Turn It Up - 6/24/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s another week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. David is up first, then Charles. As always, we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Blessing Offor and Dolly Parton – “Somebody’s Child” (single, 2024)

Not her best work, I thought when I first heard this a month or more back, but boy is this more like it. On “Somebody’s Child,” Dolly returns to her strengths—simplicity, humility—and ditches the grandiose Rockstar cosplay. Honestly, though, the reason I’ve kept playing this one is her duet partner, Blessing Offor, a Nigerian American singer-songwriter who works out of Nashville and whose work gets categorized as contemporary Christian—though in truth his songs are mostly general enough to be taken secularly, universally, like a contemporary iteration of that old record store section, “Inspirational.” Offor’s voice, a husky tenor that keeps threatening baritone, does most of its work with texture and inflection, hinting at gospel melisma he never deploys. His first verse here, counting the ways we’re all the same and all somebody’s child (or hear it as “Somebody’s child” if you prefer) is so straightforward and arresting that Dolly’s entrance feels like an intrusion, her equally quiet and intense verse just a little disappointing. – DC

Julius Rodriguez – “Love Everlasting” (from Evergreen, 2024)

Julius Rodriguez is a young-gun pianist/composer/etc., ostensibly a jazz artist but with a range more grandly ambitious and more casually pop: Besides working with Wynton Marsalis, he’s played with A$AP Rocky and members of Wu Tang Clan. This cut from his sophomore album has been on repeat at my place for a few weeks now. If it’s a RIYL you’re after, “Love Everlasting” keeps making me want to conjure some jazzier and wordless early Isaac Hayes album. But Rodriguez’s looped electric keyboards and, eventually, Keyon Harold’s relaxed trumpet, are their own thing, at ease but powerful, conjuring a feeling and a mood more than a song. Always cinematic and with the screenplay left up to you. – DC

Carsie Blanton – “The Democrats” (single, 2024) and “After the Revolution” (from After the Revolution, 2024)

When I first heard “The Democrats,” I wondered why Carsie Blanton hadn’t included it on her new album, After the Revolution. After all, that non-album single and her latest full length are each decidedly, delightfully political. But I see now that she was right to leave it off. The album, transforming a wide variety of old-school melodies into heart-swelling indie pop, is all about how we might maintain hope in capitalist end times, how to dream of a whole new world while keeping it real in this one. “After the revolution,” she predicts, “You’ll be a better husband, I’ll be a better wife.” What’s brilliant about that line is the way it embraces hope and reality at once. We’ll finally be better partners to one another afterward is exactly right: Capitalism is terrible not just because it eliminates political freedom and destroys the planet; it’s terrible because it pressures us all to be exhausted, anxious assholes. At the same time—and Blanton’s slyly sincere and subtly twangy vocal conveys this, I think—our understanding that we will be better people only afterward serves as a handy, all-too-human excuse for the shitty ways we treat one another right now. The whole album is hopeful but clear-eyed like that. “The Democrats,” on the other hand, is just cynical. Necessarily and hilariously so, but cynical, nonetheless. The song confesses to feeling hopeless and angry as the next election season, with its frustratingly familiar dynamics, inches nearer: The Republicans want to repeal the 20^th century; the Democrats do not, will fundraise as a firewall, or at least the lesser of two evils, then will equivocate, cop out and bitterly disappoint. Again. Or, as Blanton puts it with mock cheer, Republicans will “shoot you in the head, make sure that you are dead, Democrats will shoot you in the back.” This is not breaking news. It’s been all too true—more or less so, granted, depending on the issue and the moment, but true nevertheless—at least since the party began retreating from New Deal and/or Great Society ideals during the Carter years. So it makes emotional sense to direct your fury not at your obvious enemy but at the supposed ally who keeps letting you down. Short and sweet, a strummy scathing singalong full of dark humor, “The Democrats” sounds like one of the laughing-just-to-survive numbers Blanton gathers to sing with “My Good Friends” (the album closer I turned up here). The funniest moment, because it’s true, comes when she sings capitalist realism to a tune borrowed from some old union rally: “This is the best democracy we’ve ever had anywhere! If you’re a billionaire, boys, if you’re a billionaire!”–DC

The World Famous Blue Jays – “Cookin’ with Jay” (from Rig Rock Truck Stop: Another Collection of Diesel Only Records, 1993)

