Tag: Song of the Week

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg, ‘Up of Stairs’

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There are lots of dudes doing the fleet-fingerpicking thing: Daniel Bachman, William Tyler, Steve Gunn, and Chuck Johnson are all guys at the top of their game who have put out excellent records in the last year-plus. Today, we've got another entry into that canon for your consideration — James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg's "Up of Stairs," the first single from their mid-September release Ambsace.

The album is the duo's second LP together; their debut Avos came out in 2010. They've each been busy with numerous other projects: Elkington has worked with the likes of Gunn, Daughn Gibson, and Jeff Tweedy; while Salsburg's full-time gig is the curator of the Alan Lomax archive. (He also appeared on another recent Song of the Week, Joan Shelley's "Stay On My Shore.") 

"Up of Stairs" opens with bright, complementary guitar licks that immediately feel warm and inviting. The song's notes ring with remarkable clarity, and the whole tune feels like a bad-vibes antifogmatic. Even if you're not in a funk, the graceful beauty of "Up of Stairs" will make your day even better. The song's title, Salsburg says, goes back to the pair's recording process in Elkington's attic studio. "There were lot of downstairs trips to refill on coffee and binge on carbohydrates," he offers. "I remember thinking one afternoon that we should take a break to go out of doors; instead, we went back up of stairs.” 

You can take a listen to "Up of Stairs" below, and learn more about Ambsace via Paradise of Bachelors.

Rayland Baxter, ‘Mr. Rodriguez’

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Nashville-based singer/songwriter Rayland Baxter has country music in his blood: his father, Bucky Baxter, has played pedal steel guitar for Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, R.E.M. and Steve Earle, to name but a few. But the younger Baxter has spent the last several years forging his own path as a musician, and his second LP, ImaginaryMan, hits store shelves in mid-August. "Mr. Rodriguez" is one cut from that record, plodding along with a groovy rhythm, a breezy main guitar melody and some tasty organ licks in the middle of the mix. At times, the song sounds like an outtake from Paul Simon's classic Graceland. Baxter says the tune came together in pieces after a four-day trip to Detroit.

"I was enamored by the city and saddened at the same time," he explains.

"I talk about the coal mine in the song because the phrase sang better than car factory. It’s the feeling between two lovers spending all night in the dark together then having to get back to work. That’s what I was trying to convey — an emotion."

The first half of the song focuses on walking through the city with Sixto Rodriguez, a lauded yet mysterious singer/songwriter who never floated above obscurity in the United States. While the song may not be an outright tribute track, its tip-of-the-hat to the not-too-distant past makes it a moving little tune.

Baxter's Imaginary Man is out August 14th. 

River Whyless, ‘The Hunt’

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If you've got a sibling, you know it's not always all that easy to get along. Some days you're best buds; others, you're rivaling Noam and Liam Gallagher in your distaste for each other. Asheville, North Carolina outfit River Whyless has written a stirring ode to these less-than-cheerful periods of sibling dissatisfaction.

Ryan O'Keefe, who wrote the song and serves as the band's main vocalist and guitarist, explains that "The Hunt" is, more specifically, about two brothers attempting to salvage their broken relationship.

“They're searching for a connection that binds siblings. The search for the energy that draws family back together when they've been pulled apart," he says.

The tune is even-keeled, with a meditative acoustic guitar lead and beautiful fiddle parts supported by a rumbling rhythm section that never overpowers its counterparts. "The Hunt" is just out as a single right now, but for just a dollar you can cop it from River Whyless' bandcamp.

If that's not enough, some of you West Coast folks can catch River Whyless on the road this Fall, after they make a stop at the Hopscotch Music Festival in their home state in a few weeks. 

Odetta Hartman, ‘Dreamcatchers’

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Clocking in at just under two minutes, Odetta Hartman's "Dreamcatchers" is a quick and grimy little tune that's instantly captivating. The song appears on Hartman's forthcoming 222, a dream-like collection of songs that, while rooted in folk, play with psychedelia and experimental elements to a compelling end. If you're into the sort of stuff that tests and pushes boundaries, this one's for you.

"Dreamcatchers" grew out of Hartman's imagination getting the best of her as a child, when she was haunted by night terrors in her family's basement apartment in New York City's Lower East Side. Those fears subsided when her mother put a small handmade dreamcatcher in the arch of her bedroom's doorway.

"The off-kilter song — which emerged out of the lucky mistakes of a three-finger banjo roll practice session and was produced to sound like a Celtic version of hell — embodies a web of superstition in which to hang those demons and abductors as musical mementos of a time when fear was simple," Hartman explains.

