Thinking back on my phone call with mom last night, how she was cried, worried she would go to Hell. Remembering a line from an old David Bazan song: “I discovered Hell to be the poison in the well.”

Two wonderful songs by local folk music legend and forest protector Andy Mahler. 🎵

Still listening to the new David Benjamin Blower while cranking through month-end closing today.

Where there are feet upon the earth there is a village hall
Where there is prayer there is a temple and a gathering
This is an event
This is a happening
God dwells in tents where the beasts sing
God dwells, God dwells here with everything

I’m not sure how I heard of David Benjamin Blower or when I followed him on Bandcamp but I’m glad today that I did. His new album is great. “Apocalyptic folk,” he calls it, and that certainly got my attention. 🎵

The Louvin Brothers, “Dying from Home, and Lost.” The harmony on this one really reminds me of my childhood church, which I wrote about here. That album, by the way, is one banger after another.

This might interest a cross-section of folks here: A Greek Orthodox priest has released “Paradise Metal.” From the review site: “microtonal Byzantine modes with DIY electronic modernism,” “sublime new age ambient to shoe-gazy basslines and mountaintop guitar shreds to techno incantations.” Bandcamp

Thinking about Johnny Cash this morning brought to mind this from Over the Rhine: “Earthbound Love Song.” 🎵

Johnny Cash, “Satisfied Mind” 🎵

Last night was the full moon so how about a moon song from Cat Clyde? 🎵

Murphy Campbell, “Shady Grove” 🎵 More of these crazy talented young people playing folk music please. Looks like she’s just concluded a successful kickstarter for an album of her family’s North Carolina ballads.

The more I listen to Cat Clyde the more I like her. 🎵 Her album with Jeremie Albino has been on repeat for days. Today I’ve started listening to her album “Down Rounder.”

I found “Nordisk Sang” in a long-forgotten folder of music from iTunes. Haven’t listened to it in years. It’s great! 🎵 Also found in that folder: “Sonic New York” by Sxip Shirey.

We did get to hear some good singing today at the funeral. Hearing this today draws up out of my memory all those country folks, in their country churches, singing their songs in that “high lonesome sound.” We drove around the old stomping grounds in Springville after the burial, reminiscing.

I somehow missed that Jesse Welles is on Bandcamp. Listening to Pilgrim now. One song features Sierra Ferrell! 🎵

Today’s earworm: Punch Brothers cover of “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. A very good song to have looping in your head. 🎵

Jesse Welles has a new song about the death of Charlie Kirk 🎵

Good article on the fake personality of chatbots—in part because of lack of persistence through time. (Via @ayjay) As I’ve been using Claude more, I’m finding that it’s best at amplifying my own ideas and spinning them in new directions, not generating anything new or even factual.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Georgian priest chants the 50th Psalm in Aramaic 🎵

Now playing: Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times. Also see their website (click on album name) for more information about each mantra. 🎵

RIP, Ozzy. Many years ago I started trying to catch up on all the devil music I had missed in my youth. I checked out the first Black Sabbath album from the library. The opening track blew me away. “Sounds like Black Sabbath” has always been high praise to me. 🎵

Song of the day: “Que Sera Sera” 🎵

Jesse Welles is a folk legend in the making: “The Great Caucasian God” 🎵

“My Billionaire Daddies are Fighting” 🎵

Future Jeremy: if you ever get the “oh my, my lord” earworm again, this is its source. “Shooby” by Nicole C. Mullen

New Aesop Rock album release day!

“Way over yonder in the minor key” by Billy Bragg. Written by Woody Guthrie. 🎵

This is awesome: “Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ at Sold-Out Virginia Tech Concert Sparks Seismic Activity” 🎵

This is a wonderful Webb Pierce song about a man addressing his lover as he considers leaving his family for her. In the end he decides against it because “tell me, dear, could you love that kind of man?” 🎵

Every once in a while you come across a song you could listen to for the rest of your life: The Byrds, “John Riley” 🎵

Joan Baez, “With God on our Side” (Live) 🎵

Colter Wall’s cover of “I Never Go Around Mirrors” is the distilled essence of country music. His voice, the classic lyrics, stripped down music, the harmony. It’s just perfect. 🎵

Jesse Welles, “Trees” 🎵

“It’s Spring again / Don’t God keep a promise / It’s Spring again / Mother Earth keeps her word now / the woman is honest” 🎵

One of my favorite songs 🎵

As for your tender heart—
This world’s gonna rip it wide open
It ain’t gonna be pretty
But you’re not alone

Woke up this morning from a very disturbing dream AND with “Sh-boom” by the Chords playing in my head. I think I’ve been watching too much David Lynch.

