Tag: lou reed

MIXTAPE: Korby Lenker’s Joyful Contrarians

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To me, the idea of the joyful contrarian is synonymous with being an artist. Joyful because on some level the creative person’s pursuit is to get high and stay high, to chase the spark that sets your soul on fire; contrarian because artists go their own way. The artist’s work may reinforce or defy social norms but either way the connection is coincidental.

These are a few of the songs, artists, and contrarians who have inspired me. — Korby Lenker

Doc Watson – “Country Blues”

Doc is a reliable tastemaker of enduring songs, but his interpretation of the Dock Boggs classic stands apart. Something uncharacteristically sour in it. Watson usually moves through happier vistas — as in say “Ramblin’ Hobo” or “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” But here his rueful tenor slaps against a clawhammer banjo and the mood is plaintive, down spirited, and harrowing as shallow grave.

Sierra Ferrell – “Bells of Every Chapel”

In love with this Appalachian Queen of modern yesteryear. She can belt, growl and chuckle inside the same song and still leave you with a lump in your throat. Plus that strong bent of humor and just plain orneriness. Is that a word? Sierra is funny and she’s been doing it her own way since she started. Joyful contrarian incarnate.

Nina Simone – “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

I could have chosen a dozen Nina Simone songs. The playfully saccharine “Sugar in My Bowl” might have been a good choice, but there’s a performance from when she was older, well into her activist chapter, where she plays this version of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” live at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. It was 1976. The musicianship is effortless, playful even as she sings that lyric of doleful, unfulfilled desire. But the real magic is toward the end. It’s as close as you’ll ever get to watching someone’s spirit wrestle with angels and demons inside. Electrifying.

Bill Miller – “Ghostdance”

I got to know Bill Miller over the last few years, I guess during the pandemic. He sang and played Native American flute on one of my songs. A soft spoken humble man with three Grammys and a life of music behind and in front of him, he is absolutely himself wherever he goes. I’ve watched him bring a room full of Nashville cool kids to tears with his singing. For this studio version of “Ghostdance,” he bussed several members of his tribe down from Wisconsin to a Music Row recording studio. He told me the engineer didn’t know how to mic a tribal drum encircled with elders. It got a little wild. I’m trying to think of a way to put Bill’s relationship with music. Blind to judgment, it’s something like that.

Jerry Garcia and David Grisman – “Teddy Bear Picnic”

Picked this one because it’s an outlier in an outlier’s repertoire. Jerry Garcia did not give a shit who sang what or why. For him a song was good or it wasn’t. “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” from Not for Kids Only is a children’s tune written and originally performed by Henry Hall over a hundred years ago. It’s uplifting and a little sinister at the same time. Plus the chords are magic. I play it sometimes in my own shows.

Robert Ellis – “California”

Writing these blurb things, I notice that most of the artists I’m drawn to are accomplished musicians as well as being great songwriters. Robert Ellis is among the best. He’s like, maybe too good for his own good. At home on piano or guitar, he can reference more musicians and songs than you, and he does this thing I really like with his albums where every song is a moment, its own little movie. This one, “California,” is a slow-motion explosion from the years in his life before he calmed down a little.

Adam Hurt – “Flannery’s Dream”

This was my most listened to album of 2019. Ten tracks of solo gourd banjo, interpreted by a introverted master of the niche. I spend a lot of time with instrumental music. Wordless emotions hit different. I defy you to find anything in the string music lexicon as inventive and emotive as Hurt’s solo music. It’s banjo as high art. Especially this album, Earth Tones.

Anaïs Mitchell – “Brooklyn Bridge”

More widely known as the creator of 2019’s Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell has been making the most inventive music in folk for two decades. Her album Young Man In America is my favorite record of the last ten years. I chose this track from her 2022 eponymous release because it’s a perfect example of deep sentiment couched in well-turned phrases matched with one of the more unique singing voices in the business.

Lou Reed – “Perfect Day”

Lou Reed, helming The Velvet Underground in the ’60s, was really the first artist to make music devoid of or without regard to commercial appeal. The original contrarian of art house rock, his songs explored heroin addiction, transgenderism, art for its own sake, and love. During his solo career, collaborations with Andy Warhol and composer John Cage cemented his status as a dissonant God of the avant-garde. “Perfect Day” is from his later catalogue. Sweet and small and sad. You probably know it from the movie Trainspotting.

Randy Newman – “Marie”

Randy Newman is an artist of intimidating powers. Another master musician and songwriter and curmudgeonly iconoclast. Watch his Tiny Desk Concert and see what happens to you. Setting aside his singular piano style with its striding left hand and those constantly tumbling suspensions, the songwriting is pure emotion when he wants it to be, derisive if the mood strikes him, or, in the case of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (which he penned), the soundtrack of your childhood. “Marie” is my favorite song of his. Listen to the solo piano version on The Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 1.