Hartman's haunting lyrics are muddled in with her banjo licks and a throbbing beat that you don't hear much in folk music. Her work here is rich and just the right kind of spooky — let it get under your skin a little bit. 

You can grab 222 — on cassette, even! — October 2 via Northern Spy.

Daniel Norgren, ‘I Waited For You’

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He may be from Sweden, but singer/songwriter Daniel Norgren could give a lot of American folksy acts a run for their money. His tender song "I Waited For You," from his new record The Green Stone, is a beautiful and mellow reflection on the familiar, extended ache of waiting for a loved one's return. Low-end guitar tones float in front of an organ haze, with Norgren's faint accent making him sound almost like a bona fide country singer. Like Joan Shelley's "Stay on My Shore," Norgren's "I Waited For You" gracefully addresses the many emotions that come with missing someone.

About the song, Norgren says, simply: "It's a song about patience."

To hear more from him, you'll have to find a little more patience — his forthcoming LP, The Green Stone, isn't available until October 16. It doesn't look like he'll be hitting the States for any tour dates soon, but you can keep up with him via Facebook.

Jenna Moynihan, ‘The Chill on Montebello’

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It's not quite snow season yet, but you can steel yourself for the looming cold weather with Jenna Moynihan's new "The Chill on Montibello," from her new album Woven. The beautiful fiddle tune, she says, was inspired by her hilltop home in Boston.

"I wrote this tune on the first snow, while living at the top of a seriously steep hill here in Boston. When it was icy, you kind of had to just let yourself slide down and hope for the best," she says.

The track begins with an older version that Moynihan recorded with Darol Anger a few years ago on a laptop. It's scratchy and rough, recalling the old-time 78s of decades long past.

"We made that recording sound even dirtier to feel a bit like a field recording," Moynihan explains. From there, the song blooms into a slightly cleaner arrangement. Della Mae's Courtney Hartman joins in on guitar, rounding out the higher fiddle counterpoints with warm, low riffs. 

"Darol and Courtney are such brilliant musicians. Playing with them is like a having a conversation, and we're all just living in the tune. That's what I'm interested in; the construction of an atmosphere around a melody — displaying the melody through my playing, instead of the other way around," she says.

The song's rich melody and its winding, intricate instrumental components make it worthy of many, many listens. You'll find something new to appreciate with each play — get started on it below.

George Michael, ‘Praying for Time’

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You can take your Nostradamus and stately old oracles: I've always found that some of our wisest prophetics are those who lace their visions — and warnings — for the future to song. Artists are just innately intuitive, and that same sense that lets them conjure pleasure-inducing pop melodies often goes hand-in-hand with an uncanny grasp of not only time's bitter passage, but what it has in store. George Michael, who joined David Bowie, Prince, Guy Clark, Merle Haggard, Leonard Cohen, and so many more on the list of icons we were stripped of this year, was as in touch with this fine line as anyone: He knew when we needed pure joy, like the chart-topping "Faith," and he knew when we needed caution, not celebration. "Praying for Time," his last single to reach number one, came on 1990's Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1, and it dealt with a star increasingly disenchanted with the concept of celebrity, with a sensitive soul in tune with the world's suffering, with how hate too often usurps love.

"This is the year of the guilty man," he sang. "Your television takes a stand." This was over 25 years ago, before the dawn of the reality-show president who often pledges to revive that prejudice that Michael urged us to put aside, threatening our hope and future. The seminal question of the song — "Do you think we have time?" — haunts so many minds as more beloved icons, like Michael himself, show us how little of it we indeed have. We watch as the days and weeks tick faster and faster toward uncertainty, wishing for a stalled clock, or, perhaps, one that can even spin backwards. How do we move forward in a world with increasingly fewer voices, and increasingly more orange-hued nightmares with bad comb-overs? This go around, it's going to take even more than a little faith, faith, faith.

Natalie Hemby, ‘This Town Still Talks About You’

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It takes a certain kind of confidence to, as a songwriter, wait patiently while you use your powerful words to serve the storybooks of others — and a certain kind of humility, too. For years, Natalie Hemby's had her tracks cut by the likes of Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert, and Kelly Clarkson, finding a niche as one of the town's most treasured sources of song, yet only discovered by those fans keen enough to read the liner notes. Of course, the more you know of her, it's actually quite easy to recognize a Hemby tune: the polite middle finger of Kacey Musgraves' "Good Ol' Boys Club," the catchy camp of Little Big Town's "Pontoon," the perfect swampy kiss-off of Lambert's "Baggage Claim." Her fingerprint is unmistakable, her pen so flexible that her visions are only limited by the creativity of whoever is around to interpret them.

