Turn It Up - 4/29/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

The return of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the continued return of the Spin Doctors, and tributes, tributes, tributes. Let’s turn it up!

Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson – “Marching Jaybird” (from What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow?, 2025)

It’s a fitting time for Giddens to return to the Black banjo traditions that brought her into the public consciousness. It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering, the meeting that served as the formation point for Giddens’ group the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which she formed with Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson. Speaking of that influential group, they just reunited at Giddens’ incredible Biscuits & Banjos festival in North Carolina, which celebrated the past, present, and future of Black music-making in country, folk, and beyond. The Giddens-Robinson collection What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow? is a spirited collection of Carolina folk songs, with the duo (accompanied only by cicadas) jumping across a traditional repertoire rooted in the work of their mentor Joe Thompson. Near the end, they honor the great Etta Baker, the North Carolina-born guitarist and singer whose bubbling arrangement of “Marching Jaybird” rings out through Giddens’ and Robinson’s interlocking banjos. I honestly could’ve turned up this entire album, which flows like a suite and is sweeter than a sunrise. Here’s to the next twenty years for Giddens, Robinson, and the community they’ve helped sustain and expand. – CH

Lana Del Rey – “Bluebird” (single, 2025)

The tender, intimate “Bluebird” recalls the single-spotlight traditions that stretched across nightclubs from the torch songs to the folk revival. Del Rey has found few better showcases for her voice’s soft echo than this small beauty, which builds from fingerpicked guitar to swelling strings, and seeks both freedom and refuge in a lyric rooted in the natural world and animated by Del Rey’s signature cinematic dynamics. When she arrives at the central message of “Find a way to fly,” she floats away on the last syllable as the orchestration fills in the gaps around her – it’s a new version of an old trick, but sometimes the old tricks are all you need. They work every time. – CH

Dallas Ugly – “Best Behavior” (from See Me Now, 2025)

I’ve been a bit obsessed with the new album from Nashville rock band Dallas Ugly, which hits several of my pleasure centers at once. “Best Behavior,” with its sawing fiddle and (new) wavy guitar and hurtling drums, had me even before the entrance of Libby Weitnauer, whose high twang recalls Nanci Griffith and whose melody skips across the smooth-as-glass arrangement with a playful joy that befits the song’s lovestruck theme. (Multi-instrumentalist Weitnauer plays the fiddle as well.) Elsewhere on the album, guitarist Owen Burton and bassist Eli Broxham add their distinctive voices to the mix and See Me Now winds up being one of my favorite albums of the year so far. – CH

Joy Oladokun – “Nazareth” (single, 2025)

It’s starting to feel like Joy Oladokun can’t miss. Actually, it’s felt that way for a while, and her new single “Nazareth” is a welcome addition to her great run. Over an insistent strummed guitar, Oladokun sings of seeking sanctuary, invoking Jesus’s birthplace as she wonders “If there's no Nazareth on earth, what's a child of God to do?” She traces her travels over a warm arrangement that keeps walking forward even as it sounds ready to rest awhile, and the singer-songwriter’s gift for melodies nestled between the folk, rock, pop, and country impulses that inform her work remains as strong as ever. A beautiful track and a necessary message. – CH

Spin Doctors – “The Heart of the Highway” (from Face Full of Cake, 2025)

There’s something pleasing about the fact that the Spin Doctors are still out there making records. Not only have we gained enough distance from their early-‘90s heyday to consider the band without either the quick rise or quicker fall, but it’s especially sweet given lead singer Chris Barron’s vocal-cord paralysis that rendered him incapable of singing for years. The band’s recent run of friendly hippie-rock hasn’t revealed them as secret makers of masterpieces, perhaps, but each album contains a few moments that are as good as they’ve ever been. Maybe better. “The Heart of the Highway,” on the new Face Full of Cake, is one of those, a pounding road song that avoids the cornball lyrics that are one of the band’s limitations. Barron sounds great as he hits the road, as so many have before him, with both anticipation and trepidation. The band roils behind him, and the big-hook chorus reminds you why they had those hits in the first place. – CH

Valerie June – “All I Really Wanna Do” (from Owls, Omens and Oracles, 2025)

Charles recommended a cut from Valerie June’s latest a couple weeks back, suggesting in the process that Owls, Omens and Oracles might be her best yet. I’ll second the motion; we may end up “turning up” every track on the album before the year’s out. One of the powers of her music is the way she teases mystery from the familiar, how she uses her bracing one-of-a-kind voice—suggestive of wisdom and playfulness at once, both bracing and calming too—to recharge and even reinvent old sounds. “All I Really Wanna Do” begins with a fifties piano vamp, shifts to girl-group strut, and completes this wall of sound with swirling strings. The song also begins as a love song, the relationship as safe space: “We could spend all day inside / Close the curtains and just hide.” But she’s not naïve about the world, harbors no illusions of escaping it: “There'll be days of distance, there'll be nights of pain / But we'll keep on dancing through the hardest rain.” I’d recommend that strategic attitude to all dearly beloveds. I think it might work for beloved communities, too. – DC

Willie Nelson – “Still Learning How to Fly” (from Oh What a Beautiful World, 2025)

