Eilen Jewell:
“Ticked all the right boxes”
As someone who has recently discovered your good selves (I’ve lived a sheltered life), I was inspired to purchase Eilen Jewell’s new album Letters From Sinners And Strangers on the strength of Scott Brodeur’s article in #70.
I mean, singer-songwriter, riveting song stories, achingly charming voice, it ticked all the right boxes. I wasn’t disappointed. It has a timeless quality, refreshingly contemporary but with deep roots paying homage to the past; it’s damn good!
95% of my musical intake is American music (the remainder I thought was when purchasing), usually leaning toward country music, and we do have excellent publications covering the subject here in Britain (Maverick being a prime example), but it’s a breath of fresh air getting an additional opinion straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.
Keep up the good work.
P.S.: The rest of the magazine was pretty good as well!
— Simon Allen
Wellingborough, Northants, England
October:
“These are dark times”
October is a month of creativity and imagination. Change of seasons and a time of transition. Mountains full of color, as if artists had indiscriminately spilled their paint upon them. Leaves, in hues, that make every crayon box jealous, and one step closer to understanding what soul is. October is also known as a time for monsters, nightmares and demons. There is a demon that terrorizes everyday; the human kind.
It’s Halloween everyday in Iraq, and Washington, D.C. There is callousness in the heart of humanity, meanness undeniable in our veins, an arrogance indefinable, which seeps through our blood.
I think about Bruce Springsteen’s interview on 60 Minutes: “When times are dark you sing, these are dark times.” Those words have been haunting my conscience daily, like lyrics from a hit song. (“Radio Nowhere” comes to mind.)
Just a mortal, breathing hope of soulful direction, while trying to bleed poetic diction. Our quiddity of human decency should not be subject to or a dependent of financial quid pro quos.
— Scott Michael Anderson
Windsor, New York
Mary, Mary:
Quite extraordinary
I dig your fine rag to the maximum extent permitted by law. So much so, in fact, that I recently contacted Mary (“Your Call Center…”), and purchased gift subscriptions for two of my friends of Detroit heritage, so that they too may one day bow down and pray at the altar of the sonically sublime. Afterward, pondering Mary’s relevance to all things graceful, elegant and harmonic, I wrote her the following email:
Subject: Your Understated & Yet Pervasive Hipness
Dear Mary,
Just wanted to say what a great experience it was talking to you tonight. You are to be lauded and heralded throughout the land! What a cool chick you are; well, the truth be known, we say, “Babe-O-Rama,” up in my neck of the woods, but then again, we are also a town that has spawned the likes of Jack White, Blanche, the Detroit Cobras and the Deadstring Brothers. Forgive us Jesus, for we know not what we do, but goddamn, we sure do like it!
Just thought you guys should know what a little “keeper” you have on your hands!
— Doug Trestain
St. Paris, Ohio
Got a kind note of appreciation for one of our contributors? Or a bone to pick with one of our editors? Or a ranting screed about the injustice of our choices in the critics’ poll? Come one, come all, to the mailbox or e-mailbox you prefer — letters@nodepression.net, or Box Full of Letters, No Depression, 112 Briarcliff Drive, Mebane, NC, 27713. We’d like to hear from you.
