Discography - Week 38

And we launch into the New Year and a lot of uncertainty.  Just as I was wondering how many of us would choose songs last week, New Year's Eve, with a holiday theme - or at least end of the year reflective theme - I was curious how many of us would choose songs that might reflect our hopes and fears for the New Year.  I would argue that the excellent Gary Beatrice did just that, and it's difficult to not be more impacted by the turn of the year than when you have kids.

Gary Beatrice

Three songs, three father/son relationships. Actually, three healthy and positive father/son relationships. Even the healthiest of them are filled with challenge.

Mike Cooley is my third favorite Drive-By-Trucker songwriter but he nails it in Daddy's Cup. Superficially about auto racing, Daddy's Cup is all about the driving need for a child to make his father proud. After a poor debut dad tells son that if he quits now it will haunt him all his life. But does Dad say that, or is that the son hearing what is "expected" of him? After all the cup he wants to win is Daddy's cup.

In Outfit, Jason Isbell reveals how difficult, and important, the father and son relationship is from Dad's perspective. Son is leaving for the hope of a better life, and Dad just can't help but give him some final (southern) advice, the real point of which is, you better not give it away, you better not paint the homes of rich folk like I do. Tinged with regret, Outfit has to be the best father/son relationship song I've heard from the father's perspective, and how old was Isbell when he wrote it?  Maybe 28 or so? Not yet a father.

But Hiatt, in his simple, understated style, may capture it all the best in his Your Dad Did. He may be losing his job, spending more than he has, quietly laughing while Mom disciplines their children, but when it comes right down to it he's done what his father has and nothing much more. But then, Hiatt's character realizes, that ain't all bad. After all, he loves his wife and kids. Just like his Dad did.

Dave Wallace

Graham Parker, Don't Ask MeQuestions

The month of Trump continues with Graham Parker's screed against organized religion.  I find it shocking that conservative evangelicals were so willing to line up behind the most amoral candidate of my lifetime, and it manifested many of my issues with organized religion.  Parker has his own issues with religion, and he's brutal in his take down:

Well I stand up for liberty but can't liberate

Pent up agony I see you take first place

Well who does this treachery I shout with bleeding hand

Is it you or is it me well I never will understand

Hey Lord?  "Don't ask me questions!"

Of special note is the brilliant guitar work by Brinsley Schwartz, a highly underrated guitarist.

Miranda Tavares

Jason Isbell, Hurricanes and Hand Grenades

I know we've probably beaten Jason Isbell into the ground on this blog, but I'm taking a page out of Scudder's book and writing what I'm currently listening to. And I am currently obsessed with this song. That slow, jazzy/bluesy combo, the lyrics sung in a vocal style that's too lazy and languid to be actually depressing, the lounge piano in the background with that kick ass blues guitar lick giving you the shivers for a moment...before you take another sip of whiskey and go back to staring at the embers of the fire you don't care enough about to stoke. I get that this song is basically romanticizing alcoholism, but it does it really, really convincingly. However, I would give up a beer for hearing that piano any day. 

Nate Bell

I am surprised I made this in time, and squeezed my brain to produce something to comprise a second post.  It might be a bit weird.

Prologue:

I have just recently discovered this chap, as he is currently touring with Frank Turner.  I literally stumbled upon him as I was checking tickets for M's birthday show.  I had intended to do a song from Frank Turner, but I discovered that although I really like him, I am a novice at describing his magic.  M is a true disciple, and she can write an homage better.

So this fella---I clicked the link to see what we would be hearing as an opener.  Oh my gods.  The music itself is simple, tuneful, plaintive folk.  But this man's lyrics are cutting, beautiful.  This is actual poetry set to music, in most cases.  I found at least 3 that I could write on, but settled on this number.  If you want to be truly depressed, listen to his Kings to Kings. Slightly less dark but still raw and moving:

Will Varley, Weddings & Wars (An 8 Bit History of the World)

"We are all animals, my Lady"---(Tim Curry as Darkness, in Legend)

This fascinating song explains the history of human culture, quickly, movingly, and incisively.  It examines the fact that all of our achievements as humans are underpinned by violence, conquest, and a biological imperative.  We are all just animals at the core.  When I hear this song, I think that perhaps both Walden and also the right-wing "doomsday" preppers might be right, that living in the natural world, more or less as a tool-using animal, may be the most moral position?  Have a look at what Mr. Varley writes:

"'Bang' goes the big bang in the darkness and thunder.
Adam and Eve were strands of bacteria.
Blind we crawled with the birds and the bees,
Few years on we climbed down from the trees,
And were standin' in Africa, lookin' at the sky
Saying 'why we're here? what happens when we die?'
We used god as a word for the things we can't see,
Now put on some clothes and let's wait for TV.

Well it doesn't take 'till we're painting caves,
Makin' some men kings and other men slaves,
Sayin' 'god is our reason, god is our leader,
God spoke to me and he told me to kill ya.'

We spread like a virus to every dark corner,
Greeks and romans are layin' down borders.
The slaves and the soldiers, the queens and the kings,
Wherever they were, they all used to sing:

Birth, death, weddings and wars,
That's all we are good for.
If all of the past was played as a song,
Then our lives are a beat of the drum.

Invading, enslaving, then trading the plunder,
Tobacco and opium, tea leaves and sugar.
Empires built with the bones of the slaughtered.
A barrel of booze in return for your daughters and

Birth, death, weddings and wars,
Naissance, décès, mariage et guerre,
Above the same earth, beneath the same stars,
You can't hide the beast that we are."