Jimmie Rodgers – “Blue Yodel No. 9”

Hard to find a contrarian with more joy than the Singin’ Brakeman, who died from tuberculosis at the height of his fame at the age of 35. I would describe “Blue Yodel No. 9” as charmingly incorrigible. Something that might’ve made a decent Depression-era mother cover her children’s ears. Little known fact: his longtime songwriting partner, who cowrote more than 40 of his songs, was his sister-in-law, Elsie McWilliams.

James McMurtry – “Long Island Sound”

Joyful contrarian or talented asshole? Both probably. I maybe should have selected his paean to North Texas methamphetamine culture, “Choctaw Bingo,” as the most contrarian, but I picked this one, the last track from his fantastic 2016 record, Complicated Game. I like this one best because it’s about making peace with where you’re at in life, maybe even celebrating the spot where you land: “These are the best days / These are the best days / Boys put your money away / I got the round / Here’s to all you strangers / the Mets and the Rangers / Long may we thrive on the Long Island Sound.”

Photo Credit: Ali Alsaleh

BGS 5+5: Darrin Bradbury

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Artist: Darrin Bradbury
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest Album: Artvertisement

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

It’s not from being on stage, but this one time, my tour manager Josh and I broke down an hour outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, on the way to opening for Robert Earl Keen. The van just up and died. We were on the side of the highway wondering what to do when we called AAA. It turned out that we were just below the amount of miles that AAA would tow — making our arrival to open for Robert Earl Keen, pulling up right behind the tour bus in a tow truck, jumping out of said tow truck, running on stage, plugging in and playing.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

Unfortunately, I find that often characters hide behind me, making me speak for them as they cower behind me, quite frankly it’s exhausting. I wish they’d just speak for themselves, I just keep collecting them, as voices in my head.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show

Before every show I’m usually pretty antsy. Offstage I’m fairly introverted. One of my best friends from back in New York wrote this song about a decade ago on a road trip we were on through the Midwest called “Moon in the Blue Sky.” I always find a quiet spot to sing it to myself.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

Abstract expressionism, gestural painting, de Kooning, Pollock, Picasso, as well as authors Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, John Fante. I also dance when no one’s looking.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Every song is the toughest, roughest, most pain in the ass, shit kicker, tooth knocker, sock rocker, and you don’t always win.

Photo credit: Weston Heflin

MIXTAPE: Lowland Hum’s Songs for Dusk

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We’ve put together a group of songs that feel related to dusk: the transition moments between day and night. Included in our thinking about dusk are the days in between each season.. winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall and fall to winter days. We all need help in our times of transition, as we are being stretched, strained, or pressed between what was and what is to come. The songs that assist us in these travels seem to have an unplaceable quality, both disorienting and comforting like a sweet, warm drink with salt scattered on its surface.

The unique combination of anticipation and farewell allows these songs to occupy paradoxical thematic and sonic space. We need songs like these so we can bring more of ourselves into the present. So, we humbly offer this grouping of songs to accompany you in transitions of all kinds, whether they be literal dusks, the days between seasons, or simply moments where this particular tone may be soothing, cathartic, comforting or augmenting. To paraphrase something we read on The Milk Carton Kids’ Mixtape… “we include our songs aspirationally and for self-promotion here.” — Lowland Hum 

Aldous Harding – “Zoo Eyes”

We love Aldous Harding’s ability to shapeshift, morph, and play in her music while remaining vulnerable and human. It reminds us that those are all options we can choose as well when creating. Her most recent album, Designer, is delicious.

Bob Dylan – “He Was a Friend of Mine”

This song has always stood out to us as a deeply compassionate and humanizing song that packs so much into its few and deceptively simple words. It reminds me of the wordlessness that comes with deep grief. At the anniversary of George Floyd’s death I think of the great losses our nation has experienced this year and the way all words felt clumsy and insufficiently small in the face of such dumbfounding, dark and evil things.

Big Thief – “Open Desert”

We’re having a hard time finding what’s not to like about anything and everything coming from Adrianne Lenker (and her band) these days.

The Beatles – “Julia”

This melody is so wistful, dreamlike, sad, and lovely. “When I cannot sing my heart I can only speak my mind, Julia, sleeping sand, silent cloud, touch me so I sing a song of love, Julia.”

Radiohead – “You and Whose Army?”

The beginning of this song makes us feel like we are suspended in shimmering stardust thick enough to hold a person’s weight. The arrangement blooms so patiently until you suddenly tumble down a flight of stairs. That a recording can do that is one of the main reasons we organize our life around music.

