catalog Archives - The Bluegrass Situation

Like Billy Strings, Tyler Childers has taken an unlikely path to the top via live performance, not radio singles. He’s become an improbable arena-level star by ignoring typical Nashville bromides – equal parts Patterson Hood’s working-class Southern blues, Chris Stapleton’s bluegrass bonafides, and Woody Guthrie’s progressive populism. After all, you’re not gonna call your touring band The Food Stamps unless you lean left, at least a little.

Childers has become enough of a sensation for his appeal to extend beyond the Americana-adjacent world, too. Last year, he even turned up onstage for a live cameo with pop star Olivia Rodrigo in his Kentucky stomping grounds to do his song “All Your’n.” It went over like a house on fire.

Since country radio is finally, belatedly catching on with “Nose On The Grindstone,” lead single to Childers’ fine new Rick Rubin-produced LP Snipe Hunter, let’s take a look back to where he came from.

How’d this happen, anyway? Like this.

“Hard Times,” Bottles and Bibles (2011)

Going back to the beginning, “Hard Times” was the song that opened Childers’ full-length debut Bottles and Bibles. It’s an actual hillbilly elegy that definitely sets a tone, with finely detailed lyrics that unfold like a short story. Simultaneously stoic and emotional, Childers’ quavering vocal about a holdup gone wrong makes him sound like a protagonist who somehow regrets both everything and nothing at all: “And if the Lord wants to take me, I’m here for the taking/ ‘Cause Hell’s probably better than tryin’ to get by.”

“Long Violent History,” Long Violent History (2020)

Bluegrass roots and of-the-moment progressive activism makes for an unusual combination, but here we are. “Long Violent History” is title track to a bluegrass album and it’s the only original and non-instrumental track on the record. Evoking “Faded Love” at the outset and “My Old Kentucky Home” on the outro, it’s a rural Southern score for the Black Lives Matter protests that swept America in 2020.

“It’s the worst that it’s been since the last time it happened,” Childers sighs at the outset, resigned to the inevitability of violence happening again. For good measure, Childers made a supplemental spoken-word video (below) explaining the necessity of BLM: “If we didn’t need to be reminded, there would be justice for Breonna Taylor, a Kentuckian like me, and countless others.”

“Jersey Giant” – Elle King (2022)

If Childers ever records his own version of “Jersey Giant,” he’ll have to hustle to top Elle King’s cover. As with the similarly themed “Me and Bobby McGee” (written by Kris Kristofferson, but owned for the ages by Janis Joplin), King just completely inhabits the song’s bittersweet, longing anguish. “I left town when we were over… Just didn’t feel the same” – the way she pauses a beat between lines is just chef’s-kiss perfection. There are numerous cover versions of “Jersey Giant” out there, but this is the one that’s going to linger.

“Luke 2:8-10,” Rustin’ In The Rain (2023)

Remember the big pivot-point moment of truth in the classic holiday cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas – the “Lights, please” speech that his friend Linus makes? Childers must have grown up with that, too. Linus spoke these Bible verses, Luke 2:8-10, which Childers transposes to the key of honky-tonk in this song with his drawl in full effect. You can almost imagine the “Peanuts” dancers doing a two-step to it.

“Purgatory,” Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (2022)

Childers’ ambitiously wide-ranging 2022 album Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? featured eight gospel songs, each done in three different versions dubbed Hallelujah, Jubilee, and Joyful Noise. The latter category tricked each tune up with samples and remixes, which might be the closest Childers has ever come to hip-hop electronica (at least so far!). In this guise, the title track from his 2017 project Purgatory cuts the sort of groove you’d expect to hear in New Orleans.

“The Heart You’ve Been Tending,” Harlan Road – NewTown (2016)

What does it mean that so many of the best covers of Childers’ songs are by women? Who’s to say, but here’s another great one, from the Kentucky band NewTown’s Harlan Road album. “The Heart You’ve Been Tending” is in waltz time, with fiddler/singer Kati Penn’s vocal shining bright as a lighthouse cutting through a foggy mountain breakdown.

