All Eyes Out For You

Best music week of the year?

You can pretty much take your pick of Big Fall Releases tomorrow - though, admittedly, most of them will fly under the radars of the general listening public.

For my part, I expect three of tomorrow's releases to land on my Top 10 list this year (and thanks to NPR, I've heard all of them):

• Robert Plant - Band Of Joy:  Let's see, what's the best way to land in my Top 10?  Hire Buddy Miller to produce and play guitar?  Nab Patty Griffin as your backup singer?  Take the whole enterprise out on the road and blow my feeble mind?  How 'bout all of the above?  I'll admit this record doesn't always rise to the insanely high expectations I had after seeing the band in July, but it's still a fantastic record.  Some will call it a lesser sequel to Raising Sand, but it stands pretty well on its own merits.  However, any failure to capture this band live on disc - complete with the radically reworked Zeppelin tunes - will be chalked up to a missed opportunity.
• Mavis Staples - You Are Not Alone:  I'll admit that I would've love to hear Joe Henry produce this one.  Wilco's Jeff Tweedy fills those shoes, with no real track record to indicate what he'd do.  It is to his great credit that he filled the studio with Mavis' white-hot road band.  The song selections are generally pretty fantastic.  Some will complain that, at times, this record does not capture Staples at her soul-shoutin' best.  But it does capture her still at the height of her powers unafraid to sometimes put that shoutin' aside in favor on contemplative interpretations.  Nuanced and beautiful, this one is a keeper.
• Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues:  There hasn't been much dissent in critical circles that this album represents the fulfillment of the promise Earle showed on his previous two records.  Diverse, focused and showing even greater depth than his terrific Midnight At The Movies, JT Earle is obviously poised for great things.  And oh yeah - that has to be one of the best album covers of the year.  (UPDATE: GET HARLEM RIVER BLUES FOR $2.99 FROM AMAZON'S DIGITAL STORE -- TODAY ONLY!)

Hopefully, there will be plenty more to say about these records over the coming weeks as they dig a groove in my brain through repeated listenings.

And hey, what about this album due next week?

Back to the blog

Well, I can no longer belabor my exile from the blogosphere. In case you were wondering where I disappeared to, my June was mostly consumed by a move to a new home (still in Houston, though John C. will rightly dispute my claim to that based on my new zip code). There was a good three weeks or so where I was mostly checked out from a musical standpoint. Some odd shifts have occurred in my listening habits as of late, brought on by my now-standard summertime obsession over guitars. A few of you might be appalled to find out what I’ve been obsessing over lately, and we’ll get to that in short order. So in the interest of getting back to some regular blogging, let’s get a few bullet points out of the way…