Antonio Carlos Jobim – “Look to the Sky”

I mean, are you not slow dancing by yourself on a terra cotta tile patio, barefoot, with a cocktail in hand when you hear this?

Labi Siffre – “Cannock Chase”

The combination of this picked guitar and gently shuffling percussion sounds like being in the car at dusk with the windows down, scenery flying by.

The Zombies – “Beechwood Park”

We’ve listened to this album so much in the past few years, but somehow only really noticed this song and its magnificence in the past week. Now we are obsessed.

Nick Drake – “Free Ride”

To us Nick Drake always sounds like sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. Although this one carries a bit more urgency and pep than some of his other songs, this one is no exception.

Myriam Gendron – “Solace”

This song comes from an album of Dorothy Parker poems put to music by Myriam Gendron. The whole album is like a friend sitting silently beside you when you’re feeling a lot. You probably need it in your life.

Keur Mossa – “Quand le fils de l’homme viendra”

This song comes from an album that has been an immense comfort to us in times of transition. When far from home, while working on building our studio in early morning light, while in labor with our first child… It’s a beautiful treasure of humanity reaching toward divinity.

Tiny Ruins – “One Million Flowers (solo)”

This album is all solo guitar and voice versions of Tiny Ruins’ full-band album Olympic Girls. Hearing these songs stripped to their skeletons showcases how strong her songwriting and voice are. Though we were fans of the full-band album first, we prefer these versions hands down. We aspire to make songs that can stand on their own naked or dressed up.

Lowland Hum –”We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)”

This is our cover of Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” from his album, So. We covered that album in its entirety, calling our version So Low. Our version came out on the 35th anniversary of the original’s release.

Lou Reed – “Perfect Day”

This song is a cocktail of equal parts bummed-out and triumphant. How he does it we don’t know, but we love it.

Frank Sinatra – “Mood Indigo”

The strings and reeds in this song are like sitting on a fire escape in the warm balmy breeze of a summer evening. Sinatra’s delivery is so subtle and masterful. You can’t go wrong with any song on In the Wee Small Hours.

The Weather Station – “Trust”

We have long been fans of Tamara Lindeman. Her songwriting is like a window into the unspoken dialogue of real relationships.

Arthur Russell – “Close My Eyes”

This song is so visual to me (Lauren). It reads in the mind like a bedtime story complete with dark oil pastel illustrations. I dare you to close your eyes and not see it all.

Gold Connections –”Confession”

Will Marsh of Gold Connections is a dear friend of ours but we promise we aren’t biased. They just released this single and we can’t get enough of it. This song has it all: city and desert; neon signage and the kind of starry sky that can only be seen when you are far from civilization.

Bruce Springsteen – “Nebraska”

Tragic, startling, beautiful. Daniel always says he believes in this album because it gave him compassion for a mass murderer. That’s some power right there.

Paul Simon – “Night Game”

What a stunning and mournful number. Who knew a song about baseball could feel so mystical? Hold out for the otherworldly harmonica solo by Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor. This one has comforted us on many a late-night drive.

Adrianne Lenker – “forwards beckon rebound”

This whole album is a treasure. This song has such a great momentum while remaining quiet.

Martin Denny – “Trade Winds”

This exotica album is a staple in our household during our newborn son’s bathtimes. But we find it perfectly appropriate for listeners of all ages and stages. It is perfectly campy and yet transportive.

Lowland Hum – “Waite”

We felt that we needed to include at least one original Lowland Hum song, so here’s our duskiest. This song was written while on tour in Europe in 2017. We were playing a house concert in a landscape painter’s home studio and gallery (Andy Waite is the name of the painter and now friend) and the guitar part mysteriously came to Daniel while we were setting up in the space. Something about being in a home so steeped in one person’s creative life and flow was magical. There was a very real substance in the air that mysteriously found its way into Daniel’s fingertips as he was messing around on guitar.

Photo credit: Tristan Williams

Canon Fodder: Cowboy Junkies, ‘The Trinity Session’

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“Roots” is an impossibly broad term that reasonably encompasses every strain of American music, from folk and country and gospel to bluegrass and blues and rock, from hollers, reels, and jigs to ballads, anthems, and laments. That makes for an incredibly diverse catalog of songs and albums that fall under that heading. Each month Stephen Deusner examines an album that lies either in the center — or more often in the margins — of what might be considered the roots canon … if there even is such a thing.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way first: The Cowboy Junkies’ second album was recorded at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto in November, 1987. The church was initially reluctant to let a secular rock group hold sessions there, so the band broke the ninth commandment and bore false witness: They said they were a gospel act called the Timmins Family Singers and they were recording a holiday radio special. Many of the songs were captured with the band playing around one microphone, with Margo Timmins’ vocals broadcast over the church PA. It took either one day or several days, depending on who’s telling the story.