“In Your Love,” Rustin’ in the Rain (2023)

Another multimedia project of sorts, this song from Childers’ Rustin’ in the Rain started out as a relatively conventional devotional love song. Then he enlisted collaborators including his fellow Kentuckian, author Silas House, to make a video that casts “In Your Love” as a sort of country music version of Brokeback Mountain set in coal-mining country. As beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

“Matthew,” Country Squire (2019)

Childers has always been wildly eclectic and this song from his Country Squire LP is a prime example. “Matthew” is yet another working-class waltz, with enough bluegrass savvy to drop bluegrass legend Clarence White’s name in the lyrics – plus an actual sitar as oddball sound-effect mood-setter at the beginning of the song. Somehow it makes perfect sense.

“Bottles and Bibles (Live),” Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (2018)

With or without a band, Childers has always been a riveting live performer. This live version of the title track to his 2011 studio debut closed out 2018’s Live on Red Barn Radio I & II and it’s just voice and guitar. All the better to focus on the lyrics’ tale of preacher as wayfaring stranger pondering the difficulties of keeping to the straight and narrow: “But they ain’t had to walk with the weight that you’ve hauled/ They don’t know you at all, but they think that they do.”

“Coal,” Bottles and Bibles (2011)

What might Bruce Springsteen have been like if he’d grown up in a Kentucky coal-mining family? You can imagine him turning out like the narrator of this song, which sounds way too timeless to have originated in this century. It’s pure working class desperation: “We coulda made something of ourselves out there, if we’d listened to the folks/ That coal is gonna bury you.”

“Oneida,” Snipe Hunter (2025)

To be a Childers fan is to accept that he does have some idiosyncratic boundaries. There are songs from his live shows he’s never recorded, like the previously mentioned “Jersey Giant”; or popular recorded songs he has sworn off playing live, including the now-widely-seen-as-problematic “Feathered Indians.” For the better part of a decade, one of his unrecorded orphans was “Oneida,” a longtime fan favorite that’s like a Harold and Maude for the country set. Lo and behold, a recorded version finally surfaced as one of the best songs on Snipe Hunter. Dreams do come true.

Find more of our Artist of the Month coverage of Tyler Childers – including our Essentials Playlist – here.

Photo Credit: Sam Waxman

Joni Mitchell’s 75th birthday provides a great excuse (as if one is needed) for an examination of her catalog. A recent listen to her albums, in order, from the 1968 debut Song to a Seagull through 1979’s Mingus, was entrancing and revelatory.

Through these albums, motifs emerge: mechanical and technology metaphors (“Electricity,” “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” “Just Like This Train”), the allure/elusiveness of a free spirit (“Carey,” “Coyote”), the road as freedom and/or the illusion of freedom (“Refuge of the Road”), seemingly countless cafe and bar tableaus, each one vividly fresh (“Barangrill,” “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” “The Jungle Line”). And musically there’s the vertiginous vocal constructions, the ascending modal chordal guitar climbs, the preternatural classicalism of her piano and, of course, the mystique-filled harmonics of her idiosyncratic guitar tunings.

But the real motif throughout is that of the restless spirit: Just as you think you’ve got her pinned down, she’s going to bolt. This is, after all, the woman who, in her most radio-friendly pop song, “Help Me,” followed the domesticated joy of “we love our loving” with the wildcat escape clause, “not like we love our freedom.”

It’s also a catalog full of epiphanies, even for those intimately familiar with it, if approached with open ears. With each album there seemed to be one song that had gotten by in the past without making a full impression, but now grabbed the ears and mind in full, startling engagement, often standing out as different from anything else on its album, in some cases different from anything else Mitchell had offered. It’s Joni as Rorschach test, revealing as much of the listener by the response as it reveals of Mitchell the artist.

Try it yourself. See what grabs you. With commentary below the playlist, here are the songs that did that now for this writer.

“I Had a King” (from Song to a Seagull, 1968)

Never mind the “next Dylan” tag applied to every singer-songwriter of that time. The opening song of Mitchell’s debut album, produced by David Crosby, might make one wonder if she could have been the next Stephen Sondheim. The sophistication of the song is considerable, both the music and the words, a yearning soliloquy that could have been more at home on a Broadway stage than in a Village coffee house.