• Grace Potter & The Nocturnals’ self-titled new album is still my fave of the year so far. In fact, some of the credit/blame for my recent classic rock obsession should be laid at their feet for conjuring such a 1970’s vibe. It’s been a bit disheartening to see that the record hasn’t really caught fire, despite the standard recent appearances on Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel (they did manage not to slip from the #184 slot on Billboard’s Top 200 Album chart last week). There’s really no reason this album shouldn’t be some kind of hit, but it certainly exemplifies how ineffective the major-label bag of tricks is these days. Here’s hoping there are still plenty of fans out there to be won over by GPN’s best record yet. Will a second music video make any difference (even one with French strippers)? Probably not.
• Alejandro Escovedo’s new record Street Songs Of Love is probably my second favorite of the year and similarly evokes a certain golden era of rock and roll. If you thought Real Animal was an unapologetic rock album, you ain’t heard nothing to you hear this thing blast from your speakers.
• The Black Crowes are celebrating their 20th Anniversary in high style with the release of Croweology, a double CD collection of acoustic versions of songs mostly from their first four albums. It’s indulgent and overly long, and also a real treat for longtime fans. It’s kind of interesting how smoothly they’ve locked into this Band-like vibe between this and their last album Before The Frost… Certainly not for the casual listener but obviously a must-have for fans. And make special note that their upcoming tour will be the band’s last for some time while the Crowes take an indefinite hiatus after enjoying a creative resurgence over the past few years.
• Sheryl Crow’s new album 100 Miles From Memphis was co-produced by guitar great Doyle Bramhall II, and it does indeed often capture the soulful spirit of the city in the title. It’s my favorite Crow record in a long while, and maybe sometime I’ll bore you with a post about how I’m slavishly devoted to the idea that Sheryl Crow is capable of another great record. This one is better in small doses – none of the tracks are anything less than solid, but they tend to mine the same territory repeatedly. Still, it’s a mildly adventurous album by Crow’s standards, and it’s to her great credit that she’s still giving it her best effort.
• Okay, I admit I’ve been really diving headlong into guitar-hero music lately, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to claim that I’ve listened to almost nothing but Clapton, Hendrix and Stevie Ray for almost a solid three week stretch. I finally picked up Hendrix’s recent Valleys Of Neptune, which is a fantastic album of unreleased stuff featuring several alternate versions of well-known tracks. Even better is the just-released Sony Legacy Edition of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Couldn’t Stand The Weather, which features a few unreleased tracks and an entire show recorded in Montreal. I’d also like to note that Craig Hopkins has created a fantastic tribute book to SRV. He has had 3000 copies self-published, and it will be published by Hal Leonard/BackBeat Books in two parts starting in the fall of this year (pre-order from Amazon here). But the full volume is probably worth grabbing now as a collector’s item. Oh, and in case you were wondering, the new guitar is a Fender Eric Clapton Signature Stratocaster.
• I caught Robert Plant & The Band of Joy out at The Woodlands about two weeks ago. Since the new record is not yet out (due Sept. 14), I was sort of expecting a lot of laid-back material in the vein of Raising Sand. I was also expecting an open revolt of Zep-heads. On both fronts, I was pleasantly surprised. Plant was in awesome form, and I guess it goes without saying that his band – which features Buddy Miller, Patty Griffin and Darrell Scott – was unreal. Plant was generous with the spotlight, and the crowd was deliriously enthralled. Oh, and Bettye LaVette opened the show and I’m pretty sure conjured a violent thunderstorm with her set-closing rendition of The Who’s “Love Reign Over Me”. Incredible.
• I’ve actually been listening The Allman Brothers. Dear God help us all.
• The Derek Trucks Band will be taking a break while Trucks works on music with his wife, Susan Tedeschi (!). The band’s parting shot is a double live album Roadsongs recorded in Chicago last year. It’s fantastic – everything I admire about Trucks’ band amped up to 11.
• Lest you think I’ve lost all touch with my roots, next weekend I’ll be heading to North Adams, MA, for the Solid Sound Festival, aka the Wilco Super-Dork Fest. My good friend Babalugats and I also have designs on visiting the Martin Guitar Factory in Nazareth, PA (which is close to ‘Lugats’ home in PA). He really wants me to try to weasel a “press credential” or something, but I think it’s safe to assume that every attendee at Solid Sound will be a music blogger.

The making of Patty Griffin's 'Downtown Church'

A few cool new videos about Patty Griffin's Downtown Church over at YouTube, including this very cool "making of" film...

Best Albums of 2009: #2 Buddy & Julie Miller - 'Written In Chalk'

Obviously my attention has shifted to 2010, but I told ya I wouldn't leave you hanging.

 As I indicated earlier, it's almost hard to say what my objective opinion of Buddy and Julie's Written In Chalk (along with my #1 album) truly is.  What I mean by that is that this record has a very "lived in" vibe for me, despite being out less than a year.  It's a pretty safe bet that the work of the Miller's would top my desert island list (especially if I could include Buddy's production work).  Therefore, Written In Chalk is a welcome addition to that body of work.  Ultimately, it probably falls somewhere right in the middle of their discography, but it's very existence is a great cause for celebration in my book.

In many ways, Written In Chalk is a terrific summary of the couple's work over the past decade.  Though it lacks the razor sharp focus of Buddy's last album Universal United House Of Prayer, many of the gospel flavors from that record appear on Written In Chalk (thanks primarily to the appearance of Regina McCrary).  No Miller album would feel complete without appearances from Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin, who both show up.  Even Buddy's recent gig with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant is memorialized here with a backstage recording of Mel Tillis's "What You Gonna Do Lerory".

Julie Miller writes most of the songs on the album but only appears on about half of the tracks.  Written In Chalk was obviously pulled together from multiple sessions intended probably to be either a Buddy or a Julie album.  However, they've done a great job pulling those tracks together into a cohesive whole.  And though Written In Chalk isn't quite the "duo" record that their self-titled debut was, it's a fantastically heartfelt and beautiful album nonetheless.

(BTW, 2010 already looks promising on the Miller front as Buddy's production of Patty Griffin's wonderful Downtown Church was just released last week.  Buddy will be touring with Patty in the early spring to promote the album.)

O, Brother, Where Art Thou (Been)?

Well, it would be understatement to say that I've left any remnants of loyal readers pretty high and dry over the last month.  My Best Albums of 2009 list remains incomplete, pending No. 1 and No. 2 (though any regular readers of this blog probably already know what they are).

