It has to be the right time, place and setting

Marc Hirsh/NPR writes about 'the listening experience" -- his ritual when putting on a new release.

Here's a snippet that rings so true:

"...What has kept me from just putting the damn thing in my CD player and pressing "play" is a bit of what I fully accept is compulsive irrationality: I want to hear it so much that I want to make sure that conditions are exactly right the very first time I listen to it, and conditions have not been exactly right. And that is, in a word, stupid..."

Nic Jones is back

Colin Irwin/The Guardian writes about Nic Jones returning to performing.

"Searching for Sugar Man" film

Ever heard of Rodriguez? This is fascinating.

Here's a fan site.

Here's the IMDB site.

Doris Toumarkine goes long with a very comprehensive article.

Protest songs

Juan Rodriguez comprehensively writes about protest music in a very interesting piece.

Music and life

Mark Edmundsen poses the question "can music save your life?' in a fascinating essay.

An early paragraph:

When I first heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965, not long after it came out, I was amazed. At the time, I liked to listen to pop on the radio—the Beatles were fine, the Stones were better. But nothing I'd heard until then prepared me for Dylan's song. It had all the fluent joy of a pop number, but something else was going on too. This song was about lyrics: language. Dylan wasn't chanting some truism about being in love or wanting to get free or wasted for the weekend. He had something to say. He was exasperated. He was pissed off. He'd clearly been betrayed by somebody, or a whole nest of somebodies, and he was letting them have it. His words were exuberantly weird and sometimes almost embarrassingly inventive—and I didn't know what they all meant. "You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat." Chrome horse? Diplomat? What?

Shawn Colvin still creating

Laura Rowley interviews Shawn Colvin who has both a new book and musical release out.

Interesting article on Gordon Lightfoot's music

The Ottawa Citizen newspaper ran a contest asking readers to submit stories on the effect a particular Lightfoot song had on their respective lives. Three entries are highlighted.

The new Gillian Welch & David Rawlings release

Andrew Dansby writes about the latest release by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

Loved this snippet on the creative process and intent:

"We're kind of profound editors," Welch says, laughing. She estimates that two "Harrow" songs - "The Way It Goes" and "The Way the Whole Thing Ends" - were four times longer as written than as recorded. "We like that almost nonlinear folk where you get the feeling there are other verses that explain things but they aren't there. That's one of the things we like about 'The Basement Tapes,' that old folk-song feeling where you don't know all the facts. You know a girl gets killed in the first verse, but you don't know why."

Check out Effron White

I have to admit that this is a brand new name to me: Effron White. His site is here.

BobD rightfully honored -- how does it feeeeeel?

Malcolm Jones/The Daily Beast captures Bob Dylan receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Jones' key paragraph: "You don’t have to like or admire Dylan to admit that he was a game changer. He made folk music hip. He made rock lyrics literate or, put another way, he made his audience pay attention to lyrics because he made them mean something. He blew a hole in the notion that radio hits have to clock in at less than three minutes. He proved that you can stand on a stage with just a guitar and not much of a voice and hold people’s attention for, oh, about five decades."

A review of the Tom Russell CD "Mesabi"

When his contemporaries and even some of the younger ones too have run out of fertile juice, Tom Russell keeps plucking from his desires, dreams and especially his memories.

His latest -- "Mesabi" -- is among his most creative ventures, bringing back to life artists and performers from multiple entertainment realms, their unsanitized human shortcomings and the feelings everyday folk attach to their stars.

In this release, the spectrum covers the resonance of Bob Dylan's birthplace, reality's demons despoiling actors Sterling Hayden and Bobby Driscoll, the improbable life of Ukelele Ike, Elizabeth Taylor's serial quests for fulfillment, riffing off James Dean's no-mans-land death and, very broadly, the fantasy world depicted in films plus what viewers add to such make-believe. Call it the human fascination with other worldliness, a respite from the down and dirty of reality.

Russell's latest home territory, El Paso, but more so the accompanying Juarez, now separated by a river of hope and tears, is also tragically displayed.

In "And God Created Bordertowns," Russell sings:

"...Our guns go 'cross the Rio Grande
Two thousand pieces everyday
And the coke and weed and methamphetamine
Come sliding back the other way...

In "Goodnight Juarez," he captures the nihilism present today:

"...Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows just
caught the last bus out
She said: "Seven sorrows used to fit the bill
but I'd need 10,000 now..."

But there is departure from the sins and sadness too, such as that depicted in "Love Abides," a plying of eventual optimism plus the destruction of fear and a heading inside to one's sanctuary core in "Heart Within A Heart."

There is no one else offering this kind of material and with such a display. Russell presents an entertaining mix of past and present in displaying vignettes of our mostly human tragedy.

Here is a review of "Mesabi" written by Mike Regenstreif.

Here is a link to a promo of the release (couldn't embed it for some reason):

The Playlist

* Mesabi
* When The Legends Die
* Farewell Never Neverland
* The Lonesome Death of Ukelele Ike
* Sterling Hayden
* Furious Love (For Liz)
* A Land Called "Way Out There"
* Roll The Credits, Johnny
* Heart Within A Heart
* And God Created Bordertowns
* Goodnight, Juarez
* Jai Alai
* Love Abides
* A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
* The Road To Nowhere