ...

Ambrose Akinmusire and Craig Taborn made my favorite jazz albums of the year. Akinmusire approaches his trumpet from a more mainstream hard-bop tradition, but his original compositions are lovely and fresh. Taborn mixes jazz and classical chops on his long solo piano album. It's a little of both, and a little of neither. Think of it as improvised Debussy and Ravel, with some Bill Evans thrown in for good measure.

The Black Keys made my favorite rock 'n roll record of the year. There's no curveball here; it's just straightforward soulful blues and boogie, and it's a lot of fun.

Richard Buckner, Lydia Loveless, Gillian Welch, and Southeast Engine cover my much beloved alt-country/roots territory, albeit in distinctive ways. Buckner's still an indescribably sad, poetic folkie mopester, while Loveless tears it up. She's like Neko Case's foul-mouthed cousin. Where Neko went to art school, Lydia went to a lot of punk concerts, drank too much, and got pregnant at an early age. She's been disappointed by and looking for love ever since. Gillian Welch and partner David Rawlings continue on their iconoclastic ways, writing and recording songs that sound like they should have emerged from the Dust Bowl, but emerged from 21st-century Nashville instead. Southeast Engine's album is a lovely fiddle and banjo-driven song cycle set in southeastern Ohio during the Depression years; years which sound a lot like 2011.

It was a good year for the old coots. Paul Simon released his best album in a couple decades, and Peter Gabriel rediscovered his old songs but put a distinctive spin on them; rerecording many of his best-known works with a decidedly non-stodgy symphony orchestra. The new arrangements make all the difference.

Ry Cooder made a non-didactic protest album at least partly directed at my current employer, which makes it the most interesting kind of protest album. His guitar work, when it shines through, is still a wonder of economy and soul.

Laura Marling (shown above) made a muted, beautifully sung album that was scary in its lyrical intensity. Merrill Garbus, AKA tUnE-yArDs, made a loud, in-your-face, cut-n-paste album stylistically that turned out to be a fair amount of fun lyrically.

Van Hunt did for R&B what Janelle Monae did in 2010. He made an album that fits within an easily identifiable genre, and he did it by exploding all preconceptions about that genre, and incorporating influences from all over the map.

Joe Henry made another dark, mysterious and lovely album -- part lounge music, part blues, and all poetry -- from his late-night saloon.

The Milk Carton Kids managed to simultaneously conjure memories of The Everly Brothers and The Louvin Brothers. And they did it without being brothers. The Jayhawks, too, but they're not brothers either.

Veronica Falls did trashy '60s girl group schmaltz with a gothic twist. They were my favorite guilty pleasure of the year.

Dropkick Murphys continued to do what they do, which is combine The Ramones and The Clancy Brothers into something that vaguely resembles The Pogues, but which rocks harder and is a lot more humorous.

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins -- one a dour Scots folkie, the other a British electronica artist -- made my favorite album of the year. There, I picked one. Creosote's songs here -- about aging and mortality, and losing the best thing in your life -- are simply ravishingly sad and lovely, and perfectly augmented by Hopkins' found sounds and gentle tape loops.

Finally, Over the Rhine and Josh Garrels made my favorite faith-based music this year; the former a smoldering, soulful meditation on love over the long haul, and the latter an astonishing amalgam of hip-hop, folk, and soul that manages to be both poetic and forcefully prophetic.

The Faces - Five Guys Walk Into a Bar ...

.. and all hell breaks loose.

I wasn't prepared for the sonic onslaught of the boxed set that bears that name. I don't know why. Rod Stewart during the Rockin' Rod years (roughly circumscribed by 1968 - 1973) was arguably the greatest throat to ever tangle with power chords, but I think I still expected more in the way of throwaways and decidedly inferior outtakes than I got.

What I got was the equivalent of a half dozen great new Faces albums, somehow left in the vaults for decades. An astonishing 45 of these 67 tracks were previously unreleased, or released as B-sides to long-gone singles, and the revelations are many and astonishing. First, consider the fact that many people consider The Faces of the early '70s as the greatest live rock 'n roll band of the era, better than the oft-championed Rolling Stones. But based on the lone live album in the official catalogue -- 1974's woefully uneven and besotted Coast to Coast -- you'd never know it. Now consider the fact that this boxed set contains a dozen smoking live tracks that finally justify the claim. Add some revelatory BBC sessions, a batch of unheard new material (to me, at any rate; sorry, but I wasn't buying the singles at the time), and a few alternate but hardly inferior versions of the well-known classics, and you've got one of the few truly essential boxed sets.

