Tag: Song Premiere

LISTEN: Elvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite, “If I Should Have Bad Luck”

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Artists: Elvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite
Hometown: Elvin: Born in Glendale, California, raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Charlie: Kosciusko, Mississippi. (Both artists now live in northern California)
Song: “If I Should Have Bad Luck”
Album: 100 Years of Blues
Release Date: September 25, 2020
Label: Alligator Records

In Their Words: “‘If I Should Have Bad Luck’ is a song I wrote about something I know a lot about: being on the road and far from home for long amounts of time. All the ups and downs one goes through on the road are pretty bleak and empty if you don’t have somebody you love and loves you at home waiting for you to get back home. That’s why I say ‘Your love will keep me going.’

“Another line, ‘passing people’s houses on a dark and lonely road; looks mighty cozy but it’s a place I can’t go,’ is a scene out of my life that I’ve seen so many times. There you are rolling down the road in the dark and you look over and see a little home in the distance with a cozy light coming from the windows and you feel like there’s happy people there all cozy in their home. You don’t know them and they’ll never know you and itinerant strangers are not welcome there and this just makes you miss your own home that’s hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

“Same with ‘I’m making 90 miles an hour up down this highway in the dark; yonder kitchen lights make me wonder how you are,’ another similar scene. You can see that warm inviting light from a stranger’s kitchen window as you speed by in the dark thinking again of your own home and how you look forward to having a seat at the kitchen table and enjoying a home cooked meal… if you ever make it back home… one of these days… again.” — Charlie Musselwhite

Photo credit: Pat Johnson

LISTEN: Thomas Csorba, “What’s Left of Mine”

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Artist: Thomas Csorba
Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Song: “What’s Left of Mine”
Album: Thomas Csorba
Release Date: September 25, 2020

In Their Words: “When Beau Bedford and I sat down to write this song, we fell into a story of a man at a pivotal moment in his life. The speaker in this song is looking his lover in the eye and saying, ‘I love you, but there’s some living I need to do.’ He’s at a crossroads: Do I spend this precious time with the one I love, or do I go and find myself? The risk there is heavy, and you can hear it in every line he utters. I found a big part of myself in this character. As I’ve stepped into marriage, I’ve been thinking a lot about sacrifice. Wherever I devote my time, my love, my energy, I know that another part of me needs to be sacrificed.” — Thomas Csorba

Photo credit: Austin Leih

LISTEN: Ron Pope, “Turning Back” (Feat. Emily Scott Robinson)

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Artist: Ron Pope
Hometown: Marietta, Georgia
Song: “Turning Back” (featuring Emily Scott Robinson)
Album: The Builder
Release Date: September 17, 2020
Label: Brooklyn Basement Records

In Their Words: “There are so many songs about those first few seconds when you’re falling in love and your brain is constantly on fire. ‘Turning Back’ is about something that happens long, long after that. Jeff (my writing partner on this song) and I were talking about grown up love (we’re both married and have little ones); at this point in my life, a quiet moment with my wife feels like a real luxury. Whenever we get those simple, sweet moments, we cherish them. This is an entire chapter of the love story that nobody ever writes about; here we are, deep in this thing, still loving each other with absolutely no intention of turning around. It’s different than the beginning, but it’s deeper and that much more beautiful as a result.” — Ron Pope

Photo credit: Blair Clark

LISTEN: Garrett Owen, “Souvenir”

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Artist: Garrett Owen
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Song: “Souvenir”
Album: Quiet Lives
Release Date: September 18, 2020

In Their Words: “I wrote the opening guitar figure and first verse to ‘Souvenir’ a long time ago. I showed what I had written to a friend — ‘I put our love in a jar and drove it around in my beat-up car….’ He thought it was catchy. I started slowly trying to coax the rest of it out of myself and used it as an opportunity to take some really tricky chord work in the chorus and impose a massive key change for the second chorus. I have a lot of songs inspired by a long-term relationship I was in; the rest of the lyrics are a mix of abstract expressions of pain and emo-dramatic statements about how things with her ended.” — Garrett Owen

Photo credit: Melissa Laree Cunningham

LISTEN: Victoria Bailey, “Tennessee”

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Artist: Victoria Bailey
Song: “Tennessee”
Album: Jesus, Red Wine & Patsy Cline
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Rock Ridge Music

In Their Words: “I first heard Johnny Cash’s rendition of this Rick Scott song while driving through snowy Tennessee a few winters back. I was heading down toward Leiper’s Fork in my little rental car, stopping all along the road to pet horses and listening to all my favorite country legends along the way. This song really sums up how I feel about the South and Tennessee as a whole. I love the little pleasures in life that Tennesseeans hold near and dear: family traditions and small town simplicities.

“My favorite verse in the song is, ‘We got a cabin in the country / And a creek that rolls nearby / And a dog that won’t even bark at a firefly.’ That’s exactly what I saw all around me exploring Tennessee on that trip — just a lot of pure joy and friendly folks! Recording this song was SO much fun. My band fell in love with the lyrics as much as I did. We tried to stay pretty true to the sound of Cash’s recording, but we sprinkled a little bit of our own sound into it as well. It was such an honor recording this song, especially because it represents a state I have come to love oh so very much!” — Victoria Bailey

Photo credit: Stefanie Vinsel Johnson

LISTEN: Will Kimbrough, “My Right Wing Friend”

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Artist: Will Kimbrough
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “My Right Wing Friend”
Album: Spring Break
Release Date: October 23, 2020
Label: Daphne/Soundly

