A bit more straight up Country than I usually listen to, but this performance is just too good. The sheer amount of enthusiasm by Stompin’ Tom, the band and not forgetting the dancing woman, is nothing short of genius.
Author Archives: Jay Haeske
Sufjan Stevens : The Great God Bird
I have to admit that I didn’t follow Sufjan Stevens everywhere he went with his last albums and musical directions. In fact, his magnificent Illinois album from 2005 was the last of his albums to date I bought (loved it, though). Apparently his latest album, titled Carrie and Lowell, will be released at the end of March 2015, and I guess I finally will be checking that out thoroughly again.
In the meantime, here’s a ‘video’ upload of his wonderful song The Great God Bird, I don’t even know which album this was one, but it’s a magnificent reminder of the excellent music he’s capable of doing, and indeed has been recording on albums such as the afore-mentioned Illinois, Michigan and Seven Swans.
Dave Moore : My Perfect Game
Sometime musical partner of Greg Brown, Dave Moore is held in very high regard round these parts (see here and here). He’s still keeping a somewhat low profile, with his last record to date released way back in 1999, so this 2014 recording from A Prairie Home Companion is very welcome indeed. His trademark accomplished fingerpicking, harmonica and sonorous, resonant voice are augmented here to very fine effect by an extremely tasteful, understated accompaniment by the show’s house band.
Jon Brooks : The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside
(2014 Borealis Records)
Easy listening this is not. There’s meat on the bones on this record. Jon Brooks hails from Ontario, Canada and The Smiling And Beautiful Countryside is his 5th album to date. It is the first record of his I have heard, so I can’t really compare it with his previous output. He’s playing all of the few instruments heard on the album, actually it’s pretty much only guitars, a banjitar, plus some rudimentary percussion, which apparently is mainly his feet tapping and banging on his guitar. As you would expect, this makes for a rather sparsely instrumented and spartan album. The sound is dry, but quite substantial and good, with his gruff voice sounding like a little less moody Tom Waits (or Mr. Waits on one of his more friendly albums).
The songs range from the short, barely over one and a half minutes long These Are Not Economic Hard Times to the over 11 minutes long The Only Good Things Is An Old Dog. The latter of which expertly weaves together the story of a workplace mass killing with quotes from Shakespeare’s King Lear and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers Of Evil. A whole lot of songs on here are about murders and death. The Twa Sisters (also recorded in the recent past by Tom Waits on his triple-album Orphans) is based on a Francis James Child ballad and dates back to the 19th Century. It’s a long, splendid and hypnotic song with a lovely tune standing in stark contrast to the gruesome lyrics about betrayal, killing and mutilation.
My favorite song on here, Queensville is similar in that regard. Whereas The Twa Sisters is a pretty ballad, Queensville in contrast is a somewhat uptempo Hillbilly-Folk song with a catchy and upbeat feel to it. Equally uncomfortable lyrics however, about the unsolved murder of a young girl make for a captivating listening experience.
Album opener Gun Dealer is percussion-heavy and energetic and with its long list of available gun-models an excellent statement about gun-crazy cultures. People Don’t Think Of Others is yet another song I love dearly on here, the maudlin lyrics about a double suicide pact perfectly augmented by a melancholic tune and a gorgeous Folk arrangement. It’s also a fine pointer of where Jon Brooks is from with the opening lines of ‘He came from Elfros, Saskatchewan a flat town from which thwarted dreams are born, you could watch your dog run until lunchtime, or the indifferent trains ‘til morn’. Music from the Canadian Prairies breathing the wide open spaces and the secrets contained in them – in the case of The Smiling And Beautiful Countryside, the dark ones, where the ugly side of human nature rears its head all too often.
Highway 16 is again concerned with the human abyss, this one is a bout a truck driving serial killer, and on here the subdued mood of the song fits the unpleasant lyrics very well indeed. Felix Culpa is the darkest-sounding song on the album, the haunting sound of the banjitar and percussion accompaniment giving it a perfect Southern Gothic feel, reminiscent of a stripped down 16 Horsepower in their prime.
