Ryan Bingham – “The Weary Kind”
Posted on | November 25, 2009 | 5 Comments
1. Funny that Ryan Bingham would write a song with “weary” in the title, since most of his reviews mention that word in relation to his raspy drawl. In fact, Bingham is creating quite the brand for himself — the whiskey drunk, sweat soaked troubadour with miles of highway behind him. He reinforces this ethic on nearly every song, which might become cumbersome if his music wasn’t growing by leaps and bounds. From his raw debut Mescalito to the more focused, yet still cheerily irreverent Roadhouse Sun, Bingham has grown his sound to include both a healthy dose of the Byrds and an harder rocking sound. With this new song “The Weary Kind”, from the forthcoming movie Crazy Heart, Ryan takes a haunting tone, warning the listener that the life he lives (and he really lives it) is not for the faint of heart. The film, a story about a wayward country singer, which Bingham’s own story weaves closely enough with that the song manages to be both autobiographical and fictional.
2. T Bone Burnett produced “The Weary Kind”, layering it with an appropriate cinematic drama, like gathering storm clouds. The backing track is murkier than anything Bingham has approached before, but he manages to make it work. Layering woozy pump organ and pedal steel over spry fingerpicking, Bingham lays out a few situations typical to the lifestyle of Jeff Bridges’ main character: playing poker, shooting 8 ball at a truck stop. After a quick, somewhat cliched chorus, he goes a bit deeper, as his character is “sweating out the hate” with the “whiskey…a thorn in [his] side.” The song strings together the life of this wanderer to a point that is almost too much — revisiting lines heard often in Bingham’s songs. The third verse is completely unflinching, with Ryan blaming the character (or himself) for lost love, being so direct as to assert that “you are the man who ruined her world.”
3. A key item to remember is that this song was written for a film, in which Bingham and his Dead Horses serve as Bridges’ backing band. I can see how the song happened, with Burnett stumbling across Bingham’s work and asking him to contribute a song. This sounds more hastily written than his album tracks, with a few clumsy rhymes that seem a little too easy. What makes this work is the way Bingham sells it — he doesn’t have to stretch to know the lyrical territory, and he sounds at home in the arrangement. Last time I checked there was nothing wrong with an artist wearing a song too well, and that point is proven here.
Doug Burr – “Graniteville”
Posted on | November 23, 2009 | No Comments
1. I am a sucker for train songs. Something about the gentle (or frenetic) rolling beat makes me feel at home, though I could count the times I have been on one with one hand. Thus, I was an easy mark for Doug Burr’s “Graniteville”, which is a train song about trains. With repeated listens, however, there is more depth to this song than most, as Burr’s emotive voice and gentle instrumentation wrap a story about escaping a small town in the context of a real life tragedy.
2. The third track from Burr’s 2007 record On Promenade, “Graniteville” begins with a slow shuffling beat with a light keyboard before Burr’s dry, lilting voice sings a verse relating a longing from an engineer constantly on the move. However, when he hits the chorus, he references the Graniteville train disaster, which is where it gets spooky. In 2005 a train derailed near the small South Carolina town and released 90 tons of chlorine into the air and killing nine people. Train disaster songs have been done — most notably “The Wreck of the Old 97″. Where Burr steers this song away is how he weaves the sleepiness of a small town and the uncertainty of a relationship together with the story so that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
3. When Burr mentions Graniteville, the “whole town under the sleeping pill”, he brings together both the tragedy and the mood of a small town, where people are “trying so hard just to get away”. He rationalizes, and even understands people’s reasons for staying: wanting to “die in a quiet place” or frozen “watching the trains go by”. Speaking to his love, for whom “every town is small”, he speaks with the concern that she might never escape. Whether or not that is because of the train tragedy or not is left to the imagination.
4. The song echoes the “screaming of a million tons” as it lurches and speeds up near the end, with Burr’s croon reaching a fever pitch before swirling back down into silence. Burr’s ability to create a sense of mystery is what makes the song so hauntingly beautiful. I am still peeling back the layers on this, trying to find out what it is all about. I might never figure that out, and that’s alright with me.
Five Records with… Owen Temple
Posted on | November 20, 2009 | 2 Comments
I recently spoke with Owen Temple after shooting some upcoming video with him at Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas. He released the fantastic (and underrated) Dollars and Dimes this year. Five Records is an occasional feature of artists talking about the music that inspires them. Read more of these posts here.
“Jerry Jeff chose some great songs here and introduced me to some great writers. Everything from the album cover on, I thought “This looks fun”. This record is like an anthology of Texas songwriters. Viva Terlingua is the same thing as well.”
“A masterpiece — all stories, set around Lubbock, where he is from. He reminds me that that’s what music is for me — stories about these places and the characters that inhabit these places. As far as his career, he records things that interest him, even when people say ‘you can’t do that!’. He always makes me say ‘Wow‘”.
“Like Terry Allen, they have always been experimental, and only wanting to make music that makes them say ‘wow’. They push the envelope sonically and made the record they wanted to.”
Leon Russell and the Shelter People
“A song I wish I had written — ‘Stranger in a Strange Land‘. I love the simplicity of the chorus – its a song that everyone can identify with. We’ve all felt like we were the only person on the planet feeling that way at that time. The pre-chorus, where the baby looks around and feels just as out of place as the wise man, is profound. Also, he managed to include the word burro in the song.”
“I first met him at a songswap at Cheatham Street, and I admired what he was doing. He has put out a few great EP’s, including 4 of No Kind. I love the song “Sunset”. One of my favorites.”
Owen Temple – Dollars and Dimes
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