The Rambling Canuck’s post about Little Feat got me thinking about Lowell George and Co. I firmly believe, and am willing to fight anyone who disagrees, that “Dixie Chicken” is one of the top 25 rock albums ever. As I wasted away the remnants of a Friday afternoon. I found this YouTube clip:
Live with Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt. Check out the bongo solo midway through. I love Emmylou, but rhythm is not, apparently, her strongpoint.
Popularity: 19% [?]
For about nine months I’ve been blogging eclectically - music, politics, science and random ramblings - on my personal site. I’ve caught a little bit of attention with my music blogging and while I have no intentions of trying to make a living off the internets, it would be cool to get more free records. With that very altruistic ideal in mind, I’m establishing this site for my music blogging.
I’m going to keep this site reasonably anonymous. This is largely because it allows me the freedom to say what I truly think about the music that I’ll feature here - no late night phone calls from Ryan Adams, for example.
For a while, I am going to cross post a bit, just to insure that whatever audience I have on my personal site knows where to find my music writing. I’ve featured a couple of recent posts from my personal blog below. Hopefully within a couple of weeks, A Free Man will be running on its own steam.
Image Credit:
Popularity: 6% [?]
A couple of months ago I declared an end to this weekly feature, but with the 2008 U.S. presidential election in full swing, there has been plenty of political fodder. This week the news has been the news itself trying to what turned out to be a “Dewey Beats Truman” moment in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. All week has been pundits and pollsters looking for answers as to why the polls, up to nine of which predicted an Obama victory, betrayed them. Continue Reading »
Popularity: 7% [?]
It’s funny where life takes you. I spent yesterday afternoon at Her Majesty’s Prison Bullingdon doing some volunteer work regarding drugs and alcohol, forgive me if I’m not more specific. But if it was good enough for The Man in Black, then it’s good enough for me. And, no it wasn’t court ordered…
I have never been in a jail cell, never mind a prison. The closest I came was in high school when a guy I knew named, in the interest of anonymity let’s call him “J”, was driving with my friend Jamie and I from Gainesville back to Lake City. I think he must have been speeding because we saw those characteristic red and blue lights behind us that only mean one thing. One thing, right, you stop. Jason didn’t stop. I don’t remember what kind of car it was (Jamie, a little help?), but it was a something “Turbo”. I hesitate to guess what was going on in J’s head, but I think he maybe figured Turbo means fast, if we make the Columbia County line, the Alachua County Sheriff will be out of his jurisdiction. Just like in “The Dukes of Hazzard”. I am here to tell you that the “Dukes of Hazzard” is fiction. So Jamie and I had to sit in the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office until one of our Mom’s came and got us. Can’t remember what happened to J.
That was enough time in custody for me for the next nearly twenty years. So, this visit
to Bullingdon was something I’ve been dreading since I agreed to do it. About a month ago I went up for security training. The man who did this was a short, yet big Scot who started the training by saying: “Now most of your prison experience is from the TV or prison lesbian movies, but I’m here to tell you that you don’t know shit.” (I paraphrase, but this is what I heard and he definitely said the thing about prison lesbian movies). And then proceeded to spend three hours telling us about all the things that can go wrong in a prison and what sort of things he’s found in various orifices. It was very entertaining but when I got home I couldn’t remember for the life of me what I was supposed to do in the case of being taken hostage.
Now, I am not a prison-hating kind of liberal. In fact, I think if you are sent to prison, you should do the time you are sentence to do. There’s a shortage of space in British prisons and all kinds of offenders, including violent offenders, are being released early. I think that the answer to this is obvious - build more prisons. However, I think that a lot of people go to prison and come out worse than they went in. A recent study by the British prison service said that prisons were serving as breeding grounds for Islamist extremists. If we’re alienating muslims in prisons being watched over carefully by the European Human Rights Courts, imagine what’s happening in Guantanamo.
Sorry, off topic, I’ve heard estimates that 75 - 85% of people serving time in British and American prisons are there directly or indirectly due to drug and/or alcohol abuse. Since you’ve got a captive audience (huh huh?), seems the time to try and help get those problems sorted. That’s why I was there. If you’re not part of the solution then you can’t complain, right?