Album closer Worse Than Indians is inspired by a book about the relocation of a Dene tribe and a plea for forgiveness in the face of injustice and the wrong that has been done.
The Smiling And Beautiful Countryside is a convincing album by a songwriter with stories to tell, not always ones you necessary want to hear, but stories that will linger in your head for a long time after your heard them. His expressive voice and energetic musical accompaniment making the songs on the album all the more unforgettable.
Nebraska (Film review)
I have found one of my new favorite films ín Nebraska. It already ranks up there with films such as Station Agent, Bruce McDonald’s Roadkill and Highway 61 and a few of Jim Jarmusch’s early films (just to name a few) although I have only seen it once so far. The latter being a rather obvious comparison, as Nebraska is, like Jarmusch’s Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise, shot in b/w, and extremely beautifully at that, but more about that a bit later. Whereas Jarmusch’s films are always on the ‘cool’ side with musicians, DJ’s, hookers, pimps and the like in them, Nebraska is all about everyday people and their stories. It’s also a quiet, slow-paced, humane and has got an almost gentle feel to it in how the people in it are portrayed.
The film begins in Billings, MT (with the first few shots of rail lines and nearly deserted streets in winter that made me realise that I was in for a treat straight away). Old, frail and stubborn alcoholic Woody, played outstandingly well by Bruce Dern, falls for a scam letter, believing he has won a million dollars. He promptly decides to go to Lincoln, NE to collect his winnings and buy, for once in his life, a brand new pickup truck. His son, Dave, and Woody’s slightly vulgar and highly overbearing wife Kate try their best to convince him of the true nature of that letter, to no avail. Dave, also brilliantly played by Will Forte, an actor I previously only knew from a hilarious and memorable guest role in Flight Of The Conchords, reluctantly agrees to drive his dad down to Nebraska to collect Woody’s make-believe winnings. A decision he quickly comes to regret, after Woody drunkenly falls and splits his head open and he has to take him to an ER.
To recuperate, Dave decides to take Woody to his hometown of Hawthorne, NE where most of Woody’s family still lives. Fictional Hawthorne is a rural community on the plains of Nebraska, typically characterised by agriculture and a sedate lifestyle.
The meeting with his extended family (some of them on the graveyard) and former friends, acquaintances and lovers however, doesn’t go as smoothly as Dave would have hoped. The news that Woody struck it rich dos make various family members and one especially persistent former business partner and friend claim a payout for long-forgotten or not-existent in the first place, debts. The large family at the reunion meal is a brilliantly portrayed cast of people, all of them small town, and most of them older folk. Especially curious are Dave’s two never-do-well cousins, first mocking him for taking two days to drive down from Montana, and later going so far as to spring on Woody and Dave coming out of a bar, balaclavas and all – and stealing that famed letter. The rather comic fight between one of the cousins and Dave’s brother, hotshot TV-presenter Ross (played by ‘Better call Saul’, Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk) is hilarious indeed.
After these, for this somber, mostly melancholic film at least, comparatively tumultuous scenes, Dave agrees to finally go down to Lincoln to collect Woody’s imaginary winnings. They eventually make their way back to Montana without the million dollars, but with a new, well, actually 5-year old, but practically as-new Pickup truck which Dave lets Woody drive through his hometown. It’s a touching end to this lovely film, showing something of the fragile bond between a father and son that most probably haven’t been this close for ages.
As I hinted at earlier, this is a friendly, relaxed film in which nothing overly dramatic happens. I for one enjoy films like that a lot, there are enough films about cops, gangsters, pathologists and FBI people out there. This film is flying the flags for real people, trying to make the best of what they got and their all-too real problems. I was very impressed not only with the principal actors in the film, but also with the secondary ones and extras – they all look like genuinely like Midwestern, small-town inhabitants. Very nice.