Rod Stewart is only part of the show here, of course. Bassist Ronnie Lane contributes several sweet, country-tinged vocal turns, and even Ron Wood, he of the blistering slide guitar, gets in a couple yelps. But hearing Stewart unleashed, finally, in a live setting that truly shows off that remarkable voice, and backed by a balls-to-the-wall rock 'n roll band, is one of the great pleasures of my life. This stuff makes me want to riot, even at an advanced age. Keep me away from the expensive furniture.

It all makes me shake my head in disbelief at the travesty that Rod Stewart became in such a short time. At least we had five great years.

Favorite Albums of 2011

Here's my list. I'll try to add commentary in the coming days. These are the 20 albums that meant the most to me in 2011, in alphabetical order. It was a Herculean task just coming up with the list, and I'm not even going to attempt to rank them. Besides, the order would be different tomorrow if I tried to do so.

Ambrose Akinmusire – When the Heart Emerges Glistening
The Black Keys – El Camino
Richard Buckner – Our Blood
Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Dropkick Murphys – Going Out in Style
Peter Gabriel – New Blood
Josh Garrels – Love and War and the Sea in Between
Joe Henry – Reverie
Van Hunt – What Were You Hoping For?
King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
Lydia Loveless – Indestructible Machine
Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know
The Milk Carton Kids – Prologue
Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender
Paul Simon – So Beautiful or So What
Southeast Engine – Canary
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
tUnE-yArDs – Whokill
Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls
Gillian Welch – The Harrow and the Harvest

As always, there are regrets with such a list. So I offer my particular apologies to P.J. Harvey, Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Son Lux, Julianna Barwick, Josh T. Pearson, Aradhna, Sonny and the Sunsets, St. Vincent, The Cars, Real Estate, Kurt Vile, Aaron Strumpel, Blitzen Trapper, The Decemberists, Ezra Furman, Iceage, Fucked Up, Kids on a Crime Spree, The Roots, Kip Hanrahan, Megafaun, Low, Seryn, Mind Spiders, Brad Mehldau, Lanterns on the Lake, Obits, Okkervil River, and The Unthanks, all of whom made splendid records in 2011, and deserve the positive accolades and commentary that I don’t have time to give them.

Ten 2011 Albums For People Who Hate Christian Music

At Image Journal: http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/ten-2011-albums-for-christians-who-hate-christian-music

Working for The Man

Working for The Man, at Image Journal.

The Dillards

The prevailing wisdom is that country-rock (not to be confused with alt-country, Americana, y'alternative, or later labels) emerged in the late '60s, more or less simultaneously with the releases of The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Dylan's Nashville Skyline, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and the brown album from The Band.

Conventional wisdom has apparently never heard The Dillards, who were mixing up banjos and backbeats in the mid-'60s. Brothers Rodney (guitar, vocals) and Doug (banjo, vocals) Dillard migrated from their Ozark Mountain home to southern California (and from there to multiple appearances on The Andy Griffith Show) in the early '60s, playing a relatively straightforward brand of bluegrass. But by 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, the brothers had discovered a potent mix of bluegrass standards, soulful, mystical originals, and Lennon/McCartney covers. By 1968 the transition was complete, and the resulting album Wheatstraw Suite is an unheralded classic -- arguably the first country-rock album, a wondrous collection of traditional bluegrass instrumentation, pedal steel, and unmistakeable backbeats courtesy of drummer Jim Gordon, shortly before he hooked up with Eric Clapton and Duane Allman in Derek and the Dominoes.

It was a direction that spooked Doug Dillard, who quit the band to join ex-Byrd Gene Clark in Dillard and Clark. Ironically, Dillard and Clark produced their own brand of country-rock shortly thereafter, penning several songs that would become classics of the genre, and that don't sound remarkably different from the contemporary work of The Dillards. Go figure.

For an excellent overview of the evolution of a great band, pick up There is a Time, a Dillards compilation that spans the years 1963 - 1970. Listen to the harmonies and hear the template that bands such as The Eagles and Poco would smooth out and take to the pop stratosphere in the following years. Rodney and Doug deserved better. To quote Lebowski, "I had a rough night, and I hate the f*&%in' Eagles, man." Me too.

For All the Saints

For All the Saints, at Image Journal.

A Bluegrass Wake

A Bluegrass Wake, at Image Journal.

Joe Henry - Reverie

Joe Henry has a new album called Reverie. It's the best album I've heard this year. This is the way it often works for me, it seems. Joe Henry releases an album. It's the best album I hear that year.