The paired choruses really bring home the reality of the human society.  All our achievements contract to the same biological imperatives, procreating, sex, pairing up, war, and then death.  We really cannot escape the animal nature that we inherit.  If you think about all our greatest endeavors, including religion, art, music--it almost all revolves around sex, death, conquest, procreation, and trying to find meaning in our basic nature.  We commit atrocities on a large scale, while at base we are still gilding animal drives---to procreate, establish territory, and assure survival resources.  All our "higher order thinking does" is make our animal nature go poisonously beyond natural bounds.  We create a complex and more palatable set of rationales to justify our actions---and to allow us to VASTLY and quite dangerously exceed the limits the natural world would otherwise place on our biology-driven behaviors.

In reading a new book M gave me, The History of White People (Nell Irvin Painter), I am again reminded that the history of people is the history of many a millenia of exalting sets of human attributes in a given culture, while at the *very same time* using valued qualities in a fellow human being as a justification to debase, conquer, enslave and commodotize them.  We have been using each other as a disposable resource for eons, only very recently doing so by the category of skin color.

This line of thinking, naturally, takes me to thinking about Werewolf fiction and legend, one of my enthusiasms.  In the conventional folklore, it is the addition of the "beastly wolf" to "rational" man that creates a monster.  Stealing from one werewolf short story I have read, it seems the opposite is true.  It is the addition of the rapacious and unbridled human element to the wolf that creates a monster.  The loyal, discliplined, structured, pack-oriented wolf becomes a monster when attributes of man are melded with such a structured natural creature.  

How does a human become MORE of an animal, to be a better organism?  That seems to be the real question.  All other organisms unencumbered by this odd frontal brain lobe do not exceed the sustainable limits of their environment, breed beyond control, or use aggression to acquire many more resources than their pack realistically needs to survive well.  I do not have an answer, but it seems that people, since we are Beasts, need to be better at actually being Beasts, and fitting within our true, less destructive nature as animals that should fit a niche in this world, not carve the entire world into our niche.

Dave Kelley

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, This Land is Your Land

Of all the fantastic live music I was fortunate enough to see in 2016, the image that will stick with me the longest is watching Sharon Jones at Riverbend literally facing down and dancing on top of the cancer that was in the process of killing her.  She died a few months later, but cancer did not win.  I was reminded of a line in a Truckers' song written in the voice of a friend who died of AIDS.  "I'll dance on my own grave, thank you."  That is certainly what Sharon Jones did that night in July.

Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Our Land" really needs no explanation by me.  It is at or near the top of the list of the most iconic songs in the history of our country.  It was written at a time when those at the bottom of our socio-economic system were literally struggling to stay alive.  I recommend reading "The Worst Hard Times" for a glimpse into the lives of people in the Dust Bowl in the 1930's.  The next four years will almost be certainly be very difficult for those at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder.  Especially those of color.

Now Woody Guthrie was obviously white, and "this Land is My Land" draws upon primarily white Appalachian roots.  In this glorious cover, Sharon Jones and the mighty mighty Dap Kings infuse R&B and soul music into the song and make it even more inclusive.  The Dap Kings are tighter than my jeans after the holidays, and I just love the horns in this song.  Horns, like dogs and good beer, just make everything better.

On Inauguration Day, I will most certainly be avoiding the festivities themselves as well as all commentary on the event.  I will be listening to this song at least once.  I mean a Trump Administration is scarier, but both personally and as a nation we have faced worse.  Shit man, remembering Sharon Jones from last Summer, I would be ashamed to give in to fear.

Phillip Seiler

"Love me

Leave me

Take my possessions 

And go"

So begins Teenage Fanclub's Baby Lee from their album Shadows. Scotland's best export other than their epic twitter insult brigade, Teenage Fanclub brings melodic jangle pop to its apex. They don't always hit the mark, but when they do, like the entire album Shadows, they are unparalleled. It is exactly what you want from a mature, post-punk band: understated, fully aware, melancholy. I really recommend the entire album but this song should be the hook you need to decide that they are worth further exploration.

Gary Scudder

Buffalo Springfield, Expecting to Fly

I've championed this song previously, in my post on the 110 Neil Young songs that are better than Heart of Gold (it came in #3), but I felt inspired to revisit it.  Earlier in the week I was swapping emails with Gary Beatrice and he made the point, quite correctly, that there probably hasn't been a band since the Beatles that had three song-writers as talented, and operating within one band, as the Drive-By Truckers had with Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell. In response I proposed that maybe this helps explain their longevity as a band, not simply because you had more songs being written but also because it provided a balance within the band.  However, it also works the other way, in the case where the balance could not be maintained, with a prime example being Uncle Tupelo.  This made me think of Young's song Expecting to Fly, which I find almost overwhelmingly beautiful and evocative and elegiac, but also completely at odds with what the rest of the band was doing. From the first moment you hear the song you realize that the center cannot hold.  It also seemed like the perfect song as we start a New Year, and a new era fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. Plus, well, it's simply one of my all-time favorite songs, and by the time you hear this this nano-overlords will have released this week's blog post and, inshallah, my son and I will be clambering up, and hopefully down, the side of a volcano in Iceland - and what better way to celebrate my birthday?  #FuckOldAge