The Pretender

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I spent the summer interviewing so many of my favorite musicians about my all-time favorite: John Prine.

You can read the story at The Bitter Southerner.

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Jason Isbell and Josh Ritter covering “Storm Windows” by John Prine. Perfection. 

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Mason Jennings: Minnesota « American Songwriter

Mason Jennings Minnesota (Stats and Brackets) Performing at a tribute concert for Neil Young at Carnegie Hall this past February, Mason Jennings sang “Red

5 years ago today I published my first-ever professional piece of music writing. The previous month I had just moved to New York from Minnesota, so it was some coincidence that the name of the album was...Minnesota. Fittingly, I managed to find a way to center the entire album review around an obscure Neil Young song from the early 00′s. 

[thepretender]

Still relevant.

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William Bell On Making The Ballads That Made Him

William Bell's love serenades have forged romances and broken hearts in bedrooms and dancefloors ever since the Memphis-born singer's first hit in 1961.

Proud, honored, and thrilled to have interviewed the legendary William Bell about his beautiful new album.

[thepretender]

'Welcome to NRA Country': how the gun lobby tried to tap into country music

With big name supporters including Blake Shelton and Thomas Rhett, NRA Country is being used to entice younger members to the NRA by using country credibility. But with some artists distancing themselves, can it survive?

I wrote a story about the NRA’s recent attempt to partner up with the country music industry. 

[thepretender]

Hey Tumblr Country Music People, I’m looking for some feedback here:

Is “Beaumont” by Hayes Carll the sequel to “The Night’s Too Long” by Lucinda Williams/Patty Loveless?  Is the singer in “Beaumont” one of those “small town boys that don’t move fast enough” in Lucinda’s song, only now he’s gathered up some courage, or at least tried to, and so he chases that waitress who fled town years ago all the way to Houston? Is this theory of mine ludicrous? Obvious?  Plausible?

First, listen to “The Night’s Too Long,” then give “Beaumont” a spin, then let me know what you think…

[thepretender]

IMPORTANT UPDATE TO THIS PRETENDER POST FROM 2012:

Today I had the opportunity to present my amazing theory about “Beaumont” being the sequel to “The Night’s Too Long” by Lucinda to Hayes Carll in person.

Hayes told me he does not even know that song, although he does have that Lucinda album “on his laptop.” 

Oh well. I still think “Beaumont” is the sequel to “The Night’s Too Long.”

[thepretender]

In defense of Dave Prater.

I spent a good portion of last year working on this story on Dave Prater, the forgotten, under-appreciated half of Sam & Dave. 

[thepretender]

5 Favorite Albums of 2014

It’s too easy to spend every spare moment this time of year catching up on the year’s best music, too easy to treat each year as a separate entity that stops mattering as soon as January 1st hits. In 2015, I made sure to give myself the time to keep listening to 2014 records that I had really enjoyed to see which ones held up once the year had ended and we had collectively decided to move on. 

Below are 5 albums from 2014 that have stayed with me the most. These records are all slowly becoming some small part of my life, and they’re records that I’m fairly certain I’ll still be playing 10 years from now. 

Angaleena Presley-American Middle Class

It’s a cliche to say an album gets better with each listen, but that’s how exactly how I feel about Angaleena Presley’s debut. The second half of the record, in stuns me every time. There’s quaint folk, country-soul, outright diva ballads, power pop, and that’s just the last four songs. Listen to the pain, admiration, and guilt when Presley sings “see, my daddy’s not well-read,” in “Better off Red.”

Against Me!-Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Major label classic rock-meets-indie punk-meets necessary, timely social statement. It’s a record that turns its rather bleak subject material--dead friends, empty coffins, gender dysphoria--into proud, triumphant rock and roll protest. No surprise that its best song is about that most purely American of pop subjects: wanting to find a home. 

Del Barber-Prairieography

Del Baber is a soft-spoken Western Canadian who sings about his prairie home with compassion and conflict. The second song on this record is called “Farewell, God Bless You, Goodbye” and that’s about all you need to know. Saying goodbye to your upbringing is a long, hard thing to do, and this 14 song record letter is the longest, most heartbreaking goodbye letter you’ll ever hear.

Frankie Cosmos-Zentropy

Greta Klein channels Flo Rida, leaves her man behind for the club, and delivers a line on “I Do Too,” my favorite song on Zentropy, that feels more like a revelation every time I hear it: “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Rosanne Cash-The River and the Thread

If Rosanne Cash were a man, this would be the mid-late career record that would have been hailed as her wise veteran comeback masterpiece, her Time Out of Mind, her Harvest Moon, her Wildflowers. Cash treats her own Southern roots as a myth worth interrogating, and her songs attack, admire, and antagonize the South--mid-century Memphis, Civil War balladry, New Deal public works--with a love and devotion to its many musical traditions, to the “50,000 Watts of common prayer,” as she puts it, that has melded blues, country, soul and jazz for the past hundred years.

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Visit Original Link

A few reasons to buy the Felice Brothers’ new Christmas EP

-It’s called Felice Navidad

-This is the album cover

-Their last digital-only, low-key download is one of my favorite records of the last five years.

-Proceeds from album sales goes to the Hudson Valley Food Bank. 

-There’s a melancholy song called “The Dollar Store”

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These are the studio notes from the Southeastern sessions when Jason Isbell was recording his career-defining album back in the Spring of 2013. Some highlights:

-The note next to “Travelin’ Alone” says “should be like [Neil Young’s] Harvest.”

-At some point, “Live Oak” (listed here as “man who walks besides me”) “felt like an old bluegrass track.”

