Americana
Nick Hasted
As the pandemic receded, Wilco huddled together in Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio and played country songs, an easefully naturally act as the world around them shook. Though famed for the experimental, eerily timely Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) and the crackling electric contrails of its further-out follow-up A Ghost Is Born (2004), Wilco have often returned to simpler verities.Now their 12th album adds a recognisable branch to Tweedy’s ex-band Uncle Tupelo’s tree, as this founding father revisits Americana: 21 songs framed by steel and acoustic guitar, stripping himself and his country to their Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I have to confess, it’s a long time since I’ve thought about the Nitty Gritty Dirty Band and a new album serves as a reminder of how good they were, and are. Formed in Long Beach, California in 1966 by a Bob Dylan-obsessed high school student named Jeff Hanna, the band has been through many incarnations (Jackson Browne was briefly a member) and has worked with some great names, among them Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Merle Travis on Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) and scored a hit with a cover of “Mr Bojangles”, thus helping to bring folk-rock to the mainstream. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
All power to Willie Nelson – marking his 89th birthday this week with a new album, A Beautiful Time. He and Trigger have been making music together for more than half a century, Nelson releasing his first album in 1962. From his pen have come some of the most powerful, poignant and enduring country songs ever written and he’s not done yet. How many of today’s artists, from whatever genre, will survive even half as long?Produced by Nelson’s old pal and long-time partner Buddy Cannon, who co-write six of the 14 songs, the album’s line-up includes the distinctive sounds of Jim "Moose" Brown on Read more ...
Tom Carr
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding nature of recent world events, Vile’s mix of indie rock with psychedelia and Americana makes for a welcome escape.His first studio release since 2018’s Bottle It In, (Watch My Moves) – replete with brackets – is 15 tracks long. There’s a whole lot to dive into, beginning with “Going on a Plane Today”. With this piano-led curtain-raiser, Vile mixes in Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 19th album from Canadian alt-country rockers, and very beguiling it is too. As its title suggests, Songs of the Recollection is a covers album, but such a description is reductive. Good songs live on, discovered anew by successive generations – think how many singers have stamped their identity on numbers from the Great American Songbook.It's a question of how you choose, and Cowboy Junkies have chosen well, offering up an album of nine songs from across the last five decades, none of them particularly obvious. And each is carefully thought-out and reworked – as Margo Timmins, one of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Had he never written a note of his own, George Walker would still have left a record of trailblazing achievements. Born in Washington DC in 1922, he studied piano at Oberlin College and the Curtis Institute (the conservatoire that notoriously rejected Nina Simone). He was taught by Rudolf Serkin and, in 1945, debuted as a soloist first at the New York Town Hall and then, playing Rachmaninov’s third concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.Needless to say, neither Town Hall nor Philadelphians had ever seen an African American soloist before. By 1946, however, Walker had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s good advice. There’s plenty in the movie for cancel culture advocates to sink their teeth into – should they be so blinkered. Gallagher asserts here, as he did in his book on Ford, that the film might well have been titled Intolerance, such is its condemnation of bigotry.The Sun Shines Bright, which Ford claimed in 1968 was his favourite of his films Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On her sixth album, Basia Bulat re-records 16 of her own songs with specially created string arrangements. The Garden isn’t a best-of, more a recalibration of how the Canadian singer-songwriter sees herself through her music and how the meanings of the songs have changed.Bulat had played double bass in a chamber ensemble and has worked live with a string sections, so there’s a logic to how The Garden is arranged. Although three different string arrangers are used and there is a nod to Bartók and touches of Bernard Herrmann-esque drama, the defining characteristic is the relationship of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I didn’t even know what I was writing about. It was just sent to me”, John Mellencamp has said of Strictly A One-Eyed Jack, his first album in five years.Lauded by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Nora Guthrie, who sees in his work echoes of her father Woody, and Bruce Springsteen, who is writ large on this his 24th studio album, Mellencamp really does seem to contain multitudes. From the first notes of “I Always Lie to Strangers”, Jack’s opening track, you’re hooked, grabbed by the lapels, and happily held close. The style and mood are reminiscent of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his great late Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Disclaimer: it’s a little unfair I’m reviewing Kiefer Sutherland’s third album. He seems alright, left-ish for an American, done his time in the bad boy lane, sense of humour, tried his hand at this and that, even as a rodeo-rider, and has entertained plenty onscreen. Although I’d never heard his music until this month, I knew he’d played everywhere from the Grand Ole Opry to far-flung Glastonbury marquees. Unfortunately, the reason I’m reviewing this is I understood from all I’d read that he made whisky-soaked country. This shows you should be careful what you believe. Kiefer Sutherland Read more ...
Liz Thomson
So, it’s been another world-beating year. Known unknowns and unknown unknowns – at least two people have set Donald Rumsfeld’s 2002 Pentagon musings to music, and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding his words rather useful. Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine Bob Dylan writing something similar, back in the day.Amid the hideous unknowns, amid the existential crises in which we ineluctably still find ourselves, it is inevitable that we reach out to old friends. Bob Dylan turned 80 in May (my new edition of Bob Dylan: No Direction Home by Robert Shelton, the New York Times journalist who wrote Read more ...