Turn It Up - 11/25/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s a new week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. David goes first, then Charles, and we’ve got a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Coward Brothers – “Tipsy Woman” (from The Coward Brothers, 2024)

For an artist who has seemed determined across nearly half a century to release basically every musical thought he’s ever had, Elvis Costello has never really put out any albums I’d term as especially self-indulgent, let alone a waste of time. Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything. The Coward Brothers, Costello’s team-up with longtime friend and collaborator, T-Bone Burnett, released a 45 in 1985: “People’s Limousine” b/w a cover version of “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” a pitch-perfect, and perfect in every other way too, homage to country duet teams like the Everlys and the Louvins. By contrast, The Coward Brothers is twenty cuts long and fifteen cuts too long at a minimum — full of song fragments, writing exercises, and genre goofs that somehow land both fussed over and like demos they’ll maybe return to later. Note: I make these estimations as someone who is an OG fan of the Costello/Burnette nexus; who still plans to make my way through the album’s related scripted-audio-series True Story of the Coward Brothers; who finds EC’s TB-produced King of America a beau ideal of proto-Americana; and who hopes to discover the six-disc box King of America and Other Realms under his tree in a month. Thank goodness that “Tipsy Woman,” at least, is a keeper (I’d likely have found room for it in my Costello “Love Letter in 16 Songs” if it’d been out yet.) Mostly just Elvis and acoustic guitars, with T-Bone harmonizing here and there, the ballad’s about a guy pleading with his besotted lover to put down the bottle even as he matches her drink for bleary drink. The bedraggled bubblegum chorus (“Tipsy-tipsy-tipsy-tipsy”) is, like another round, hard to resist. -DC

Bartees Strange – “Sober” (single, 2024)

Opening warm and grooving and ruminative, like Fleetwood Mac leaning Yacht-ward, then shifting to anthemic heartland guitar rock, all of it cut with an alternative vibe, “Sober” is genre-fluid—not obtrusively to make a point, but seamlessly because Bartees Strange, a black indie rocker who grew up singing opera in Oklahoma, feels musically at home wherever. At the same time, “Sober” is about not feeling at home in your own skin, failing a lover (“a hard truth when she needs softness”), failing himself (“When you’re not near me every song’s a throwaway”), then drinking up his insecurities. “That’s why it’s hard to be sober.” – DC

Brooks & Dunn (with the Earls of Leicester) – “How Long Gone” (from Reboot II, 2024)

Brooks & Dunn’s pair of recent Reboot efforts, where they team with younger acts on new versions of their old hits, have been predictably hit or miss though I applaud their rejection of simply remembering the good-old-days: Fucking with the familiar under cuts nostalgia by definition. I recommended the duo’s teaming up with Lainey Wilson to ZZ Topify “Play Something Country” last month, but this bluegrass version of “How Long Gone” is the project’s sharpest reinvention. Brooks & Dunn’s chart topping original, in 1998, was twangy power pop, but this fresh version of the song with the Earls of Leicester sounds like it was mean to be bluegrass all along—and as the Earl’s lead singer and guitarist Shawn Camp co-wrote “How Long Gone” in the first place, maybe it was. Camp sings the first lonely verse with characteristic understatement; fiddler Johnny Warren, dobroist Jerry Douglass, and banjo man Charlie Cushman crush their breaks; then Ronnie Dunn finishes it off. Beautiful. And, fingers crossed, a signal that the Earls of Leicester may be thinking to push their focus beyond the Flatt & Scruggs songbook. –DC

James Brandon Lewis Trio – “Five Spots to Caravan” (single, 2024)

On “Five Spots to Caravan,” the debut single from Apple Cores, due out in February, Chad Taylor launches the trio with wild trips across the kit, bassist Josh Werner grounds the energy in a groove, and James Brandon Lewis improvises a melody on sax atop all that focused abandon like an MC freestyling over a hip hop drum loop. My kind of modern jazz. – DC

