Rosanne Cash – Black Cadillac (2006)
Cash’s first album since 2003’s Rules of Travel, Black Cadillac is darker than its predecessor, but with melodies often more complex and lyrics more stunningly poetic than anything its creator has conjured before, the album is more transforming than depressing, and exquisitely beautiful. In the achingly mournful, yet redemptive “I Was Watching You,” she writes of waiting in heaven as her parents meet and wed, and of eventually joining them on earth, only to realize her parents now view life’s events from her first vantage point. Other songs (“House on the Lake,” “Burn Down This Town”) frame more tangible real-life events, i.e., the Cash compound in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and the Man in Black’s firebug tendencies. Producers John Leventhal and Bill Bottrell dot the lean, atmospheric, and genre-blending production with instrumental hallmarks that recall both the Appalachian sound of the Carter Family and the work of J.R. Cash (the horns in the title cut pay homage to those in “Ring of Fire”). But while elegiac, Black Cadillac never turns maudlin or morphs into a tribute record to a fallen icon (the lawyers get skewered in one particularly clear-eyed passage). Instead, this extraordinary, intensely moving work is made up of dreamy and deeply personal pages from a psychic scrapbook, delivered on the cashmere-and-corduroy voice of one of music’s purest and most visionary artists.
Alabama – Original Album Classics [Box Set-5CD] (2013)
CD1: Alabama – My Home’s In Alabama-1980
CD2: Alabama – Feels So Right-1981
CD3: Alabama – Mountain Music-1982
CD4: Alabama – The Closer You Get-1983
CD5: Alabama – Roll On-1984
Linda Draper – Edgewise (2013)
“When I wrote this song,” Linda Draper reflects on her new single “Hollow,” “I was thinking back to a conversation I overheard on a plane. The woman was talking about her step-son not being committed to any ‘real’ career, and that all he wanted to do was write. She said that he better ‘get it out of his system.’ As I heard this, I thought about another of my inspirations for this song, Nick Drake, and what a dull world this would be if he had been told this and listened.”
“Hollow” will appear on Draper’s upcoming new album Edgewise, scheduled for release on May 21st, 2013. The album arrives on the heels of a half-dozen Draper albums released throughout the years, including four LPs recorded with legendary cult-icon and music producer Kramer (Ween, Low, Galaxie 500.)
Dan Michaelson – Sudden Fiction (2011)
Recorded after a stint in the remote artistic desert community of Marfa in Texas, the third album by Londoner Dan Michaelson, formerly of Absentee, is rich with flashes of southern pedal steel, which give life to the otherwise threadbare set-up of piano, guitar and occasional cello. Stripped to near-silence in parts, the nine tracks are […]
Warren Haynes – Studio Demos (1991)
Produced by Chuck Leavell, Warren Haynes’ first solo album is a refreshing change of pace from his work with the latter-day incarnation of the Allman Brothers Band. Although the feel of this album is undeniably classic rock, with much of Free’s bluesy swagger, it is also vaguely reminiscent of ’80s rock at times (check out […]