Turn It Up - 9/25/2023

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

Sep 25, 2023

We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first this week, then David, and we’ve also included some reading recommendations at the bottom.

“Steelhead Trout” - Margo Cilker (from Valley of Heart’s Delight, 2023)

There are many delights on the new Margo Cilker record, but I keep gravitating to this hand-clapping ode to a fish’s perseverance. Chronicling the fight of the title trout to get upstream and spawn, Cilker relates her awe and wonder at the steelhead as she witnesses it swim while she takes a break from working on the dam that’s become another barrier for the trout to overcome. This is a workers’ anthem too, you see, delivered with plainspoken spirit by Cilker over a joyful noise of steel, accordion, piano, and harmonies. When Cilker and company promise that “only death can stop the steelhead,” don’t be surprised if you pump your fist in praise. - CH

“Finally Home” - Seth Glier (feat. Crys Matthews) (single, 2023)

It’s no surprise that many musicians are engaging with the climate crisis, creating a soundtrack of ongoing disaster and the desperate need to reimagine our lives while we still have the chance. On “Finally Home,” Seth Glier and Crys Matthews draw on the past. Inspired by the work of Afro-Indigenous community farm and food-justice organization Soul Fire, Glier and Matthews explore the ways that Black and native communities in the U.S. have long offered alternative visions of land stewardship as survival and resistance. With its popping rhythms, syncopated harmonies, and gospel insistence, “Finally Home” exudes a call-and-response energy that links a usable past to a sustainable future. It’s too simple to suggest that this record feels like Sweet Honey in the Rock backed by Meshell Ndegeocello, but it’s not wrong. - CH

“Emissary” - Karen & The Sorrows (from Why Do We Want What We Want, 2023)

Karen Pittelman is an essential voice in our moment. She’s an activist, writer, teacher, organizer, and world-builder who (among other things) has helped build the vibrant world of contemporary queer country, creating and expanding spaces for marginalized fans and artists. She’s also a great artist in her own right, whose work with Karen & The Sorrows has earned her comparisons to everyone from Dolly Parton to Tom Petty. I can certainly hear both those artists (and many others) on her new EP, where the acoustic sound emphasizes the richness of tracks like the driving “Emissary.” But, more than that, I hear a singular artist who’s earned those comparisons and forged her own unique identity. Due to health realities, Pittelman can’t tour in the COVID era, so there’s extra reason now to support this artist and the crucial work she creates. She’s done – and is doing – a lot for all of us. Let’s do what we can for her. Here’s that Bandcamp link again. - CH

“Banks of the Ponchartrain” - Iris DeMent (from More Than A Whisper: Celebrating the Music of Nanci Griffith, 2023)

I wrote about Nanci Griffith last week, in part because Friday saw the release of a new tribute album. It’s a lovely collection, filled with versions that both affirm and extend her legacy. But her friend and fellow traveler Iris DeMent is perhaps the only contributor who fully reinvents her choice. She turns “Banks of the Ponchartrain” – a stomping celebration of home in Griffith’s original – into an epic prayer for rest and rejuvenation. With her voice soaring over her stately piano, DeMent draws out the sweet specificity of Griffith’s lyric with a mix of yearning and blessed assurance that makes her character’s journey all the more poignant. And brings it much closer to a different, or at least particular, kind of homegoing. - CH

“Have You Ever Seen The Rain?” - Jake Shimabukuro (feat. Kawika Kahiapo) (from Grateful, 2023)

Hawaiian composer and ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro’s new album finds him collaborating with some of Hawai’i’s finest artists, making for a collection that symbolizes Shimabukuro’s larger artistic project and feels tragically timely given the Maui wildfires and the larger realities of imperialism and exploitation that they brought back to the surface. Grateful’s filled with beautiful demonstrations of the islands’ rich and diverse music, with Shimabukuro’s graceful playing at the center. This take on the CCR classic – performed with vocalist/guitarist Kawika Kahiapo – is a good example of what makes the album so striking. Stripping away any rock bombast from John Fogerty’s cryptic lament, Kahiapo and Shimabukuro transform it into an intimate lesson, with Kahiapo’s rich baritone and gentle guitar conferring with the high twinkle of Shimabukuro’s ukulele. Like much of this record, it feels both like a private conversation and a message to the world. And it succeeds beautifully on each register. - CH

“Heartaches Don’t Come Easy” The Freedom Affair (from Freedom Is Love, 2020) and “Heartaches Don’t Come Easy” The Freedom Affair (from Freedom Is Love, Instrumental, 2023)