In our final months in the Holiness church, the Spider Man movie and soundtrack came out. Rachel and I loved it. After church on Sunday nights, we’d roll our tv out of the closet (literally), put in the spider man dvd, go to special features, and watch this video over and over. Good, cheesy memories

Stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it: “Stand by Me” by the Staples Singers. 🎵

Bless Brother Ali. He can be righteously angry on one track and beautifully moving on another. Indeed, using your heart for what hearts are for.

Sierra Ferrell’s harmony on this song takes me straight back to childhood in Trinity Pentecost Mission in Springville.

Two things about this:

1. One of the smoothest key changes I’ve ever heard.
2. Canst thou shred on a mandolin? Yea, verily.

New song from Nick Shoulders: “Apocalypse Never.”

Cling to joy, don’t let it die

Like the waters, we will rise

He’s also selling a poster (image attached) that will benefit the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Like Ray Charles’ “Night time is the right time,” Waylon Jennings’ “Amanda” is a song made by its backup singers.

If you ever take a notion to listen to some cowboy music, Don Edwards' album Saddle Songs is worth your time. I found it a few weeks ago at Half Price Books.

Two more things from the show last night:

1. They opened with “The World Can Wait.” Linford said the song was about JOMO: the joy of missing out.
2. They played some new, unrecorded music. Folks, when you get your ears on “Bella Luna,” you’re going to love it.

Song in my head today: Marty Robbins, “Bouquet of Roses”

This is a great piece on Eminem’s boxes of rhyming notes. Via Austin Kleon’s Friday newsletter.

It probably says something about me that this is one of my favorite Aesop Rock songs.

I readily admit that I know only a little more than nothing about classical music. A few years ago, though, Rachel and I came across the video of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony and, to our surprise, found ourselves crying by the end. So, yeah, I’ll be watching this movie.

New Aesop Rock album release day is a good day.

The saddest mummy/archaeologist love story you’ve ever heard. 🎵

So Blood in the Machine starts with an epigraph from Run the Jewels? Dude, I’ve already bought the book—you don’t have to keep winning me over.

Powerful song by Derek Spencer on a real life tragedy in small town Kentucky. This guy deserves more attention than he’s gotten. 🎵

source

It’s a Soundgarden Superunknown kind of morning.

The Mavericks 1994 album “What a Crying Shame” mostly reminds me of Dwight Yoakam, which is probably why I love it so much. Dwight Yoakam will always be my favorite country singer. But the Mavericks are more than that–proof of which can be heard in their wonderful 2020 album “En Español”. 🎵

So here I was listening to Sleep’s “Holy Mountain” while compiling a statement of cash flows when I decided to learn more about the band. One of the original members left? To become an Orthodox monk? And started what is surely the most metal zine ever created by Christians, let alone monks? Wow…

Weird country track of the day: “Turn on the Dark” by Nick Shoulders. 🎵 (Weird country should totally be a sub-genre if it isn’t already.)

Two songs that I discovered as covers and still prefer over the original 🎵

• Mavericks, “All that heaven will allow” (cover of Springsteen)
• Colter Wall, “Big iron” (cover of Marty Robbins)

Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari with some top notch Earth First! tunes. (In this case, BLM refers to the Bureau of Land Management.)

I don’t listen to a lot of hip hop but, when I do, it’s usually someone from Rhymesayers. Today, Sa-Roc is blowing me away. 🎵

“Haven’t I said enough? Haven’t I said far too much?” 🎵

Black Sabbath playing “War Pigs” live. Still one of the greatest anti-war songs. (That drummer, folks. They don’t make them like that anymore.)

