By way of explanation, I have spent most of the last 21 years engaged in the business of criticizing obscure pockets of would-be popular music. Back when my amateur status as assured, I used to make cassette tapes summarizing my year's discoveries -- mostly old and obscure rock 'n' roll -- and simply date them with the year of that discovery. The last of those which will easily be found, a kind of party tape with Free's "Alright Now" and the Eurythmics and god knows what else mixed in, ends with Mudhoney's "Touch Me, I'm Sick."
And there one era ended for me, and another began.
For the 13 years following my great grunge adventure, I was lucky enough to co-edit and art direct an obscure roots music magazine called No Depression, which shuttered its print version with our May-June edition, thereby occasioning my retreat to this corner of the writing universe.
For the last few years, as both a holiday gift and as a means of assuring that my obligatory year-end list was accurate and complete, I've used the new-fangled iTunes technology to pull together a summary compilation CD. And then, obsessive that I am, I design a cover, burn a few copies, and send them to my big brother and a handful of citizens who labor outside the confines of the music business.
And so...
...now that I have my amateur status back, for the most part, I had nearly forgotten this short-lived tradition until one of our former babysitters came back to town and asked if I'd made a new compilation for 2008. And I hadn't, though my year-end list obligations for the ND website continue. And so I did. Ordinarily I would post this in blog form on the ND website, but I'm already a column ahead there, and I feel like writing this now, and not later.
And like every music geek known, I have the insatiable desire to inflict my taste on others.
One final caveat: I have inhabited an obscure, roots-oriented corner of the music listening world for more than a decade. My compilation is envisioned as an aural essay, and the linkages between songs -- the sequencing -- is something about which I have agonized far beyond my wife's patience and understanding. The songs comment upon each other, reflect upon each other, add up to a meditation on the year passed, at least on my year as it passed by. In no way does this list pretend to reflect the best songs in the greater universe of music, for I long ago withdrew from that world. This is just what I heard, what spoke to me. I do not mean to be willfully obscure; this is simply what I listen to.
Let me emphasize, again, that what follows is meant as a kind of essay, and that sequencing is important to me. I emphasize this because we now live in an era of shuffle-play, in a time when the nature and existence of the record album as a suite of songs is jeopardized by technology which invites end-users to program music to their delight, without respect for the artist's intent. Sequencing matters, and especially to a technophobe like me.
- "Plan To Marry" by Lucinda Williams (from the album Little Honey). Of all the improbable things, Lucinda Williams made a joyous album that is, mostly, sometimes obliquely, about being happy and falling in love. Typically this is an occasion upon which great songwriters discover their inner mediocrity, and she did not. Instead, she found a vent for all that joy. This is not the song most have noticed on Lucinda's album, but its theme, the questions it raises, fit our times, and this particular community. The song was included as a nod to a blog/column by my colleague, Kurt B. Reighley, and then found it way into the opening.
- "I Idolize You" by Lizz Wright (from the album The Orchard). I cannot pretend to know squat about jazz, nor about jazz vocalists, and yet, still, I will argue Lizz Wright is one of the finest vocalists of our times. Of any time. She opened her previous album with "A Taste Of Honey," and made Herb Alpert's classic all her own. Made it new. Ike Turner, who passed this year, wrote the song, and Tina cut it long ago. It belongs to Lizz Wright now. And, of course, we have business with idols, including the one we elected.
- "The Guy For The Job" by Tim Carroll (from the album, The Devil Is A Busy Man). A garage rock tonic of braggadoccio. Tim Carroll is one of those enormously talented people who bang around in East Nashville, making records, writing songs, playing guitar with various people (including his wife, Elizabeth Cook, who sometimes appears on the Opry; if it were within my power, both would be stars...but, of course, it's not within my power). For a while this compilation centered on the devil's work, but this song comments better on the season than does that too obvious theme.
- "Mercy" by Duffy (from the album Rockferry). By the time this CD arrived at my door this summer I had long since quit regularly opening the mail and hunting the next star. But the cover looked right, and so I played it, and was enchanted. Two weeks later she was near the top of the Billboard charts, which rarely happens to music I like. She is young and, I believe, Welsh; this is a techno-disco-soul song that sounds (though it is not) like something from the 1960s, from the same era Lizz Wright often nods to. And it reminds me, somehow, of the Eurythmics, who once I loved.
- "Fire Song" by Valorie Miller (from the album Autumn Eyes). This is Ms. Miller's third of fourth album, none of which have done much to draw attention to her work outside her native environs of Asheville, NC. This song is not reflective of the album -- it's the only piece I really like, in fact -- which is far more folk, less angular, and less blue than its predecessors. But it's about grace, in a quirky way. And her voice has some of the same astringency I hear in Duffy.