The Freedom Affair is a nine-piece Kansas City soul collective. Their fantastic 2020 debut, Freedom Is Love, is filled with original anthems of love, loss and liberation, all freedom forward and funky as all hell—seriously one of this decade’s better albums. Their place holder follow-up project is the same ten-tracks with all the lead and harmony vocals (courtesy the Freedom Threedom) wiped clean. That seemed a deliberate loss of the project’s primary emotional punch, so my first thought was: Why? But beyond providing a bunch of new groovy music beds for back-announcing DJs, the instrumental version of the album reveals jams every bit as good as their Bar-kays, etc. inspirations. And what I’d previously experienced as merely great rhythm tracks are revealed, unadorned, to be chockful of delightful in their own right accents and countermelodies. Compare and contrast the original lead-off cut “Heartaches Don’t Come Easy” with its voiceless version (each begins with “Be My Baby” drums), and I bet you’ll want to side-by-side everything on both sets. -DC

“Need Me a Car” The Bel Airs (from Need Me a Car, 1985) and “Need Me a Car” Mike Henderson & the Bluebloods (from Thicker than Water, 1998)

Mike Henderson died last week at age 70. He was a founding member of Dead Reckoning Records as well as bluegrass band the Steeldrivers, and he also had an off-and-on solo career as a singer-songwriter: Track down his excellent 1994 album Country Music Made Do It. My sense, though, is that a lot of folks don’t realize this Missouri boy got a big part of his start playing the blues. When I was in college in Columbia in the early 1980s, I’d often see him at the original Blue Note—singing, blowing harp and playing slide guitar—as a member of the Bel Airs, an extremely entertaining Show Me State version of the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Their take on Junior Wells’s “Need Me a Car” was a regular highlight and became the title track to their 1985 album. In 1998, backed by country-blues-rock outfit the Bluebloods, Henderson cut the song again in a boozy, juke-jointy New Orleans style. Its big extended finish, strangled and desperate yet ready to encore, stands as one of the finest vocals of Mike Henderson’s too little appreciated career. -DC

“He Will Follow You with His Eyes” Corinne Bailey Rae (from Black Rainbows, 2023)

The first half of Rae’s latest album is an unexpected rock-star turn, sheets of guitar noise abutting spiky pop punk and sci-fi glam and, on at least one track, evoking PJ Harvey. “He Will Follow with His Eyes” presents itself as a departure among the departures, a return to form. Over a spare cool-jazz pulse, cooing like Billie Holiday, she seduces with cosmetics-ad promises to catch the man of your dreams: “Ladies, don’t you long for love? Be irresistible…” Then a plug is yanked, the groove stops short, and Rae begins chanting a new beauty formula: “My black hair kinkin’, my black skin gleamin’…” Beautiful. -DC

“Blues for Mama” Nina Simone (from You’ve Got to Learn, 2023)

On this just-released live set from the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival, Nina Simone intros “Blues for Mama” as “a gutbucket blues” inspired by a well-worn stereotype: an old man on an old porch, surrounded by flies, a busted bottle and “molasses all around,” picking out the blues. And then, with her first slashed note of piano, Simone proceeds to destroy that pretty picture. “Blues for Mama” is about the woman that guy has badmouthed, beaten and left behind. “Whatcha gonna do?” she cries, poking at the woman, goading her beyond her private blues as Rudy Stephenson’s electric guitar lines slice everything they touch. “Ain’t nobody perfect,” Simone shouts, connecting the dots from Mama and her to us: “Ain’t nobody free.” -DC

“You Be Free” Anohni and the Johnsons (from My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, 2023)

I’ve been listening to My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross since it came out just after Independence Day, and all summer it kept pestering me that Anohni’s voice, more here than ever before, was reminding me of someone. But who? Then I saw she’d covered “Be My Husband” a couple years back, and it hit me: Nina Simone. They both have a tonal attack at once shouted and intimate, uninhibited and full-throated but always protected by a carefully enunciated dignity. Of course, the person Anohni most sounds like is Anohni. On “You Be Free,” caressed by delicate electric guitar, she shares how hard this world has been to her and hopes her broken back can be a path to a new one. “You be free for me,” she pleads. Go and know how it feels to be free. -DC

Reading recommendations

Jewly Hight on Allison Russell, for NPR

Jewly Hight, Steacy Easton, Justin Curto, and Justin Hiltner on “25 Songs that Sound Like ‘90s Country,” for Vulture

Natalie Weiner on Vince Gill, for Vulture

Justin Curto on the 1990s country music revival, for Vulture

Jack Hamilton on the new version of the Replacements’ Tim, for Slate

Elizabeth Nelson on The Replacements and Tim, for New Yorker

Brittney McKenna talks to Adeem the Artist, for Nashville Scene

Jessica Hopper profiles the first women on the Rolling Stone masthead, for Vanty Fair

LZ Granderson on Jann Wenner and his famous friends, for Los Angeles Times

Sheldon Pearce on Jann Wenner and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for NPR

Black Rock Coalition statement on Jann Wenner, for Black Rock Coalition.org