The aching, soulful, and optimistic music of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Two musicians who “discover a new emotional urgency in songs about the slow, challenging, beautiful heat of living.”
All posts tagged: O Brother Where Art Thou?
Roots music for ghosts, goblins, and other things that go bump in the night
The really grim and scary songs for Halloween were all hiding out in the roots music bin.
So How Did Your Summer Go?
Shortly after Memorial Day I wrote a post entitled Got Plans for the Summer? where I outlined ten things I hoped to accomplish during the Summer of 2011. Well, Labor Day is here – and we’ve reached the moment of reckoning. While I was not a perfect ten-for-ten, I can explain. 1. Play more music with friends – It is bad when you come up short right out of the box, but this was one item where I failed miserably. We had a very busy summer, and this one just got away from me. Luckily, playing music with friends isn’t bound by season…so I’ll try and schedule some fall play dates. 2. Summer in New England – Technically, this was completed. I did spend two days in Portland, Maine in early June and I’ve just spent 8 days in New England…but it wasn’t the vacation we planned. To cut to the chase, Candice fell when we came here to Providence to drop Andrew off at school and she’s been in the hospital this week dealing …
Five albums for a desert island: The Circle Album
I still remember coming home sometime in 1972 — I was a junior or senior in high school — and putting Will the Circle be Unbroken on my stereo. I had started focusing on acoustic music (such as James Taylor) a year or two before, but I was soon exploring more of the roots of folk, which led me to the record bin on that fateful day when I found this record with the funny looking cover by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — a country-rock ensemble I had recently seen in concert. There was a little patter to start the record, which was unusual in and of itself in that era of over-produced rock albums, with Jimmy Martin commenting on John McEuen’s banjo kick-off by saying, “Earl never did do that….” But then Martin, the Dirt Band, and their musical guests were off with a rollicking version of The Grand Ole Opry Song. Decades before O Brother Where Art Thou?, there was Will the Circle Be Unbroken when some long-haired hippies and rockers took country, bluegrass, and mountain …
MORE TO COME... 