- "Blue Side Of The Mountain" by the Steeldrivers (from their eponymous album). The lead singer, Chris Stapleton, comes roughly from the same part of Kentucky where I now live. Most of his bandmates are a generation older, and were involved in varying ways with the Dead Reckoning collective/label Kieran Kane (of the O'Kanes) and his friends put together in Nashville in the mid-1990s. That label occasioned the first piece I wrote for ND. Which is not the point. Stapleton is a stunning singer, as much southern rock as bluegrass.
- "What's The Use" by Bobby Rush (from his album, Raw). Mr. Rush, about whom I know nothing, appears on the album cover wearing only his overalls and a guitar, and he is mostly alone throughout this album. Most of the songs are standards about women and such, but I was looking for an excuse to mention him, and I was looking for a more direct commentary on the economy. (I had meant to break my own rules and dig out John Brimm's old Chess recording of "Tough Times," until I remembered this track.)
- "Blue-Diamond Mines" by Kathy Mattea (from her album Coal). She was, once, a country star -- a female Don Williams, perhaps. Now, at her leisure, she made an entire album about coal, enlisting Marty Stuart and his crack band for support. In which, among other things, there is an opportunity to talk about the evils of mountaintop removal.
- "The Devil" by Darrell Scott (from his album, Modern Hymns). Darrell has written his share of country hits, and made his share of largely ignored but really good albums. For this one, he chose to salute songs and songwriters who he had admired as a young man. He and I share an admiration for Hoyt Axton, who was the first country singer I ever saw perform in the flesh, back at the Arena in Seattle in about 1978, during my first punk phase. The album on which this song appeared was just released by the Australian label, Raven. Like I said, the devil's at work, one way or another.
- "Hell Ain't Half Full" by Chris Knight (from his album, Heart Of Stone). Chris has one great song, "If I Were You," about a homeless guy and some other things (on the Trailer Tapes, finally), and some other really good ones. This, too, is one of his best, though his shot at country stardom ended long ago and for just this kind of bleak, closely observed reason. Where I live today lots of people are being lost to meth and oxy.
- "Frankie's Gun" by the Felice Brothers (from their eponymous album). Feral kids from upstate New York, dabbling in antique sounds, partly show, partly substance, and I'm not sure about any of it. But I bet they've watched Reservoir Dogs once or twice.
- "Little Liza Jane" by Otis Taylor (from the album, Recapturing The Banjo). Otis isn't singing this one; it's either Keb' Mo or Alvin Youngblood Hart, and my copy doesn't say. But Otis is the instigator. Once upon a time he may or may not have almost been signed to a London label as the next Jimi Hendrix. He became a bicycle racer and an antique dealer, and, finally, a bluesman, sort of. He is as smart and difficult an interview as I can remember having conducted. This album is an attempt to reclaim the banjo, an instrument adapted in the New World from its African roots, to remind listeners that it was more than the minstrel show and, later, bluegrass. This is the adult version of a song my five-year-old listens to on an Elizabeth Mitchell album, and so it's a nod to her, as well.
- "Banjo Pickin' Girl" by Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet (from their eponymous album). Just fun, really, and the first in a series of songs drawn from the community of musicians dedicated to taking bluegrass and stringband music in whole new directions. This is the only traditional sounding son on the album, which is both glorious and challenging. Washburn is also the banjo player in Uncle Earle, and speaks Mandarin, by way of a quick thumbnail.
- "The Absentee" by Crooked Still (from the album Still Crooked). I loved their last album, and don't quite love this one, which is too much chamber music for me. This one was made after the original cello player decamped, but, regardless, Aoife O'Donovan is among the best new vocalists one might happen upon. Probably there should be a Punch Brothers track on this, too, but there isn't.
- "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by Hayes Carll (from his album, Trouble In Mind). A Texas version of Tim Carroll, with, for the moment, a major label deal.
- "Life Has Its Little Ups And Downs" by Raul Malo (from the Imus Ranch compilation). I'm not a big Don Imus fan, and sort of ignored this album. But I am a huge fan of Charlie Rich, and of this song song, written by his wife. Raul Malo -- late of the Mavericks -- is a richly voiced singer with an appetite for schmaltz. This is an almost gospel reading, a soaring promise of endurance. And we shall need that in the months and years to come.
- "Trouble In My Way" by the Como Mamas (from the album Como Now!). A cappella gospel. Essentially a modern field recording. The album is a compilation of voices, all cut during one day. It is the best record I have heard this year.
- "A Change Is Gonna Come" by Ben Sollee (from his album, Learning To Bend). Sollee plays cello in the Sparrow Quartet with Abigail Washburn, and comes from across the state, in Louisville. This is, of course, the Sam Cooke song we have been hearing a good bit of around and since the election.
- "I'll Take You There" by Mavis Staples (from Live: Hope At The Hideout). I do hope she is playing one of the inaugural balls. Who better to salute the man from Chicago who would be president than a woman from Mississippi, long a Chicago resident, who sang beside Martin Luther King?