The aspect I like best about Nebraska however is the photography. Each single scene in the film is perfectly framed and lighted, whether they are beautiful wide-angel landscape shots or small-town scenes quite a few of which are night shots. For somebody like me who loves the much-ridiculed Plains landscapes and the little towns dotted about it, the Nebraska is a feast for the eyes. Coupled with the superb acting, the lovely story and the impeccable directing, this is a film I will be cherishing for a very long time. Director Alexander Payne has of course done a quite similar-themed film before with About Schmidt, so he’s clearly got a lot of affection for his home state (he was born in Omaha). Although I did like that film a lot too, Nebraska in my opinion is the more successfully realised film of the two.
Sherman Alexie : Reservation Blues
Reservation Blues revisits the characters of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin, first written about so memorably in the 1993 short story collection The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven (read my review here). In Reservation Blues, long-dead and legendary Blues musician Robert Johnson somehow makes his way onto the Spokane Indian Reservation and quickly disposes his famous guitar into the hands of angry (and mostly drunk) Victor Joseph, who from that moment on, plays a mean guitar.
Together with his best buddy Junior and Thomas, he starts Coyote Springs, a band that after some rocky beginnings manages its way off the reservation (‘’anywhere off the reservation,’ Thomas said ‘ ,is along ways from the reservation’’), first to the Flathead Indian Reservation and later to Seattle, eventually landing in New York City. In between they get helped and/or distracted by a variety of imaginatively conceived characters, such as Flathead sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water and Seattle New Agers Betty and Veronica, who briefly join Coyote Springs only to leave both the band and the reservation because ‘it’s nuts here’. Also always lurking in the shadows are the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota and Big Mom, a mystical figure living high up on Wellpinit Mountain where she is joined by Robert Johnson. Things take a decidedly turn for the worse after the audition in New York City goes less than ideal and the hoped-for path to stardom curtailed. Back on the reservation, Junior takes his own life and the band gets scattered with the wind.
Things of course don’t go by without a myriad of complications and hiccups, such as various little and big tiffs between various members of Coyote Springs, beautiful Checkers Warm Waters falling in love with the reservation priest Father Arnold, and the continuing struggle with money worries.
The writing is once again wonderfully unique and steeped in mystique, such as in the last sentence of the book ‘Checkers and Chess reached out of their windows and held tightly to the manes of those shadow hoses running alongside the blue van’.
I wasn’t that totally captivated by his writing style as when I was reading The Lone Ranger And Tonto… but that might only because the short story collection was the first book I read by Sherman Alexie and his writing style was brand new to me then.
As in that book, the humdrum tragedy of life on an Indian reservation are very much in the focus of the book, as witnessed in conversations such as this one by Father Arnold and Checkers Warm Waters: ‘Does everything have to be about money?’ ‘Of course it does. Only people with enough money ever ask that question anyway’.
Speaking for Sherman Alexie is the fact that none of the often rather serious subject matter is written in an educational or preachy way. On the contrary, he manages to convey the things he wants to say in an often downright hilarious, even wacky way, without sacrificing his messages or diluting the comments and observations of the harsh realities of life on an Indian reservation and the continuing struggle Native American society is experiencing. Which is one of the main reasons endearing his work to me so much. Reservation Blues is an extraordinarily well-conceived story featuring a great cast of memorable characters. All of which are written about with loving attention to detail, culled both from reality and the inventive mind of Sherman Alexie, who as a mixed Spokane/Couer D’Alene is uniquely well-adapted to write about these things. As for my attraction to his writings and all things Native American, that attitude of the ‘white man’ gets addressed numerous times in the book too, such as in the scenes with Betty and Veronica, so that’s given me a chance to reflect on my motivations, which is making his books particularly relevant to myself and a lot of other people reading them.
Eric Bibb : The Cape
Another new discovery for me – as usual, I am late discovering fine artists who have been around for ages. The Cape is taken from his 2004 release Friends
David Mallett : Second Cup Of Coffee
David Mallett is a singer/songwriter from Maine, active since the 1970’s, although I have only recently heard of him for the first time. His songs have been covered by artists as varied as Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Emmylou Harris, Alison Kraus, and, ahem, The Muppets (Garden Song). He’s recorded some more Country influenced albums in the past, but the songs of his I like most are firmly rooted in Folk-traditions. So, fittingly, the two videos I chose to share on here were recorded in a coffehouse in Massachusetts in 2014.