For her solo debut, Puxico, Hemby chose not to use the opportunity to spell a confessional diary of her life or ride a show horse around the stable. Instead, she focused on the tiny town that gives its name to the title, where her grandfather, George Hemby, is from and where she spent much of her childhood. It's about the holes we leave behind in the shape of ourselves that never quite close up even when we drift farther and farther away — and how, in a world that at times feels crushing, there's always a place where we truly belong. "This Town Still Talks About You," which combines a pop-sensible beat with subtle country orchestrations, reminds us that moving on doesn't have to mean saying goodbye. What makes it unique is that Hemby decides to tell this story from the perspective not of the leaver, but of the left behind, full of vivid scenes and snapshots.

"You were so loved, you were one of our own, and it's never been the same, since you've been gone," she sings softly. We all want to believe that, if our high school walls could talk, they'd say the same thing about us.

Luke Roberts, ‘American Music’

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I didn't go into this week thinking that, by 11 pm Tuesday night, I would once again be looking toward music as catharsis. I thought, rather naïvely I suppose, that we would be queuing up some suitably celebratory tunes — maybe a little Kool and The Gang, maybe a little drunken Katy Perry — as we raised our glasses of boxed red wine and toasted to the first female president-elect. But instead, the house was silent, save for the low hum of MSNBC on in the background, turned down so we didn't have to hear the chirp of talking heads confirming that our worst fears had come true. There was no music. At 2 am, I woke up screaming, grabbing my baby daughter; I heard her whimper in the bassinet next to me in my half-conscious state, and had thought she was in danger. In a way, she is. It took me an hour to get her back to sleep, and I couldn't even muster myself to put on a lullaby: Instead, I played white noise.

The morning after, it was still quiet. Eerily so, as I dropped off my kids at daycare and went to get coffee. I didn't put on the radio; I left the television off. At my desk, speakers remained silent. It was all too fresh — even though I knew, like pouring peroxide on a wound, that turning to music would ultimately set me in the direction toward healing, once I got past the sting.

At around noon yesterday, I decided I was ready, and turned on Luke Roberts' new LP, Sunlit Cross. For most of the day, I found myself stuck on the second track, "American Music," a song anchored by slow and sticky plucks of the acoustic guitar that progresses into lush territory as his voice echoes and the keys kick in. "The gates are always open," he sings, "when you make them smile. We're going to put American music in the heart of every child." In this moment, he seems both earnest and critical: In America, we've often been in the strange place of encouraging our youth (and youth abroad) with our ideals as much as we over-enforce them — listen to us, follow us, be us. This is about to get a whole lot worse, especially as those gates close tight and a wall arises.

Roberts' voice is as soft as it is broken, the melody as traditional as it is off-kilter. And, breathing in and out with those subdued strums, I felt a little calmer — something no op-ed, no talking head, no Facebook post had yet been able to make me do. Calm for the beauty of the song; calm for knowing the ability to create will still exist; calm to remember the power and grace of American music. I finally felt brave enough to let it guide my emotions, and it reminded me that there's always a safe place within those notes and bars. And that, no matter how much easier it might be, white noise is never the answer.

Jonny Fritz, ‘Are You Thirsty’

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Somewhere along the way, when everyone in folk and country songwriting started to get just a little too serious, there was one unexpected casualty: detail. Just ask Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes: Mention a "chicken wing" in your song, as he did in "A Little Bit of Everything," and Reddit riots break out. Even though some of our greatest writers thrived — and still thrive — on very specific narrative imagery (well, hello, Bob Dylan and John Prine), it's far from an accepted thing — especially when it's used in any subversive or slightly satirical context. Any time we hear that sort of combination, we immediately classify it not as smart wordplay that captures the shadier side of human existence, but as comedy. Who knew that a chicken wing could be so divisive?

Such is the case, often, with Jonny Fritz, who happens to have featured Goldsmith and his brother Griffin on his Jim James-produced LP, Sweet Creep. Fritz has always been an extremely detailed writer, singing about trash cans, panty liners, and, now, alcoholics and seedy hotels; and sometimes that can make people a little uncomfortable. It's a lot easier to laugh than to actually appeal to the visceral nature of his work. "Are You Thirsty," the song that opens Sweet Creep, is deliciously specific: "Are you packing on the pounds now that you quit?" Fritz asks over a chugging countrypolitan doo-wop. It's about an alcoholic who left the bottle behind, and Fritz never buries his ideas in too many metaphors or grand, sweeping statements — he's simply turning life to lyric. And, really, life is almost always a combination of funny, imperfect, weird, and sad … a meaningful one, anyway. Same goes for music. Fritz knows this well, and delivers, whether or not your instinct is to laugh or cry.