Americaland
Jimmie Dale Gilmore – “I’m Gonna Love You”
Daily declaration of intent is better than the real thing. It is the real thing.
Raphael Saadiq – “Just Don’t”
“I can see the trees again, the grass is never greener.” From Stone Rollin’, an infinite green dream of an album.
Grant Hart – “California Zephyr”
“He’s here to party not to feel pain.”
Iris DeMent – “Go On Ahead And Go Home”
Where were you when an artist released her fifth album in a 20-year career?
Los Lobos – “The Road To Gila Bend”
From The Town And The City – a phrase that echoed in the indefinable town-city where I fell in love with this band.
k.d. lang – “Honky Tonk Angels’ Medley”
Her angels: Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells. 25 years later, she’s singing on Laura Veirs’ Warp and Weft. When I called her guest appearance “invisible,” maybe I meant that she too has now graduated to the realm of what Finster saw.
John Fahey – “Sunflower River Blues”
Tellingly, the first song on his handpicked Best of John Fahey 1959-1977. If you started elsewhere, Fahey requests you start over. There’s no working backward through half a century of junk, no way to return all the junk to the soil, but an artist like Fahey can cast momentary spells to help you forget it ever happened.
The Men – “Half Angel Half Light”
“Where would I be?” he asks, but does it matter, with his band’s vision of the country so whole, with invitations to being lost everywhere they look? From New Moon, the first album they’ve made that’s as great as its sense of music history. I’m full-on overwhelmed now, so that this has become one of my favorite rock ‘n’ roll records of the century, along with Sleater-Kinney’s similarly titled The Woods.
Seattle’s Wayfinders play Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” in Helena, MT
…at the Rialto on August 10, after Barton Carroll’s set. Imagine it under twirling prom lights, and you have Wayfinders’ basic dynamic. It was the second time I’ve heard that song played in downtown Helena, so that now I hear it as a loud rescue of an empty town. There’s always such an absence of illusion, seeing live music in Helena, that it hardly seems real (when the effect should be, by definition, the opposite), but “Powderfinger” exposed the aura Wayfinders could have on a bigger stage.
Luna – Bewitched, Romantica
Bookends to their masterpiece, Penthouse: the slightly less perfect album that made the later one’s ease of beauty possible, and the one whose years later return to a feeling is so marked that it has to contain a song titled “1995.”