I love vinyl records too, but you know what’s cheap and plentiful for the person who wants to own their music? CDs. My local record store had a huge selection but half price books and thrift stores have just as many with even lower prices. And CD players are cheaper than record players right now.

Now spinning: Beach Boys compilation “Endless Summer.” Not my usual music but it caught the attention of my teenage daughter. I came into the room and found her taking a video of it playing.

Now spinning: the Abyssinian Baptist Choir led by Professor Alex Bradford. Liner notes by no less than Langston Hughes.

Parker Millsap

Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I feel the magic.

Amen, Parker.

I’ve been listening to Colter Wall’s “Western Swings & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs” on repeat for days now. This is proper country music. Favorite song: “Big Iron”. Rachel (who is the real country music fan in the family) thought she had heard it before and figured out it was a cover of Marty Robbins. Superior to the original, in my opinion.

Three songs so miserably sad it’s hard to listen to them more than once:

• Keith Whitley, “Don’t close your eyes”
• George Jones, “He stopped loving her today”
• Jason Isbell, “If we were vampires”

Others that fit the description?

Some music from this evening:

• Townes Van Zandt sings “Pancho and Lefty”
• Iris DeMent sings “God Walks the Dark Hills”
• Rising Appalachia sings “I Shall Be Released”

“The first commercially-available CD (Billy Joel’s 52nd Street) was released forty years ago yesterday.” And today, by coincidence, I bought a CD for the first time in many, many years.

Speaking of Green Lung, I’m too much of a boring middle-aged CPA dad sort of human to have what the kids call an aesthetic. If I did, though, it would be “PNW hiker watching folk horror and listening to 70s psychedelic rock.”

Now spinning — though with headphones since my wife and daughter don’t exactly like psychedelic, occult, doom (what do I call them?) rock. Also, cool liner notes.

Jon Batiste: What a wonderful world 🎶

New Jack White!

My favorite Tiny Desk Concert: Cory Henry and the Funk Apostles

When Rachel gave me a record player for Christmas, she included with it an album of Big Band recordings because she knew that what I primarily wanted out of a record player was the romance of playing this music on it.

There’s a reason for that. When we were first married, our Sunday night after-church ritual was to eat fast food with friends. (The iron-clad digestive system of youth…) But we had to keep an eye on the time because we needed to leave in time to catch “Big Band Jump,” a syndicated radio show on our local AM station which we would listen to on the drive home and while we got ready for bed. Then once we were in bed we would listen to an old-time radio show performing all sorts of mystery and thriller stories. (I can’t remember its name - maybe it was rebroadcasts of CBS Radio Mystery Theater?)

While that story makes it sound like we were married in 1948 instead of 1998, it’s one of my fondest memories of those early days of our marriage. Big Band music already has a certain romance to it, but add to that two newlyweds in a small apartment listening to music and stories from their grandparent’s time and you have a sonic impression that lasts.

🎵 “I had a thought about darkness; a thought’s just a passing train.” - John Moreland 🎵

Austin Kleon mentioned Betty Davis on the occasion of her death a few days ago - and what I want is know is how I lived 45 years on this earth without hearing her music? 🎵

The Black Belt was a region in the American South known for its rich, black soil. It was home to many cotton plantations and, consequently, enslaved black people. During the Great Migration, large numbers of black people moved out of the South into northern cities, taking the blues and other cultural creations with them. Not all moved, though. Alabama Blackbelt Blues is a documentary by Alabama Public Television on the continuing blues tradition in Alabama’s portion of the Black Belt. (Watch the trailer here.)

If you like the blues, you’ll like this documentary - simple as that. It’s given me a whole list of singers and musicians to listen to. And, unsurprisingly, the names of John and Alan Lomax come up regularly as collectors and preservers of this music. I plan to explore their collections more thoroughly soon.

Listen: “Trouble So Hard” by Vera Hall

🎵 Sister Rosetta Tharpe - “God Leads Us Along” 🎵

Now spinning: D-Vine Spirituals. It’s a new release of recordings of Black gospel groups from the seventies and if any of those words light you up, you’ll love this album. It’s also available digitally, of course, in all the usual places.