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘My Right Wing Friend’ after reading a dear old friend’s Twitter posts. I knew if we communicated personally, we would still be those dear old friends who shared 40 years of memories, from high school through his college and my early touring years, through the time we raised our children. We’d always been political opposites. And we’d always had friendly debates and agreed to disagree. It’s tougher now, in a way — with a glance, you can find something to hate about people you love. I am learning to communicate personally with my right wing friend. That way, we keep our friendship alive. This is a love song to friendship. As my friend said, after he heard the song for the first time, ‘Come over here and let me kiss you on the lips, my left wing friend.’ Still laughing. Still friends.” — Will Kimbrough

Photo credit: Sadie Kimbrough

BGS 5+5: Blitzen Trapper

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Artist: Blitzen Trapper
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Latest album: Holy Smokes Future Jokes
Release Date: September 25, 2020

Answers provided by Eric Earley

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Michael Stipe was my favorite songwriter as a kid, his lyrics were so strange and uncanny. I’m thinking of Reckoning and Murmur, some of the most anachronistic lyrical content ever. There were no lyric sheets or online lookups back then so I was always trying to figure out what he was saying. His songs always had the feeling of a riddle or a magical text, the imagery was dreamlike and over the years I’ve tried to emulate that in certain ways. Tom Waits was a large influence later in my twenties, his bizarre comical lyrical storytelling and character voices were inspiring, I’m thinking of Rain Dogs in particular.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

There isn’t any favorite, lots of weird amazing ones for sure, playing “Heard It Thru the Grapevine” with Stephen Malkmus trading weird, collapsing solos with Stephen as he made up the words because we were too lazy to learn the lyrics. I think we were in Cleveland, but I could be wrong. Playing Big Star’s “Feel” with Jody Stephens on drums and Mike Mills on backing vocals in Austin, Texas, that was surreal.

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

Most of my favorite songs have literary origins, whether it’s a particular Cormac McCarthy novel like Blood Meridian (“Black River Killer”) or a general religious text like the Bardo Thodol (the new record is based largely on this book). Biblical imagery has made its way into countless songs I’ve written as a result of childhood influences and pervasive cultural resonances. I’ve also started writing a lot of songs from reading specific poets, using their wordplay to inspire different turns of phrase. Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, to name a couple, I’ve also used Finnegan’s Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow to generate wordplay and imagery.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I’ve been playing music since I was a child, so being a musician was never really a choice. I didn’t think of it as a career for a long time. I went to college for physics and math, studied painting, learned classical fingerstyle, became a sous chef. Finally in my late twenties I decided to drop everything and play music, mostly because all the songs I was writing were keeping me up at night, but I didn’t have any vision for the business part of it. Spent seven years playing unattended shows in Portland. Got a record deal off a random song on Myspace and suddenly was touring and making money.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Experimentation is the only way to realize the vision of reality you want to hear, so never grow static in style or voice, always move forward, never sit still sonically. Don’t write angry, only from a place of emptiness without sentimentality, nostalgia without regret. Don’t try to please anyone, only follow your instincts.

Photo credit: Jason Quigley

LISTEN: Delta Spirit, “What Is There”

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Artist: Delta Spirit
Hometown: NYC, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Austin, Montreal
Song: “What Is There”
Album: What Is There
Release Date: September 11, 2020
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “’What is There’ is an acrostic poem that I wrote for the guys in the band, with each verse directed at a specific person. I wrote the song in the winter of 2018 while living in Oslo. We had just decided to give the band another go and I was feeling sentimental about the journey we had been on since 2005. We were all just kids trying to break into this business. Each of us had been burned by the major label system with other projects. Starting Delta Spirit with my best friends, traveling the world, and playing music that meant the world to us was such an improbable miracle, but then it felt inevitable. There were moments when we lost our way as brothers and as creative collaborators, but since the break, we have found new and better ways to communicate. And that feeling of inevitability is back.” — Matthew Logan Vasquez, Delta Spirit

Photo credit: Alex Kweskin

LISTEN: Balsam Range, “Grit and Grace”

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Artist: Balsam Range
Hometown: Haywood County, North Carolina
Song: “Grit and Grace”
Release Date: September 4, 2020
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “’Grit and Grace’ is the kind of song that every single person who walks this earth can or will likely relate to at some point during their journey. But with determination, courage, faith, and finding the inner grit to overcome struggles, we live to tell another story. One that has a happy ending for us. My desire is that this song provides encouragement and strength to anyone who may be suffering. That they may find peace in knowing they are not alone.

“The inspiration for ‘Grit and Grace’ came from a man who served his country, walked the Bataan Death March, and was a prisoner of war for 3½ years, Walter Middleton. When my mom asked him how he got through it, his answer was simply, ‘I provided the grit and God provided the grace.’ He later in life wrote a book about his time spent as a prisoner of war and he signed the book to my mother with, ‘For folks like you I would gladly do it again.’ It is hard to comprehend the willingness to suffer that greatly for others but many before us have. Life is about learning, teaching, sharing, and helping those along our journey that are experiencing what we may have already experienced and by grace overcame.” — Buddy Melton, Balsam Range (vocalist and fiddler)

Photo credit: David Simchok

LISTEN: Great Peacock, “Heavy Load”

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Artist: Great Peacock
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Heavy Load”
Album: Forever Better Worse
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: Soundly Music

In Their Words: “I don’t totally know what this song means or is about. I just know that it makes me feel a lot of different emotions. We love so many things throughout the course of our life. Love is experienced and given and received in so many different ways for all manner of experiences, memories, places, things, and people. I think the real message of this song is that love isn’t always an easy thing, but you can’t give up on it. You have to give and receive it. I’m telling myself that in this song. I’m not singing to anyone else. I’m singing to me.” — Andrew Nelson, Great Peacock

Photo credit: Harrison Hudson