Yes, I was scared. A prison is a scary place, it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to sap your spirit. I will never complain about how well prisoners are treated, three squares and a bed, leisure time, etc. because at the end of the day, they can not leave that place and all those gates lock. The thing is, that the guys I talked to where not what I thought. They didn’t look like “prisoners”, they looked like me. They were polite and grateful that we had taken the time to come and talk to them. When we were done we shook hands and in some cases, hugged in that manly way where you don’t touch much. And they went back to be locked up in their cells and I walked out of the main gates.
It’s funny where life take you. And it’s funny how the road twists and turns. A twist or two in the wrong direction and who knows.
“This wall divides us, we’re on two different sides
But this wall is not real; how can it be real?
It’s only made of concrete and barbed wire
Concrete and barbed wire, concrete and barbed wire
It’s only made of concrete and barbed wire….”
-Lucinda Williams “Concrete and Barbed Wire”
Popularity: 6% [?]
Ryan Adams is a tricky one for the critics to handle. He can be absolutely brilliant and he can be really bad. He apparently has a tendency to phone up critics who give him bad reviews and argue with their answering machines. He is certainly prolific and the biggest criticism he gets is that his releases are not well edited. That is certainly true, but in the narcissistic naughties, that’s not necessarily a huge flaw. Now in the interest of full disclosure, I am a big fan of Ryan Adams, so not at all objective. His time in the alt-country band Whiskeytown, set him up for life in my humble opinion and I think he’s done great stuff since then. “Heartbreaker” and “Gold” are great albums, and I think “Love is Hell” is a masterpeice. I had a bit of a problem with him releasing three albums in 2005, but among those three are some great tracks - “Cold Roses” is a solid album and “Jacksonville City Nights” holds a special place in my heart as it reminds me of north Florida.
From the opening chords of “Easy Tiger” the Ryan Adams fan can breathe a sigh of relief. The alt-country troubadour is back and when he begins to sing with his warbling tenor that’s reminiscent of a Grand Ole Opry era country star:
“We’re going to win
Put your troubles behind you
And go on to bed
Let go of the worry…”
You just know it’s going to be OK, and that’s sort of the theme of this album - easy does it, it’s gonna be OK. The following tracks “Two” and “Everybody Knows” are easy, straightforward country song reminiscent of Whiskeytown era Adams with better production. Incidentally, this record was produced by Jamie Candiloro who has also produced R.E.M.’s albums since “Automatic for the People”. I don’t know enough about production, but I can convince myself that there’s a subtle feeling about this record and the those R.E.M. records that I can pick out.
For those you who like to hear Ryan Adams rock, there’s “Halloweenhead” complete with a declaration of “Guitar solo!” The 22 year old student in my lab declared this declaration as “cheesy” and she’s right, but it’s a solid Adams rocker. The rest of the album carries on in the rambling alt-country style that represents Adams at his best. His lyrics as usual are edgy and yearning, it’s like listening to someone on the edge of a breakdown, but he never quite gets there. And I think that’s what keeps you coming back. “The Sun Also Sets” is a good example:
“I wanna know how it all works out
I had a feeling we were fading out
I didn’t know that people faded out so fast
And that people faded out
When there was love enough left to fix it
But, there it is
There it is, we are only one push from the nest
There it is, we are only one push from the nest.
There it is, the sun rises
But the sun sets, the sun also sets…”
Other stand-out tracks are “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.”, “Tears of Gold” and “Pearls on a String”.
There are rumors that Ryan Adams is in recovery, for example see this excellent New York Magazine article about he and Jeff Tweedy from Wilco. Adams says that he’s been going to AA meetings, though like Fight Club, that’s not usually something one talks about publicly. Wish him all the best. As to whether this is “recovery album” I’m not so sure. There is a hopefulness, a comfort and a focus that have been lacking in Adams’ recent releases.
And that’s what makes this album worth buying. It’s a grower as well, get’s better with repeated listens. Filter magazine’s reviewer says it better than I can: “Our hero of Whiskeytown has returned.”
As a final note, I’ve gone through phases as to how I acquire my music. Like most people I bought CDs until the advent of Napster when music was “free”. I stopped downloading in that manner because I think it hurts the artist ultimately. I used the iTunes store until a recent yearning for something physical brought me full circle back to CDs. And I would like to say that was a good decision, because if I had bought this album on iTunes I would not have seen the wonderful CD art. Those of you who know me will no why that was such a nice surprise.