“The Fiddle and the Drum” (from Clouds, 1969)

The astonishing overdubbed harmonies. The indelibly idiosyncratic guitar tunings. The spritely dulcimer. The vivid close-up imagery and emotions. The sonata-like piano. None of those Mitchell signatures are on this song. Rather, this is a little coda for Joni Anderson, Canadian folkie. It’s just a solo, unaccompanied voice in an anti-war plaint, a song that she wrote but could easily pass for an English lament from centuries past. No wonder that among the several cover versions of it, one was by English singer June Tabor. As atypical a Mitchell song as it is, it’s resonated through the years with various versions, not least in its use as the title tune for a 2007 ballet conceived by Mitchell with Jean Grand-Maître of the Alberta Ballet Company. “This is a song I wrote for America, as a Canadian living in this country,” she said, introducing it on a 1969 Dick Cavett Show performance.

“Rainy Night House” (from Ladies of the Canyon, 1970)

“She went to Florida and left you with your father’s gun alone…” The tale is startling in its starkness, the melody deceptive in its plainness (relatively), but it’s the brief bits of “upstairs choir” harmonies illustrative in the middle and elegiac at the end that bring the light to these shadows.

“The Last Time I Saw Richard” (from Blue, 1971)

It’s a full minute into this song before Mitchell sings, as if she needed the time to consider whether to tell the story of dreams held and lost or just to keep it to herself while sitting and playing the piano. “All romantics meet the same fate someday” — as Joni a line as there is.

“Judgment of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig’s Tune)” (from For the Roses, 1972)

The middle instrumental section comes almost out of nowhere, Mitchell’s piano turning angular and fragile before being joined by waves of voices, flutes and strings, and then goes away just as suddenly, as if a tease for a concerto she was holding inside her. The title parenthetically evokes Beethoven, but the music suggests some of the 20th century’s great composers.

“Car on a Hill” (from Court and Spark, 1974)

Anticipation as palpable as it comes, first in the pure joy of it, but then full of anxious worry. You can picture Mitchell peeking out the window, checking her watch, trying to check her rising fears, waiting…. waiting… waiting….

“The Jungle Line” (from The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975)

Not only is there nothing else like this in Mitchell’s catalog, there is nothing else like this anywhere. Burundi drummers roil, punctuated by blatting synth lines, as Mitchell paints an account of another cafe scene with renewed vividness.

“Song for Sharon” (from Hejira, 1976)

On paper, musically at least, “Song for Sharon” would seem to be the plainest of the songs among the electric-guitar texture explorations of Hejira (not a piano or acoustic guitar to be found here), nearly nine minutes long. But patience pays off as line after line startles, shocks, an account of wanderlust, of suicide, of searching, of revealing resignation as she writes to a childhood friend: “Well, there’s a wide wide world of noble causes / And lovely landscapes to discover / But all I really want right now / Is, find another lover.” And keeping her company, a doo-wop chorus of Saskatchewan ghosts, though it’s unclear whether she’s carrying them with her or running from them.

“The Tenth World” and perhaps “Dreamland,” as the two are something of a piece (from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977)

The shifting landscapes of the 16-minute “Paprika Plain” is this album’s masterpiece, perhaps, but “The Tenth World,” six minutes of dense and intense Afro-Latin percussion laced with barely perceptible chants and chatter, may be the most unbridled expression in all of Mitchell’s work, the sound of total, joyful abandon. And it leads right into “Dreamland,” also just percussion and voice (in a very different way than “The Jungle Line”), which carries that joy from fantasy to reality. Bonus on the latter: Chaka Khan’s soul-moan counterpoints.

“The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey” (from Mingus, 1979)

A low detuned guitar string buzzes and roar while wolves — real wolves — howl as Mitchell casts a dark, wary, jaundiced eye on a two-legged lupine predatorily prowling the Hollywood Hills. It’s an odd side-trip on this album, nothing really directly to do with the honoree. Maybe that says something about the wolf that lives in Joni Mitchell.

Photo credit: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for The Music Center — (L-R) Jorn Weisbrodt, Charles Valentino, Joni Mitchell, Sauchuen, and James Taylor celebrate onstage at Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration Live At The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on November 7, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.

Tag: catalog

Tyler Childers: The Backstory (In Songs)