Five Records With… Adam Carroll
Posted on | January 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
I recently spoke with Adam Carroll, a singer/songwriter from Lockhart, TX. He and Michael O’Connor are about to release Hard Times, which I covered here. Five Records is an occasional feature of artists talking about the music that inspires them. Read more of these posts here.
“ When I was 19, I listened to this thing forever, before I started playing guitar. If there was anyone that made me want to get into music, it was Neil.“
“Doug Sahm — He makes San Antonio really cool, which it is. He plays blues, Tejano, just that old style. I really admire that he did what he wanted to. A lot of musicians talk about him, but I dont think he gets enough credit.”
“Michael and I were trying to write honky tonk songs while making Hard Times. If you want to call yourself a honky tonk singer, you had better listen to Ernest. He’s not the best singer in the world, but he’s the best at what he does, which is good news for me.”
“Theres a song called “One For the Money” that he wrote for Sam Peckinpah, that I wish I had written. Also, from the same record, “The Lights of Magdala” is about as good as it gets.“
Canadian Amplifier – Bootleg Series Vol. 1
“He does stuff with sound, and this little bitty guitar, that is cooler than anyone I’m hearing. He can do more interesting things with beat up old equipment that new gear can’t recreate. Also a great writer.”
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.
James Hand – “Don’t Want Me Too”
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
1. Let me tell you what I appreciate about James Hand: there is not a single phony thing about him. Not that you needed me to tell you that, with Kristofferson saying that “he believes” James Hand and Willie calling him “the real deal”. Despite such accolades, Hand has flown under the radar for most of his career. Shadow on the Ground is his second record for Rounder, and “Don’t Want Me Too” is a prime example of his no-nonsense way with a song. Hand shows no need to dress up a song with lavish production and extended wordplay, coaxing a whip-smart performance out of his band that crackles with an energy seldom heard today.
2. With his rhythm section accompanied by only a snaky guitar line and breezy steel, Hand lets his stark voice bottle up his feeling of unrequited love, swooping and fluttering with an impressive agility. His almost comically long run-on of an opening line laughs in the face of metaphors, but resonates with the honesty of someone whose pain keeps them from waxing poetic.
“You didn’t want me when you had me or you never would have left/
And I still don’t know why you did”
He recalls Hank Sr. with his drawling “why, why why” before lamenting that he wants someone who “don’t want me too”. Then, as quickly as it began, the track careens to a stop in just over two and a half minutes. His crisp, immediate approach has the freshness of Buddy Holly or Doug Sahm, and carries an energy that absolutely cannot be faked.
3. There is a lot of complicated music being made today that says half of what James Hand and his band get across in “Don’t Want Me Too“. To me, honky tonk or western swing has always been best enjoyed live at a place like the Broken Spoke, but Hand’s performance on this track surpasses that preference, coming off more reminiscent of early rock and roll. I am glad James Hand is giving lessons in how to make exciting music recorded live by real people playing real instruments, and I hope young artists are taking notes.
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