-For “Songs She Sang in the Shower” (noted here by the opening line “on a lark,” it reads “Simon and Gar,” and also says the song has a “Stuck on my Own Love” melody. Does anybody know what song that is?

-Track 12 appears to be an unreleased outtake. It’s hard to make out, but the line reads something like “Lookin’ for my constant-need to be wild.”

-The note next to “Cover Me Up” just reads, “Powerful song.” Indeed.

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Here’s a seriously heavy Johnny Cash song he wrote called “More What is Truth.” Cash apparently never even recorded the song, which I’m sure his record label was quite happy about. 

The graduate with the highest grades

Gets 2 scholarships for the marks he’s made

One of the lower grade classmates

Goes to the Army when he graduates

The lucky scholar gets a white collar job

The ex-GI is one of the mob

The white collar man has got it made

The ex-GI doesn’t have a trade

The old lady take a pull for her nerves

Says these kids today got more’n they deserve

They don’t have to work the way we did

Sometimes I think we’re too good for our kids

They drive fast cars, they drink & smoke

Half of ‘em drivin’ around high on dope

Always livin’ for the latest thrill

They make me nervous what’d I do with my pills

[thepretender]

Here’s Kacey Musgraves on John Prine, seemingly from a Grammy acceptance speech that was never used (correct me if I’m wrong on that).

I stumbled upon John’s music & it flipped my world inside out! Clever songs that broke any uptight molds of songwriting? Songs personifying bowls of oatmeal?! Songs that never pandered to trends but stayed ahead of them? I was hooked & he has long since been a huge inspiration. Just when I think a line is good enough I examine how it could be made more honest & conversational, like John’s. I encourage songwriters of every age & genre to explore the simple-yet-vivid pictures he paints. For his perspective is gold & a good song will always be a good song. There’s no doubt that John’s music has helped make me the writer that I am. So I wold like to share my 1st “Song of the Year” Grammy with Mr. Prine (an awards that means so much)...for the bravery & standard to always say it how I see it.

-Kacey

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I spent this past Friday afternoon at the Country Music HOF and Museum, took a bunch of pictures. This letter that Dolly Parton sent to Ashley Monroe after hearing her debut record is the first of many to come. 

Dear Ashley,

Steve Moore, my friend and yours, gave me your CD yesterday. It is really great. What a beautiful, beautiful voice you have, what great songs and what great harmonies you sing. You’re a lot better than me, but you reminded me a lot of myself in the way you phrase everything. I bet we would sing great together. Maybe some day we’ll have the opportunity. In the meantime, I just wanted to let you know that I think you’re great. I will keep it and listen for my own enjoyment if that’s okay.

My favorite line on the whole CD was “I made him sing ‘I Saw The Light’ until he sobered up.” Boy, did that hit home. It sounded my like brothers and everybody back home!

I wish you all the luck in the world. Steve says you’re quite special. And if he says so, I know it’s true because he’s quite special, don’t you think?

Much love,

Dolly

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Is there a better way to describe being a teenager?

We read all the right books

We sang songs we misunderstood

And with or without any reason we did rebellion what justice we could

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I don’t know if there’s a singer-songwriter I’ve listened to more consistently in the past six-seven years than Jason Isbell. It was a treat to review his new album (out today!) for Rolling Stone, but there’s one song on the record I felt like I needed to say a bit more about.

At first glance, “Palmetto Rose” is a throw-away Isbell tune, a blues shuffle  vaguely concerned with Southern identity with a catchy chorus that Isbell could write in his sleep at this point. 

It wasn’t until I started really listening to the song’s bridge, towards the end, that this song started to hit me.

Out on Sullivan’s Island they’re swimming

On the beach where the big boats rolled in

With the earliest slaves and their children

Our first American kin.

I started Googling. I learned about Sullivan’s Island. I learned that it was once the largest slave port in North America, that approximately 40% of all African Americans living in the U.S. today can most likely trace their heritage there.

I learned that today, Sullivan’s Island is a quaint beachfront community that did not bear a single mention of its history until Toni Morrison dedicated a park bench nearby in 2008 to the millions of slaves who were brought to the island.

The bridge to “Palmetto Rose” flung open the troubled door on this song--the dark waters beneath the surface of its murky blues-rock, the hundreds of years of history the song’s narrator is taking in as he looks out at a city he can’t help but love, despite its countless demons.

The bridge made me pause over an earlier line in the song that I hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to: “Catch em coming out of the King Street Store/With some bullshit story about the Civil War.”

The bridge made me think of the last chapter of The Great Gatsby, when Nick Carraway looks out on the Long Island Sound as he “became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.“

I thought about how the bridge to “Palmetto Rose” was a twisted, Southern Gothic version of that final moment in Gatsby. Instead of looking back three hundred years and seeing pure green innocence, the singer looks back and sees nothing but blood and terror.

The bridge also made think of Randy Newman’s “Sail Away,” our most brutal of national anthems, where Newman’s slave-trading narrator has gone to West Africa to give his sickening American Dream stump speech: “We will cross the might oceans into Charleston Bay,” he sings, over and over He’s talking about Sullivan’s Island.

It so happened that I first started really listening to “Palmetto Rose” in the days after a man walked into a church in Charleston, 9 miles west of Sullivan’s Island, and murdered nine men and women. I thought about the twisted atrocities and age-old beauties of “Palmetto Rose,” a song that could be best described as: half about flowers, half about slavery.

I thought about how Isbell demands that you not be able to think about one without the other.

[thepretender]

 I have a feeling the new album from Traveller (Robert Ellis, Jonny Fritz, Cory Chisel) will be one of my favorites of the year.