His website is: http://davidmallett.com/
Jon Brooks : Mercy
Jon Brooks is a Canadian Singer/Songwriter who I have only recently discovered. Still have to get one of his records, his latest album The Smiling And Beautiful Countryside was released in late 2014, so I’m probably gonna go for that. This song, Mercy is taken from his 2011 album Delicate Cages, is a splendid, quiet acoustic song with intelligent lyrics – so it’s right up my street.
Bruce Cockburn : Nothing But A Burning Light
When Nothing But A Burning Light was released, way back in 1991, I liked the music I was listening to have a bit more punch and drive, so I didn’t give him and his music the attention it definitely deserves. Having left the ‚Rock’ period more or less behind the past few years, I can see now that he is an amazing guitarist, an extraordinarily gifted songwriter and politically on the ‘right’ side, which for me is the left. He’s long been active and supportive of humanitarian and ecological causes, as well as a supporter of Native American causes (he was, for a time in the 1960’s, a member of Abundance To Revolution with Duke Redbird, whose song Silver River (with Shingoose) can be heard on Native North America Vol. 1 (read my review here). Which neatly brings me to one of the standout tracks of this record, Indian Wars. Fittingly, it’s a somber, sparsely produced song with only him on acoustic guitar/vocals and Jackson Browne on a resonator guitar together with violin/mandolin player extraordinaire Mark O’Connor. The result is a dignified, slow and gorgeous songs with touching, poetic lyrics such as this: ‘treaties get signed and the papers change hands but they might as well draft these agreements on sand’. O’Connor’s contributions can’t be praised enough, on here, as well as on One Of The Best Ones, his graceful violin/mandolin accompaniments are simply wonderful. Also exceedingly excellent is Child of the Wind – a song with a title like this could be very much kitsch in lesser hands, but on here it’s utterly beautiful (this time with Cockburn on a resonator guitar, having one of those played on a song is always a plus). Speaking of arrangements, the album is produced by probably the best man for this kind of music, T Bone Burnett. Burnett contributed his skills to many of my favorite records such as Counting Crows’ August and Everything After, as well as albums by The Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan and Gillian Welch (just to name a few). In the recent past he’s become legendary of course with his musical directions for The Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?’ and Inside Llewyn Davis. On here you hear a sound which is, for that time period, outstandingly good, a bit thinner than nowadays maybe, but there’s mainly acoustic instruments and the sound is both rustic and naturalistic – just as I like it. There’s also two lovely instrumental songs, one, Actions Speak Louder is the theme to a documentary called The Greenpeace Years. The slightly too commercial for my taste Great Big Love most probably was intended as a hit single (the album was released on Columbia Records after all), but for me is the least convincing song on the album. Album opener A Dream Like Mine which sounds similarly catchy (it’s one of the few slightly more uptempo songs) fares much better in comparison. Second track Kit Carson and Mighty Trucks Of Midnight sound exactly like the titles suggest, breathing the spirit of empty North American trails and highways, with the latter touching on problematic issues such as US American companies leaving the country to do their manufacturing down in Mexico. Soul Of A Man, a song by Blind Willie Johnson sounds exactly like you would expect it to (which is a good thing, naturally). Somebody Touched Me in contrast, sounds light and airy with a rather nice organ by Booker T. Jones. I’ve just been rediscovering this CD among my records a few days ago, I didn’t even know anymore I had it. I am very glad I did, it’s an amazing record by an artist at the prime of his career, with a producer on board that knows exactly how to produce this kind of music, a match made in heaven. And, most importantly, a bunch of great songs. Here’s a rather beautiful video/slideshow to ‘ Indian Wars’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1a5DLmR8U
Back Road Bound 