It’s easy to sink into indifference. Looking out upon a world drenched in blood and smoke, it’s tempting to turn your back—to hitch a first class ticket onto a gospel train bound for Glory, while the world is left to smolder along the track. That is why it’s necessary to have a folk singer like David Benjamin Blower around. Blower follows a long line of prophets and protest singers—from Elijah to Woody Guthrie—who shift our gaze outward, to the greed and exploitation that burns in the world. His latest record, Welcome the Stranger, is immediate and fierce, drawing on the empirical imagery of the Old and New Testaments, and the Dust Bowl tunes of Guthrie, reminding us all that the world didn’t get better after the dust of the Great Depression settled. He sings of the displaced and the refugee, giving voice to their hardship. He sings with love, with brutality, and with anger, using his guitar and voice as a jackhammer to smash through the apathy of our age.
You can listen to and purchase the album at https://benjaminblower.bandcamp.com/
All proceeds from the record will go to charities working directly with refugees.
The song was alive. It had travelled harsh seas and long roads. From the highlands of Scotland, it voyaged on rickety ships to the fog engulfed mountains of Appalachia. It was strummed on a handmade guitar, before it made its way down the mountain, into some parlor room where a quartet of well-to-dos sang it slow and mournfully. From time to time, it may have stood at the precipice of life and death, reflecting on its mortality. It had witnessed its brothers and sisters fade into the mountain fog. It saw pieces of itself—lyrics, melodies, a chorus—fade with them. But somehow, miraculously, it endured. It found new lyrics, new melodies…a new voice to carry it down more roads. It found itself in a Cleveland, Ohio recording studio, bouncing hither and yon through the old guitar of a bespectacled young singer named Amanda Egerer. Egerer had always been drawn to the lost, hard-travelled tunes…the obscure ones, the prodigals. She didn’t come from the Scottish highlands, or the mountain hollers, or the parlor rooms, but her powerful voice reaches a kind of middle ground where those histories meet. She befriends the lonely song. She ushers it onto the next leg of its journey, like any great folk artist does.
You can listen to and purchase Amanda Egerer’s new album, Folk Songs of Many People, on itunes or at https://amandaegerer.bandcamp.com/album/folk-songs-of-many-people
“Moon Ballads” by Austin Wolfe [a review]
April 24, 2016
It’s late at night and I’m driving home, following the ghost of an old river canal. The sky is close to empty, a few silent stars giving off a dull light for any wayward stargazers that look heavenward. I pass graffiti on concrete. A pine branch sitting in the road. Austin Wolfe is singing Moon Ballads on my stereo. “Could it be now, mama, all that we have loved we’ve loved in vain?” Most of the farmhouses that drift by have a single orange light glowing on the porch. A tiny bit of hope for any wayward prodigals. My eyes grow weary. I consider the trees and the brambles and the loneliness that lives on that road. The loneliness that lives on all roads. Austin contemplates: “I’ll sing to you this longing through the telephone. We’ll think of something warmer and we’ll imagine it until we feel it in our bones”. He sings in fiery metaphors. He mines the ether for truth. The songs…a ray of hope for those late night travelers.
You can preview and purchase the album at https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/moon-ballads/id1100707613 or https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/austinwolfe12
“Hope & Sorrow” by Wilder Adkins [a review]
March 19, 2016
So here we find ourselves at nature’s crossroads—that transitional purgatory between winter and spring, where the dead things of wintertime fade among the buds of a new season. Birds are reappearing against gray skies. Winds are blowing from new directions. It’s an appropriate climate for Wilder Adkins new record, Hope & Sorrow. Through 12 dreamy songs, Adkins sings in that middle ground where heartache meets love, questions meet faith, and joy blends with pain. The songs are quiet, led by Adkins’ gentle guitar and dulcimer work, but there are extra flourishes this time around as well. There are bursts of string-work and ethereal harmonies. Though each song feels small and intensely personal, there is a grandness to the record. It is Adkins grappling all night as Jacob did, fighting for blessing. It is the artist trying to make sense of those gray, middle grounds. In this world of Hope & Sorrow, time is fading, flowers are blooming and life is flooding in.
You can listen to and purchase the album at https://wilderadkins.bandcamp.com/
“Slow Trauma” by Bill Mallonee [a review]
March 14, 2016
To look at Bill Mallonee these days—the gaunt cowboy with gray hair falling down to his shoulders, his white and gray beard in tangles, his weary eyes staring at something off camera, something distant—you are quite aware that he’s seen a thing or two in his day. In the 90s, he and his band the Vigilantes of Love were regularly on the verge of some kind of mainstream success, with Mallonee poised to take his place among the great songwriters of the ages. But somehow, as those mainstream mechanisms seem to roll, it never quite happened. Eventually he retreated from the road, to the highlands of New Mexico and a simpler life.
The desert suits Mallonee. His retreat (or whatever you want to call it) has given him a creative outlet to pour all that mileage into bittersweet albums about faith, hope, love and the darkness that hovers like a cloud around each. His latest record, Slow Trauma, is another of his late period masterworks. Across 10 songs, Mallonee extracts wisdom from the lives of American waywards, his own life included, as they look across the expanse for some kind of redemption. Mallonee wrote the songs, and he and his wife play all the instruments—a full band of guitars, harmonica, piano and percussion. They call themselves the Big Sky Ramblers, and out there at the edge of the highway, where the mainstream machines cease to roll, they’re coming to grips with hard roads travelled, and heavenly roads ahead.
You can listen to and purchase the album at http://billmalloneemusic.bandcamp.com/
let us make a record 