#pat ament

[blackswaneuroparedux]

When you ride your bike, you’re working your legs, but your mind is on a treadmill. When you play chess, your mind is clicking along, but your body is stagnating. Climbing brings it together in a beautiful, magical way. The adrenaline is flowing, and it’s flowing all the time.

- Pat Ament (rock climber and artist)

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Songs By Pat Ament

Head over to Aquarium Drunkard to get the lowdown on a record that I’ve pretty much fallen in love with in the past few weeks: Songs By Pat Ament, an impossibly rare early 70s Colorado singer-songwriter affair reissued by Grapefruit Records this month. There’s context from James Jackson Toth, a lengthy and revealing conversation between Ament and Simon Joyner, and you can stream the whole thing, too. Great stuff -- an intimate, immersive listen, with lyrics pitched somewhere between Cohen and Dylan, warm Wurlitzer vibes and Ament’s lovely vocals. A total gem. Just listen to the opening track and you’ll be hooked.  

“Always it seems a whole world is ready to dismiss a new artist. They said about Dylan that he sang like a dog with his foot caught in barbed wire. When El Greco went to Toledo, Spain, the rival Spaniard artists hated him and persecuted him, in part because his work violated tradition, with its elongated shapes, but also because the church started to give him the big commissions. People also find success to be an affront. In fact, though, this album came together in an instant, little to no rehearsal, just several friends who went into the studio and did everything quickly, many on first take. I put no thought into arranging the songs, and they were anything but honed. The goal simply was to get them on tape, in some form, and maybe something good would come of it. I had no plan for the album, other than that it might go out into the world and make a little magic of its own. Through the years, and now, I would learn it did in fact touch a few people.”