So what's been going on?  Well, the quick answer is that I somehow found myself sucked into a vortex of film, which has occupied a great deal of my interest lately.  This blog doesn't seem quite the forum for it, so I decided to crank up a new film blog to deposit those thoughts.  By all means, please check it out if you're so inclined (the longest entry so far is my impression of Frederico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2).  I've been traveling the past couple of weeks, and I'm pretty behind on some new DVD releases.  But hopefully, I'll be catching up over the next week or so.

However, what really happened, I think, is that the last quarter of 2009 just really left me high and dry musically.  Looking back, I believe Joe Henry's Blood From Stars (released in August and in my hands much earlier than than) was the last album that really grabbed hold of me.  That's an awfully long time to go without a record that gets under your skin.  Quite frankly, my attention has just drifted away from the world of music.

This year is already more encouraging.  Spoon's new record is wonderful, a real affirmation that they simply are one of the best studio bands out there.  Transference won't be the crossover hit that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was, but it continues Britt Daniel & Co.'s streak of daring, fascinating albums.

Even more wonderful is Patty Griffin's just-released semi-gospel record Downtown Church, produced by Buddy Miller.  There's little to say about it except that Griffin has become just about my favorite singer on the planet, and the material on the album runs a gamut of styles.  I call it "semi-gospel" because it would be almost easy to overlook that thematic element of the album and simply be washed away with the gorgeous performances.  When I think about what kind of reaction I was missing with much of the music I heard in the back half of '09, THIS is what I'm thinking about.

I'll perhaps have much more to say about Downtown Church soon, but don't forget that Allison Moorer's new album Crows is due in less than two weeks (Feb. 9), and Drive-By Truckers' The Big To-Do is due on March 16.

Looking ahead: 2010

Well, my year-end list is nearly complete.  There were, as always, some real gems in 2009, but on the whole, I'd say fewer keepers than usual.  2010, on the other hand, looks to be full of promise, primarily on the female singer-songwriter front, which - let's face it - pretty much makes or breaks my music year.

First, comes word that Tift Merritt is in the studio with producer Tucker Martine, who has produced a whole slew of great albums, not the least of which was the 2007 album from Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter.  Speaking of whom, Sykes & Co. should have a new release in 2010 as well.

On Jan. 26, Patty Griffin will release the delayed Downtown Church, produced by Buddy Miller (whose heart problems likely delayed the project).  Allison Moorer will release Crows on Feb. 9.  The album reteams her with producer R.S. Field, who also produced her best record The Duel.  Grace Potter has a new album due in the spring, but unfortunately it appears that the sessions with T-Bone Burnett were scrapped.  I'm extremely interested but also a little worried about the direction of that project.

The Drive-By Truckers supposedly have not one, but two, new albums in the can, and those will presumably be released by ATO Records in the near future.  Spoon unexpectedly announced the release of a new album Transference, due Jan. 26 on Merge.

Sam Phillips will continue to release new work with her self-released digital project The LP, including three more EP's and a full-length album.

What else in 2010?  Might we hear the anticipated reteaming of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant?  Will Gillian Welch follow David Rawlings' 2009 lead and drop a new album after almost seven years of waiting?  Aren't Over The Rhine long overdue for a new studio album?

Bob Lefsetz on Buddy Miller

Music industry pundit Bob Lefsetz attended the Three Girls and Their Buddy show at the Greek Theater this past week, and he was most impressed by Buddy Miller.  So impressed he included his thoughts in one of his recent newsletters.  Check it out here.

For my money, Written In Chalk is far and away the best album of 2009 thus far.

Buddy Miller in Mix Magazine

Buddy Miller is featured in a cool article in this month's Mix magazine, discussing the recording process behind Written In Chalk.  Highly recommended for my geeky - er, gearhead - readers.

Buddy in Blurt

Blurt interviews the always-great Buddy Miller.  The interview was conducted in January, prior to the release of Written In Chalk (and Buddy's bypass surgery).

Also, here's a fantastic review of Chalk by Bully! Pulpit's Brian Quincy Newcomb.

Buddy & Julie notes

A few other reviews of Written In Chalk have trickled out in the past week, including No Depression editor Peter Blackstock's take (which also appears in the just-released second No D. "bookazine").  You might recall that Blackstock's co-editor Grant Alden penned the outstanding liner notes for the record.

Also a really nice write-up in Canada's Globe and Mail.

It also appears that some June dates for Three Girls & Their Buddy (Emmylou, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy) have gone onsale.  That's great news since it would seem to indicate that Buddy will back out performing by early summer.  Here's hoping that he is on the mend and will get a chance to promote the new album very soon.

UPDATE:  And a wonderful, detailed review from Jim Markel over at Swampland.com.