Musician, label head, magazine editor, Sirius radio programmer, Outlaw Country cruise director and all-around rig-rockin’ life enthusiast Jeremy Tepper died last week. He was just 60 years old. I only met him a few times through the decades, but he was always wildly friendly to me in our encounters and supportive of my work. In charge of several country channels at Sirius, he helped me get booked on the program of his friend and collaborator, the also gone-too-soon Mojo Nixon, when the first edition of my Haggard book came out. As the date of my appearances coincided with Jeremy’s birthday, he spontaneously invited me and my wife to join him and a few dozen of his family, friends and fellow travelers at Katz’s that evening for his “Fiftyfest.” That kind of “the more the merrier and, hey, have you met…” vibe was the way he rolled. Long before I ever met Jeremy, I knew his name from Diesel Only, the roots rock and trucker-devoted record company he co-founded, and the label’s first collection, 1992’s Rig Rock Juke Box, which was bookended by cuts from his Brooklyn-based band, the World Famous Blue Jays. Another Jays’ number, the instrumental “Cookin’ with Jay,” concluded the second Diesel Only set, Rig Rock Truck Stop, and featured guitar work from label co-founder Jay Sherman-Godfrey and from the track’s producer Eric Ambel. Sounding a little like the Strangers hooking up with the Beatles at Cosmo’s Factory, it percolates along nicely, with Tepper’s guitar in there too, playing a characteristically supporting role. The record sounds fun and inviting like a party where you know fit right in. At just two-and-a-half minutes, it’s over way too soon. – DC

The Decemberists – “The Burial Ground” (from As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, 2024)

I’ll admit that The Decemberists’ particular thing doesn’t usually work for me, but it really works when it does. Most of those bullseyes are when the group leans into power-pop chime, as they do on the lead-off track from their new album. Booming drums and ringing guitars surround Colin Meloy as he invites his friend to meet him in the cemetery, where they might escape the rest of the world for a while and find a cure for the friend’s “maladies in my head.” It’s a message as inviting as the post-R.E.M. wall of sound, especially when Meloy’s protagonist reminds the friend to make sure they remember to bring the stereo. Not a bad way to work the graveyard shift. – CH

Los Cenzontles (feat. David Hidalgo) – “A Rainy Night in Soho” (from Covers 3, 2024)

On the latest volume of their lovely series of covers albums, the band and cultural academy Los Cenzontles tackle everything from the Rolling Stones to Billie Holiday to Ramón Ayala with equal effectiveness. The stunner may be this version of the Pogues classic, recorded after Shane MacGowan’s death with the assistance of the great David Hidalgo. As the story goes, Cenzontles leaders initially wanted the Los Lobos master to only add an accordion part, but Hidalgo asked if he could record a vocal in honor of his departed friend. Los Cenzontles aren’t fools, so they said yes. Hidalgo delivers a weary yet assured performance, befitting the song’s sweet sadness and meshing perfectly with the trumpet blasts and violin caresses that follow along with Hidalgo as he strolls (or maybe staggers) down the street towards home. The song is becoming a staple of MacGowan tributes – on his recent tour through Ireland, Bruce Springsteen played it on every stop – and I hope this gently beautiful version becomes part of the repertoire from which a new standard is built. – CH

Bree Runway – “Just Like That” (single, 2024)

This latest fireball from Bree Runway not only returns her to the stage in commanding fashion, but it also refuses to let the listener settle into any of the four or five different grooves that Runway works during its brief 138 seconds. Mixing spitfire flow and polyrhythmic glitch, Runway earns her boasts as she struts across rolling waves of drum-and-bass clatter. (“Told them people they can't mess with me/And if they slow I can also spell it out in Twi,” she promises in a nod to her Ghanaian heritage.) The best and truest declaration of all? “Of course I am a pop star.” She sure is, and pop music in the twenty-first century doesn’t come much better than this. – CH

Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad Ensemble, and Benmont Tench – “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (from Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty, 2024)

The new star-packed salute Petty Country is a worthy reminder of Tom Petty’s great talents, and a few tracks stick out beyond the amiable encore-cover vibes. The most striking is this take on Petty’s oozing synth epic, here reimagined by Rhiannon Giddens, the Silkroad Ensemble, and Heartbreaker ringer Benmont Tench as urgent chamber-pop. Other than the instrumentation, Giddens and company don’t change much about the song: instead, they weave its fragments of melody together with the same rising intensity that animates the still-striking original. Giddens’ voice and banjo are at the center, reminding listeners that she is one of our era’s most able and distinctive interpreters who rebuilds the canons and leaves their mysteries intact. – CH

Recommended reading:

-Jim Farber talks to Linda Thompson, for New York Times

-Andrea Williams on Rissi Palmer and Black women in country music, for Tennessean

-Geoff Edgers on the late Jeremy Tepper, for The Washington Post

-Alex Williams on the late Angela Bofill, for The New York Times

-Robert Christgau on Stephen Deusner’s Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Travelling the South with the Drive-By Truckers, for And It Don’t Stop

-Josh Freidberg on the personal impact of queer country music, for Good Country

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