After an album of Blaze Foley covers in 2011, singer-songwriter Gurf Morlix returns to his catalog of forbidding originals. The album’s title provides a clever play on words, suggesting a man catching up to the moment only to find that moment overbearing. The title track focuses on immediate burdens, but Morlix also finds overwhelming baggage in a future lashed inextricably to the consequences of past actions. Morlix’s characters are left stranded at a turning point between decisions and their lifelong consequences. The prisoner of “My Life’s Been Taken” ruminates on his confinement, resigned to a life of wondering what could have been. The song provides a coda to 2009′s “One More Second,” in which a shooter considers the thin line between reaction and action; here the killer is doomed to reconsider that border until his life ends.
It’s been nine years since Chris Stamey’s last solo album, Travels in the South. In the interim he’s worked with Yo La Tengo on A Question of Temperature., re-teamed with fellow dB Peter Holsapple for Here and Now, regrouped with the dB’s for Falling Off the Sky, and continued a busy career as a recording engineer and record producer. The long years between solo outings are certainly understandable, if not necessarily a happy state of affairs for fans; but those same fans should feel rewarded by this collection of eleven magnificent new productions. Stamey’s melancholy tunefulness has never sounded more graceful, rendered in contemplative tones and finely crafted instrumental textures that shift seamlessly between rock, soul, jazz and classical.
Stamey’s formal education in music theory and composition has never been a secret, but his recent work on the Big Star Thirdconcerts seems to have deepened his thinking about how orchestral instruments could fit into and augment his music. He interleaves strings, woodwinds and brass with guitars, bass and drums, dotting his musical landscape with cello, bassoon, flute and trombone. The results are both ethereal and dynamic, offering everything from neo-psych dreaminess to symphonic vigor, sometimes within the same song, as on the sky-gazing “Astronomy.” This coalescing of musical influences is seemingly foreshadowed by the merging of souls in the opener, “Skin.”
Soulful album of singer-songwriter folk, country and rock
“Singer-songwriter” usually labels someone who sings their own songs, but in Jimmy LaFave’s case, it describes someone who’s as talented at originating material as he is in lending his voice to others’ songs. His first studio album in five years balances eight new songs with five covers, three of the latter selected from the catalog of Bob Dylan. Perhaps the most surprising reinterpretation is his resurrection of John Waite’s “Missing You” from its 1980s chart-topping power-ballad origin. As a writer of emotionally-laden songs, LaFave could hear the finely-tuned angst of Waite’s lyric, and reconstruct it into rootsy rock ‘n’ roll. The production’s guitar adds a touch of Southern soul, and the emotional choke in LaFave’s voice mates perfectly with the song’s mood.
The Dylan covers “Red RiverShore,” the oft-covered “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” and Empire Burlesque’s “I’ll Remember You.” LaFave adds something special to each, reading the first in slow reflection, and warming the latter from the chilly production of its original version. The album’s fifth cover is Bruce Springsteen’s recently released (though earlier written) “Land ofHopes and Dreams.” LaFave strips the song of its E Street bombast to better reveal the tender heart of its inverted allusions to the gospel-folk classic “This Train.” LaFave uses the covers as a launching point for his original songs, weaving a continuous thread through expectation, melancholy, sadness and second chances.
There’s no shortage of live albums on Billy Joe Shaver, including well-picked gigs from the ‘80s (Live from Austin, TX) and ‘90s (Storyteller: Live at the Bluebird and Unshaven: Live at Smith’s Olde Bar), but when you’re an honest-to-God troubadour, each performance is a unique combination of people, place and songs. This two-disc (CD/DVD) document of Shaver’s September 2011 show at Billy Bob’s Texas, is just as essential as the earlier volumes. Though one could never expect Shaver to fully recover from the passing of his son Eddy, he sounds more energized – and less haunted –than he’s appeared in several years. No doubt the stage is both a reminder and a sanctuary, and he throws himself into these songs in a way younger performers couldn’t even imagine. His voice sounds great, and his band plays in a deep, empathetic pocket.
The set list holds few surprises for Shaver’s fans, but mostly because they’re so fervent about his music. Those new to Shaver’s catalog will find many of his best-known songs here, and even his most well-traveled tunes are sung with enthusiasm for words that clearly remain both important and true. The two new titles are the Johnny Cash-styled “Wacko from Waco,” recounting a 2007 shooting incident (also memorialized in Dale Watson’s “Where Do You Want It?”), and “The Git Go,” deftly casting modern ills against biblical antecedents of temptation, truth and fate. Studio versions of the new tunes are also included as bonuses. Shaver’s musical range – from delicate old-timey tunes and folk-country to stomping country-rock – would be impressive at any age, but at 72, he’s hotter than most musicians a quarter his age.
While Jon Dee Graham’s earlier albums haven’t exactly been super-shiny mainstream productions, his latest release takes organic to a deeper level. Recorded over several months of gifted studio time, the album pulled itself together without an up-front plan, and the lack of a clock ticking away budget dollars manifests itself in more loosely finished productions. This isn’t a collection of leftovers; it’s a set of songs and performances that weren’t pre-conceived for release. It’s more finished than a sketchbook, but not as polished as a framed work of art, and the less finished corners reveal some of the artist’s work method.
The confidence to release such an album has grown from Graham’s life experiences, including a near-fatal car crash in 2008. The opening “Unafraid” provides a manifesto, and the album shows Graham’s not so much a fatalist as one who’s no longer derailed by doubt or fear. Working against his own recording history, Graham came to the studio with only fragmentary ideas, developing them with his studio hosts, John Harvey and Mary Podio. Rather than worrying the songwriting ahead of time, he developed the concepts, lyrics, melodies, production and instrumentation in unison. Graham overdubbed most of the instruments himself, but the album hits many of its strongest points when he sings against a lone guitar or piano.
A too-brief set of ‘60s and ‘70s Carole King demos
Demos are an industry currency that fans don’t often get to hear. They’re an audio notebook in which songwriters sketch their vision, either for themselves, or more intriguingly, for those to whom they wish to sell songs. In the case of a singer-songwriter like Carole King, there are both kinds of entries in her notebooks – writer’s demos that were inclined towards the sound and style of a potential client and initial renderings of songs that King would sing herself, including five tunes written for her 1971 breakthrough, Tapestry, and another, “Like Little Children,” written in the mid-60s but recorded 30 years later for the film Crazy in Alabama.
An earlier, unauthorized, volume of King’s demos and early solo recordings, Brill Buliding Legends: The Right Girl, gave a glimpse into her years as a Brill Building songwriter. But that volume fell short of its full promise, by including demos for songs that were never commercially recorded or never broke on the charts. Though interesting in their own right, these lesser works said more about the hard work that goes into getting a hit single than they did about the development of King’s best-known titles. Not so with this authorized volume of King demos, which not only offers up a few key Brill Building-era demos, but extends into her solo work as a successful performer.
The three major Brill-era hits included here in demo form are the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby” and the Everly Brothers’ “Crying in the Rain.” The first is surprisingly different from the hit single, with King’s folk-rock demo more wistful and forgiving than the skeptical and mocking tone of the Monkees take. The second, on the other hand, seems to anticipate Bobby Vee’s style, and though the single is more fully orchestrated, the mood and hooks were all there in the demo. Others, such as “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” reveal their foundations – in this case, the gospel chords of King’s piano and the freedom of her vocals – even more clearly in these stripped down versions.
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Second in a six-EP series features a new song, a remake and a cover