I once read a review that claimed that Henry's music is an acquired taste. And it is. He himself would admit that he isn't much of a singer, and the off-kilter, woozy amalgam of Depression-era jazz, blues, and folk that accompanies his words can sound dense and foreign to modern ears attuned to accentuated dance beats or power chords. It comes across the speakers or the earbuds the way a not-quite-tuned-in radio station comes in; readily discernible, but fuzzy. That impression is only accentuated with Reverie, which leaves the windows of the recording studio wide open to pick up the sounds of passing traffic, barking dogs, and visiting mailmen. Personally, I love the sounds. But I love Depression-era jazz, blues, and folk, too. I'm weird.

If you don't particularly care for the sounds, and if you're willing to hang in there and give it a go anyway, I can't help but think you'll be amply rewarded if you pay attention to the lyrics. Songwriters are frequently called poets, but really most of them are hacks who have figured out how to rhyme. Joe Henry is a poet. By that I mean his lyrics can stand alone as legitimately layered, nuanced poetry. Dylan has done this at times, and perhaps Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen in good years, but Henry has made a 20+ year career out of this, and he keeps getting better. From a songwriting standpoint, I'd stack the albums Joe Henry has made in the past ten years -- Scar, Tiny Voices, Civilians, Blood From Stars, and Reverie -- against any ten-year-run by any songwriter anywhere, anytime. Look at what he does for Richard Pryor, perfectly encapsulating a deeply conflicted life, and doing it within the context of a 12-bar blues:

Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself
Sometimes I think I’ve almost fooled myself--
Spreading out my wings
Above us like a tree,
Laughing now, out loud
Almost like I was free

I look at you as the thing I wanted most
You look at me and it’s like you’ve seen a ghost;
I wear the face
Of all this has cost:
Everything you tried to keep away from me,
Everything I took from you and lost

Lights shine above me, they’re like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they’re like stars beneath my feet;
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands,
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can’t bear to watch me land

Take me away, carry me like a dove
Take me away, carry me like a dove;
Love me like you’re lying
Let me feel you near,
Remember me for trying
And excuse me while I disappear

He captures those fumbling, inarticulate moments when we know that something is stirring within but we can't name it, can't pin it down, but we know that we are fully alive, in touch with the person we are and the person we can become. He does it on Reverie with songs like "Heaven's Escape" and "Grand Street." A kid lies on top of a car hood, watching a Henry Fonda movie projected against the side of a bank. A kid -- the same kid? -- encounters a seedy hotel cook holding a door open to the back of the hotel. What happens in those two scenarios is blurry, indistinct, never explained. But these are the moments on which life hinges. Get off the car hood, or walk in the hotel door, and life proceeds one way. Stay on the car hood, walk past the hotel cook, and life proceeds another. Flannery O'Connor presents these tiny, telling moments again and again in her short stories. Sherwood Anderson does it in a marvelous short story called "Sophistication." It's the same moment Bruce Springsteen describes in "Thunder Road." Mary either gets in the car and heads off down the highway or she doesn't. And everything depends on the choice.

That's what Joe Henry does, again and again. He illuminates the ineffable. He probes the inarticulate, murky world where the light occasionally shines. He's a great songwriter.

Dwight Twilley

The saga of Dwight Twilley is the classic story of the right guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have never been easy for a man from Tulsa, Oklahoma to bust into the rock 'n roll mainstream, but Twilley also happened to arrive on the scene in the mid-'70s, a time when Anglophile power pop was in disfavor. Just ask Alex Chilton and Big Star. Twilley and songwriting partner Phil Seymour delivered two superb albums -- 1976's Sincerely and 1977's Twilley Don't Mind -- experienced barely a ripple of critical acclaim, and disappeared from view.

He's resurfaced with new solo albums periodically, and the past five years or so have seen a resurgence of interest in his music. Nada Surf covered Twilley's "You Were So Warm" (from Sincerely) on last year's very fine If I Had a Hi-Fi (a case of the criminally unappreciated covering the criminally unappreciated?), and he's now the subject of a rock 'n roll documentary. The resulting soundtrack for the film (called, appropriately enough, Soundtrack) has just been released, and it's a wonderful reminder of all that is special about his music. The songs, all written and performed by Twilley, are rueful, funny, and deeply personal, and if his voice is a little weathered and frayed around the edges, he's lost nothing in the way of memorable pop hooks. Take a listen, explore the back catalog, and revel in the wonders of one who slipped under the radar.

The Four-Day Layover

The Four-Day Layover, at Image Journal.

9/12

Never forget.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkgsgAsKtLs