#michael hurley

[murphysletsdraw]

Light Green Fellow (gouache)

A daydream I had to Light Green Fellow by Michael Hurley & pals, one of the most beautiful songs I've heard. I'll post a link to the song in a reblog. inprnt.com/gallery/murphysletsdraw if you want to buy the print!

[toiletpapercosmos]

[glavilio]

Rest in peace Michael Hurley (1941-2025)

[neshamama]

michael hurley's last lp came out a couple days ago, five months after his passing. not sure what to expect, emotionally primed, i played it last night on the porch. in each beat i got everything i knew michael hurley to create best. goosebumps, laughs, tear-stained cheeks as a friendly old guitar-clad fellow guided me through wondrous worlds only he could dream up. fantastical or mundane, never does the music veer from the very human heart that gives all of us life.

goodbye mike and thanks for everything.

[nickshutter]

Armchair Boogie (Michael Hurley Tribute)

[leonardcohenofficial]

RIP MICHAEL HURLEY

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Michael Hurley (December 20, 1941 – April 3, 2025)

Goodbye, Snock! Amidst the global chaos of last week, Michael Hurley was swallowed up by the eternal lips. A bitter pill, but his passing meant that I've spent the past few days listening to a lot of Michael Hurley music, and that is something guaranteed to lift anyone's spirits, anytime. A parting gift from one of the great voices of our time.

I was arguing that Hurley was a Dylan-level talent, and I'm sticking with that; even though their careers played out very differently, both songwriters are dialed in to a very specific (though wide-ranging) era of American music, mining the sounds of 1920-ish through 1960-ish to create a deeply personalized cosmology, a dream of an alternate timeline, a shortwave radio picking up mysterious signals from some other place.

Anyway, other people will probably be able to express this all in more clear terms. My advice is mainly just to listen to Michael Hurley. You could dig this video of his last local show in Portland, just a few months back. You could dig back into this remarkable decades-spanning collection of covers via the Shards of Beauty blog. Or, like me, you could listen to Hurley's rendition of "Cry of the Wild Goose," a song that Frankie Laine somehow took to the top of the charts in the early 1950s. In Snock's hands, it becomes a haunting glimpse into the heart of darkness, wingin' north in the lonely sky.

“It was March 16, 1961,” Hurley said in a must-read Arthur Mag profile by Byron Coley. “I heard this music, and it was very snocky. It was like what you would hear when you hit hardwood sticks together. I heard a whole symphony like that. I thought it must be me, having my vision. I’d always read about the Indians who go out and fast until they get a vision and take a new name. They go out in the hills somewhere and starve themselves until they get a vision. Might be a bear or something. I was kinda following that idea. I heard this music and I kinda saw it too, over an ocean wave, like the surf was coming in. The surf was coming in just like this snocky classical music. That was it.”

[dustedmagazine]

Michael Hurley — Broken Homes and Gardens (No Quarter)

Broken Homes and Gardens, by Michael Hurley

11 track album

Michael Hurley died with his boots on, making no concessions to age or ill health. He passed away on April 1, 2025, at the age of 83. At the time, he was driving home in a hired car from appearances at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee and another show in Ashville, North Carolina, shows where he’d been noticeably frail. But despite these challenges, he was still at it, finishing Broken Homes and Gardens the month before he died. And so, this will be the last studio album from Michael Hurley, and true to form, a warm and weird and wonderful one.

Hurley reconvened much of the crew that made 2021’s Time of the Foxgloves for this album, singer Kati Claborn and stand-up bassist Luke Ydstei of The Hackles, fiddle player Halli Anderson and Nate Lumbard on bass clarinet and auxiliary percussion. Ex-Decemberist Rachel Blumberg sits in on drums and the New Zealand writer Sarah Illingworth last spotted working on a Hurley biography co-writes the song “I’ll Walk with You.” The texture of the music around Hurley, then, is homespun and relaxed, as warm and plush and fuzzy as a well-used blanket. Lumbard’s clarinet work is especially fine, swinging in with a vibrato’d swagger into the old-time-y corners of the songs.

The songs here include some older material, some newly written for this album and a few covers. Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar, its shimmery xylophone, its jokey voice demanding “How ‘bout a banana for manana?” It’s all of a colorful, free-ranging piece, wholly natural and also slightly strange. Even the covers fall into line, like “Cherry Pie,” borrowed from 1950s doo-wop artists Marvin and Johnny, but made Hurley-esque by its lush country harmonies and wheeling arcs of clarinet.

You get the sense of how long Hurley had been at it, musically, from the talking blues magic of “New Orleans ’61,” which unspools a narrative of mid-century road tripping to the south, sampling the cuisine (Chicory coffee! Rice and beans for 35 cents!) and ending up in jail. It’s a great story, a little shaggy, maybe not wholly true, but the relic of an era that Hurley lived through and most of us did not. We’re all a little poorer now that his memories and his music are gone.

Jennifer Kelly