Al Green – “Everybody Hurts” (single, 2024)

What a blessing. What a great idea. What a remarkable reminder of Rev. Green’s astonishing gifts as a singer, both in terms of the voice that now exhibits the deepened resonance of his age and the interpretive abilities that transform every song he considers, especially the already-famous ones. What a song: R.E.M.’s aching anthem of love and heartsickness that offers each listener assurance and shelter. What a band: an all-star group of Memphis musicians (including several members of the legendary Hi Rhythm Section) that slides easily and effectively into the gentle groove that Green and his background singers build to gospel heights. What a time to be alive, to bear witness to this remarkable recording. What a time to be alive, to need it as badly as we do. What a gift, from one of our greatest vocalists who we are so lucky to still have with us. What a track. What an amazing track. – CH

Baby Rose – “Landslide” (single, 2024)

A stunning reimagination of a new standard. Baby Rose’s remarkable voice has been at the center of great records – both her own and those of her associates – since she emerged in the late 2010s. Tackling Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” which was also famously and powerfully recorded by The Chicks, she eschews the ascending-descending arrangements of earlier versions in favor of a slow R&B simmer backed by lonesome electric guitar and wavy keyboards. It’s a perfect fit for Stevie Nicks’ meditation on facing an uncertain future, grieving the losses of the past, and finding the strength (or at least the resolve) to keep moving on. Baby Rose’s “Landslide” more than earns its place next to the song’s canonical versions, and I hope it becomes one of them itself. – CH

(Thanks to Ann Powers for hipping me to this track.)

Graham Parker – “Almost Thanksgiving Day” (from Your Country, 2004)

There are plenty of songs about Thanksgiving, but I think this might be the only one about the day before. And it’s a good one. From Parker’s twangy 2004 album Your Country, “Almost Thanksgiving Day” is a windswept waltz describing preparations for the coming holiday, from chopping wood to kids coming home to watching the forecast for snow. It’s both welcoming and ominous, particularly in the final verses when Parker – in full, glorious whining-soul voice, doubled by a harmonica wheezing behind him – notes a drunken driver dead on the highway and then the exhaustion of the song’s subject as they await the next morning. Neither a nostalgic evocation nor a stony dismissal, “Almost Thanksgiving Day” is both at the same time, capturing an ambivalence about holidays that feels authentic. – CH

Arlo Guthrie – “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (from Alice’s Restaurant, 1967)

Alice Brock died last week at the age of 83. A painter and author, Brock is most famous for her time as a restauranteur, through which she gained renown as the subject of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice Restaurant Massacree.” The 18-minute talking blues from 1967 established Guthrie as a solo star and has since become something of a Thanksgiving standard. The song is based on a real incident of Guthrie’s arrest after cleaning out Brock’s garbage on Thanksgiving, and its (fictional) later impact on Guthrie avoiding the Vietnam War. The song may seem an odd choice for an enduring holiday anthem, even despite the setting. But the friendly narrative – delivered by Guthrie with the wry sweetness that became his trademark, over a finger-picked dance of acoustic guitar – and the evocation of the little community that gathered around Brock’s table makes it seem more fitting. Alice Brock’s life shouldn’t be reduced to one famous moment, of course. But it’s poignant that this year’s annual playing of the song she inspired and helped create will take place so soon after she moved on. “Remember Alice?,” Guthrie reminds us a few minutes in. “It’s a song about Alice.” It sure is, and I’m thankful she made it happen. – CH

Recommended Reading

-RJ Smith on Wussy’s recent album release show, for Robert Christgau’s And It Don’t Stop

-Michaelangelo Matos on Quincy Jones’ 1989 album Back on the Block, for The Current

-Larisha Paul on why Shaboozey deserved more from the CMA Awards, for Rolling Stone

-John Leland on the return of Jesse Malin, for New York Times

-Elizabeth Nelson on Bob Dylan and the border, for Southwest Review

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