When fans talk about The Trinity Session, they almost always foreground the circumstances of its recording, as though that setting demonstrates the album’s authenticity — as though authenticity were objectively demonstrable. Overshadowing the music, the story of the album has become the album, and even the band is complicit: In 2007, they celebrated their breakthrough’s 20th anniversary by rebooking the same church, inviting some popular fans inside (including Vic Chesnutt and Ryan Adams), and re-recording the album song for song.

The music gets lost in that tale, so that it becomes easy to ignore the mood that the church itself went so far to create. It obscures the fact that this is an album that dramatically rewrites its folk source material, that conceives of personal and professional troubles (touring, romance, the usual) as the raw material for folk tunes, and considers Elvis Presley and the Velvet Underground to be folk artists. For many listeners (including yours truly), it was their first introduction to the folk process, years before Uncle Tupelo and others were revving up the Appalachian tradition to define alt-country. The Trinity Session is a seminal album, if it can ever escape the church.

The Church of the Holy Trinity did do one important thing: It created a sonic palette for these songs, eschewing the clinical silence of the studio for something with an audible ambience. It’s there in the a cappella opener “Mining for Gold,” a cover of a song by the Canadian folkie James Gordon. As Margo voices the worries of someone whose life is spent underground, you can hear the soft rumble in the background, a thousand small things coalescing into a roomy thrum: distant traffic, footsteps, whispers, birdsong, exhalations and inhalations, the bustle of Toronto just beyond the sanctuary. If you wanted to be romantic, you might say it’s the sound of a ghost in the room, a spectral musician accompanying Margo’s performance. But perhaps it’s something more: The entire world hushed so that the singer can get inside her own head for a few precious moments. That sound is the sound of sanctuary.

Reviewing the album in 1989 for Spin, Erik Davis described it as “a combination of Quaaludes and honey.” In this aural soup, the instruments take on lives of their own. Alan Anton’s bass doesn’t enter through your ear; rather, it already exists in your head. The harmonica leaps out of “I Don’t Get It,” almost like a jump scare in a horror movie. Michael Timmins’ guitar solos seem impossibly delicate, especially on “Dreaming My Dream with You.” His sense of timing makes the music all the more immersive; you lean in to hear his notes. Most of all, it’s the way these sounds collide and combine that reinforce the idea of the Cowboy Junkies as a band, which is crucial. They sway into oncoming traffic on “Walking after Midnight,” they swing delicately on “Blue Moon Revisited,” they jam industrially on “Working on a Building.” The church becomes a place of musical communion.

Margo Timmins sings “Mining for Gold” like the song wasn’t written but passed down through generations, and introduces a compelling strategy the band will deploy on most of the songs that follow: It uses the folk tune as a metaphor for band life. The Cowboy Junkies are miners searching for a rich vein of gold, and they persist despite the dangers such an enterprise entails. She may sing of silicosis (and who else could make that disease sound sing-song-y?), but the travails they face are more spiritual than physical. There is a sly nod to fellow Canadian Neil Young, who famously had “been a miner for a heart of gold,” but there are sly nods to so many performers here: the swaggering sex appeal of Elvis Presley on “Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis),” the horrific isolation of Hank Williams on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the heroic stoicism of Patsy Cline on “Walking after Midnight,” even the unexpected compassion of Lou Reed on “Sweet Jane.”

These artists are the veins they’re mining, which inform the handful of originals on The Trinity Session, in particular “200 Miles.” At first, it plays like a rounder’s anthem or a trucker song, but it becomes not only a description of life in a touring band but a declaration of intent — an explication of why the Timminses might choose a life on the road: “I got Willie on the radio, a dozen things on my mind, and number one is fleshing out these dreams of mine.” It’s no coincidence that they follow that song up with Waylon Jennings’ “Dreaming My Dreams with You.” “I hope that I find what I’m reaching for, the way that it is in my mind.”

The Cowboy Junkies are not only running toward some dream they can only vaguely define. They are also running from something. Death stalks every song on The Trinity Session, whether in the form of black lung or a car collision or some unknown fate that befalls every one of us. “I want to make sense of why we live and die … I don’t get it,” Margo sings on “I Don’t Get It.” And, just in case you think this album is without humor, she remarks grimly, “I ask my friends if they understand, but they just laugh at me and watch another band.” Music is one means by which we might understand life and death — or at least the Junkies hope so.

Are these songs receptacles for the dead and the doomed? Do they contain the ghosts of Hank, Patsy, and Elvis, and now Lou and Waylon? Nearly every artist they cover has died, which means that, 30 years after it established them as one of Canada’s most daring rock acts, The Trinity Session isn’t so much an album as it is a séance — a means by which they can contact and interrogate the dead.