In his No Depression review, Henry Carrigan identifies Oh What a Beautiful World as the 77^th studio album of Willie Nelson’s career—though given Willie’s preposterous recent productivity it can sometimes feel as if he’s surely released that many albums just this century. The new one is unexpectedly (which is not to say undeservedly) a tribute to the Rodney Crowell: Has a legend of Nelson’s magnitude ever paid such a tribute to one of his musical heirs? Even more unexpectedly, Nelson skips the bulk of Crowell’s best-known songs (“Shame on the Moon” excepted) and also sticks mostly to his 21^st century songbook (“Banks of the Old Bandera” dates to the mid-seventies but Crowell didn’t get around to cutting till 2000) or to songs from Crowell side projects such as The Notorious Cherry Bombs or 1997’s The Cicadas, from which “Still Learning How to Fly” originated. The song well suits Willie, a bright strum and jangle for what is hopefully his prolonged ride off into the sunset. I like the way Crowell’s “Still Learning How to Fly” evokes Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and love the way that “I got a past I won’t soon forget / You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” trips off Willie’s tongue. – DC

Rodney Crowell – “Mr. Soul” (from Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young, Vol. 1, 2025)

Speaking of Rodney Crowell… His contribution to this new The Songs of Neil Young set, a benefit for The Bridge School, is pretty remarkable, taking a distinctive and time-bound performance like Buffalo Springfield’s psychedelic summer of love hit “Mr. Cool” and making it his own weird thing: slinky and slightly funky, its groove now mildly menacing and the tone shifted from self-reflection to maybe something closer to self-absorption. When Crowell sings “She said, ‘You’re strange but don’t change,” he prefaces it with a chuckle, as if he would ever. – DC

Tommy McClain and Lucinda Williams – “Release Me” (from A Tribute to the King of Zydeco, 2025)

Speaking of tribute albums… I’ll admit I chuckled a little myself when I saw Lucinda Williams was among the acts involved in this forthcoming Clifton Chenier tribute, A Tribute to the King of Zydeco. I was imagining the response of critic Greil Marcus, an esteemed critic, to put it mildly (and friend of NFR; check out our chat with him here), but also one who enjoys reusing the line “Aren’t tribute albums terrible?” and who is not a Williams fan at all, to put it far more mildly than he often has. It occurred to me, as well, that Marcus’ dislike of tribute discs might be related at least in part to how often Williams, who seems to have embraced her unofficial role as the tribute contributor queen, shows up in their credits so regularly. In any case, I quite enjoy Lucinda’s work here, singing the mid-century country standard as one half of a conversation with Tommy McClain. They each have a new love already lined up and want to be shut of one another now, but it’s McClain who sounds most urgent. No wonder: The old swamp popper, a tribute worthy act himself, turned 85 last month. He launches into “Release Me” full-on begging and acapella (shades of Ted Hawkins’ “There Stands the Glass”), and you can immediately hear that his once pristine high tenor has become ravaged by all those miles, albeit not unpleasantly so, like, say, car wheels on a gravel road. On accordion, Keith Frank tips the balance from country soul to country zydeco. Not terrible. (Per the press release: “All proceeds from A Tribute to the King [out June 27] will fund the newly established Clifton Chenier Memorial Scholarship, which will provide financial assistance to students studying traditional music — specifically zydeco accordion — at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.”) – DC

Journey – “Feeling That Way” and “Anytime” (from Infinity, 1978)

The British producer Roy Thomas Baker died a couple of weeks back. His studio career stretched from early 1970s engineering gigs for Free and Nazareth well into this century with production work for Smashing Pumpkins and Yes. As those examples suggest, and though he also produced records for The Trammps and Dusty Springfield, Baker specialized in varieties of hard rock, including most famously Queen. His work on the band’s Sheer Heart Attack and especially on “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the rest of Night at the Opera, identified him with a distinctive layered harmony sound that he carried with him from project to project. His commercial peak, and I’d say his artistic one too, came in 1978 and 1979 when he produced the first two albums by The Cars: That otherworldly explosion of unison voices in “Good Times Roll” made the song, launched the band from cool new wavers to mainstream rock stars, and is so Roy Baker. In the same two-year window, he also produced Foreigner’s Head Games, a reunion with Queen for Jazz, and Journey’s AOR breakthrough Infinity. Combined, that five-album run would go on to sell 20 million copies—which shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did since I bought a copy of each of them in real time myself. My favorite Baker harmony moment is on Infinity, when “Feeling that Way” exhales into “Anytime,” sequenced snugly behind it. They were always played together that way, too, on Kansas City’s KY102 where I first heard it—as they were on AOR outlets everywhere else (or else the DJs got slammed with phone complaints!) Baker’s studio manufactured harmony blend shone in that moment: “Feelin’ that way!” rearending “Oooh-oooh, anytime that you want me!” It still sounds magical, to me, and massive. It’s the very opposite of authentic or intimate, of course, yet Baker’s choice conveys perfectly the larger-than-life intimacies of the song’s aspirational interior worlds. R.I.P., Roy Thomas Baker. – DC

Recommended reading/listening:

-Charles Hughes talks about his book Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, for a National Humanities Center webinar

-Keith Harris on seeing Paul Simon in concert, for The Racket

-Carl Wilson on the late David Thomas, of Pere Ubu, for Carl Wilson, ‘Crritic!’

-Carl Wilson on the late Joshua Clover, for Carl Wilson, ‘Crritic!’”

-Ian Cohen on Def Leppard’s Hysteria, for Pitchfork

-John Ganz on the books of Donald Trump, for The Nation

-Jewly Hight on Rhiannon Giddens’ Biscuits and Banjos festival, for NPR

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