Two more Tom Russell items

Found this August 6, 2010 Tongo Rad post at the now defunct Horseflies Music Blog and he does a tremendous job at breaking down Tom Russell's "U.S. Steel" song:

"... By all rights what you’ve got here are the ingredients for some standard blue collar fare, no disputing that. But what makes is stand above all of the rest is just how smartly written the lyric is and how well the arrangement is executed .."

Go here for more and it's definitely worth your while.

and

Here's another broader Tom Russell piece by ScottR at The Agonist, dated March 8, 2011. This line in particular jumped out at me:

"... Music has always been about the lyrics for me ..."

This also hit home:

"... I tried to tell him how much his music meant to me, and how I had lost a very close musician friend a couple years back, and how he had helped fill a hell of hole in my life. I tried to tell him that I had taken a creative writing course at one point in my life and the instructor had pointed out how many writers “take the easy way out” in their writing instead of doing the hard work to get it right. I said that even Dylan was guilty of it at times. I told him that I had never seen him do that. He looked at me, handed me back the CD’s, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you…, that really means a lot to me ...”