Like to leave you with the most hopeful lyrics on the album from “Pearls on a String”:
Blue eyes for miles
Pretty as a peach
Glorious kind and always on the time never far out of reach
Tomorrow’s on its way
And there’s always new songs to sing
Glorious kind and always on time like pearls on a string
Soft precious and easy
Under the sea
If you dive down far enough to the bottom look around and you will see
Tomorrow’s on its way…
Popularity: 5% [?]
…that you may not have heard, but should.
I don’t like the nationalism of the British music press. Inevitably their year end lists include a overwhelming number of British bands/artists compared to those from the rest of the world. A lot of really good foreign acts get ignored by NME, Word, Mojo, etc. But here are 8 bands/artists from Blighty that if you haven’t heard in Fortress America are worth a listen.
1. Jarvis Cocker is the former frontman for the classic BritPop band Pulp. He actually lives in France these day, but is as British as they come in spite of that. His first solo album Jarvis came out over here last year and is just a wonderful record. Has all the clever, sardonic lyrics of pulp with a more mature edge, fatherhood agrees with Jarvis. Download “Fat Children”.
2. Amy Winehouse is getting a fair bit of press in the States, saw her on the cover of Rolling Stone this week. I didn’t want to like her, I really didn’t. She’s a tabloid queen and living the rock n’ roll lifestyle to what will probably be its natural conclusion. But when I heard her album “Back to Black” I just couldn’t resist liking her. She’s got a coice like a noughties Dusty Springfield and her lyrics are sharp, soulful and seductive. Download “Me & Mr Jones (Fuckery)”.
3. I didn’t want to like Lily Allen either, she plays a try hard ghetto girl that just doesn’t get with her middle class roots. But I heard a radio interview with her and when she dropped that act and performed, I was sold. She’s got a sweet pop voice but deadly sharp lyrics. Picture Alanis Morrisette or Liz Phair with a voice and a sort of ska/reggae beat. Her debut, “Alright, Still” is a perfect summer record. Download “LDN”.
4. The best way I can describe Frank Turner, is British folk-punk. He’s a public school
boy gone indie. His debut album “Sleep is for the Week” is a songwriting gem and he’s the new new-Dylan in the fawning British music press. Definitely worth a listen for the singer-songwriter fans. Download “The Ladies of London Town”.
5. I’m afraid that Maximo Park was a one album sort of band. Their debut “A Certain Trigger” is a compelling sort of geometrical post-punk guitar album. The vocals are often subdued and the whole thing has an urgent driving feel. A great bicycling album. Unfortunately their second album kind of fell flat. I’ve not bought it and what I’ve heard is really disappointing. But one great album is more than most folks can do. Download “Graffiti”.
6. Like Amy and Lily, I hated everything about Lebanese expatriate Mika. His single “Grace Kelley” was one of those annoying dance pop songs that you hear everywhere and can’t get out of your head (think Scissor Sisters). I made a decision early on to have nothing to do with Mika. But then, I saw a part of his set from Glastonbury where he performed a song called “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)” which included giant blow up dolls and big beautiful dancers. Beyond the sort of nice message of the song, it was damn entertaining. I’ve just gotten the album from someone at work and am sure that I will be disappointed, but nonetheless download “Big Girl”.
7. I’m not sure how much press Leeds band The Kaiser Chiefs got in the States and elsehwere. They are kind of the precursor to the massively overrated Arctic Monkeys. Their first album “Employment” was a joyful, cheeky, “lad rock” gem. Their second, “Yours Trul, Angry Mob” is solid, but lacks the charm of the debut. This is probably not their fault, but that the type of music they play is just drowning the radio. Download “Na Na Na Na Naa”.
8. Continuing, in the sophomore slump vein Razorlight’s debut “Up All Night” was a magnificent album. Something like The Verve meets The Strokes with not a bad track to be heard. They got caned by the critics because lead-singer Johnny Borrell tends to talk trash and mimics Jim Morrison, but that debut in 2004 is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, the second album - self-titled - is a pallid imitation of the first and I fear that these guys are like the Stone Roses, one that you’ll never forget and then nothing else.
Popularity: 18% [?]
We post MP3 files on this site. Buying music supports artists and all of these songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please e-mail: chris[at]afreeman[dot]org.