Rob Sheffield says the CD revival is here. I’m going to stick with collecting records for now, but this makes a good argument for the CD. “Look, CDs will never be as sexy as vinyl albums. I get that. … Really, there’s only one thing CDs have ever done right, which is make music. They get the job done, which is why they’re still around.”

In response to a recent post I wrote mentioning zines, @lewism pointed me to an episode of Rolf Potts’ podcast in which he discusses mixtapes, those homebrews of (chiefly) the eighties. I made a few mixtapes myself in the old days but, being a fundamentalist child, they were mainly of southern gospel quartets, that is to say, lame in the extreme.

(Explaining all this to our daughter Darcy, who was born after we left fundamentalism, I went down a quartet music rabbit hole on YouTube. Eventually she fled the living room. I’m sure our YouTube recommendation algorithms are thoroughly confused and will take some time to recover.)

I also watched the documentary discussed by Rolf Potts, Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.

The documentary outlines the history of the cassette and the revolutionary impact it had. For the first time, it was possible to record at home: songs from the radio or other cassettes, found sound, and - crucially - your own music. And, as you can see in the documentary, this homebrew tradition continues into the present day.

Among young aficionados of cassettes, the attraction is surely the ability to record music at very low cost, together with the hipster weirdness of using obsolete technologies. Among older cassette lovers, there is likely the additional factor of nostalgia. I’ve seen a similar dynamic in myself as I’ve been listening to records since Christmas. Records - especially older ones - definitely don’t have the clean sound of digital music. There are flaws that cause them to skip and hiss. As a physical medium, a record carries time within itself. On the other hand, each time digital music is played it is an experience ex nihilo, as if you stand with the angels at the moment of creation. That is not nothing - and is definitely an argument in favor of digital music.

Nevertheless, records and cassettes have an element of wabi-sabi to them. (Important caveat: I have no expertise on this subject and it is not from my culture. Whatever I say here should be seen as provisional and open to correction.) Some attempts at a definition of wabi-sabi:

• The honoring of “imperfection, brokenness, and decay.” The belief that “a thing gets more beautiful as it gets scarred from use and imbibed with its own story.” (David Duchemin, Start Ugly)
• The “acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, favouring the imperfect and incomplete in everything” (Lilly Crossley-Baxter, “Japan’s unusual way to view the world”)

Sculpture by Kazunori Hamana; photo by Lily Crossley-Baxter

• The “beauty in the imperfections found as all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing.” (Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence)
• “The beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral.” (Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty)

Over time, physical mediums for music acquire imperfections and scars that speak of their history - even if we don’t know that history ourselves. When I am listening to an old record, I imagine previous owners sitting in their living rooms, laying in their bedrooms, doing any number of things while listening to this very record. What was going on in the life of that person when they first pulled the record from its sleeve? Was this piece of vinyl important to them?

I am not saying anything as simplistic as “physical good, digital bad.” What I am saying is that perhaps a digital self, a digital life, experience mediated by digital technology, is too thin to be fully satisfactory. Perhaps we have over-emphasized experience via the mind, forgetting that we are bodies and that human life is intimately connected to the wear and tear of physicality.

Other links:

• There are a lot of good links on that Rolf Potts podcast page. Next up for me is to watch High Fidelity.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Japanese aesthetics
• “Japanese Aesthetics, Wabi-Sabi, and the Tea Ceremony” (pdf) by Nancy Walkup

🎵 Now spinning. I first heard Robert Finley on the Colbert show a few days ago and fell in love with his wonderful voice and grandpa dancing. Bonus: this album was produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, so that’s a shot of extra confidence in its quality.

Today I found a copy of Over the Rhine’s “let’s stay together” record. I’m thankful both that I found it and that they stayed together.

Today’s record store purchases

I was reminded this week of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley’s bonkers Evelyn Evelyn project. Webley described it as “like something the Andrews Sisters might have recorded if they had grown up in the circus listening to new wave music.”

Went to see Over the Rhine - the best band in the world - at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater last night.