The more things change…
There’s been talk lately about how the iPod (not an endorsement) is changing the way people listen to music. Well, maybe. But maybe not. After all, buying the latest single from a favorite act at iTunes (not an endorsement), or downloading a track for free from an audio blog, or listening to your MP3 player on shuffle mode isn’t all that different, really, than working your way through a stack of 78s or 45s, or making a mix tape, or just listening to songs on the radio.
No different, in other words, than how most people have most often listened to recorded music for as long as there has been recorded music to listen to: We listen to one track by one artist followed by some other track by some other artist, and so on and so on. We have not, for the most part, spent most of our listening time to sitting repeatedly through entire albums by one act. Indeed, the standard review of just about any album release would be something along the lines of, “It’s OK, but I really like this song…”
Sure, the past year saw its share of great albums: Bruce Springsteen’s folk-rock revivalism, Johnny Cash’s last will and testament, to cite just two examples. And there were plenty of examples of the near great as well: the ’80s revivalism of Gnarls Barkley, and what I hope will not be the last wills and testaments of Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Candi Staton, and Solomon Burke.
Still, the majority of my favorite music this past year, as is the case every year, came in the form of isolated jewels scattered amidst otherwise unremarkable discs. These numbers — sometimes officially released singles, sometimes “just” standout album tracks — are necessarily overlooked by Best Albums lists; but the half-dozen endorsements below go to the heart of what I enjoyed most this year. I’ve paired them because two hearts are better than one.
1. Christina Aguilera “Ain’t No Other Man”/John Legend “Save Room”. Two pop throwbacks who actually hold their own against the glories of ’70s soul. Legend swipes (via a shared writing credit) the melody to the Classics IV’s “Stormy”, and the result of his recycling is a crooned “Baby It’s Cold Outside” for the 21st century. Aguilera’s inspiration (“Happy Soul” by the Moon People) comes in the form of that by now so old-fashioned tool — sampling — but the effect is state of the art: beats and horns so fierce and arresting, emotions so baldly, joyously in love, that I’m sure I wound up blasting “Ain’t No Other Man” more than any other track all year.
2. Jim Lauderdale “I Met Jesus In A Bar”/Allison Moorer “How She Does It”. Two tracks that should’ve been all over country radio this year. Optimistic without being naive, both feature characters who hit bottom only to discover they can bounce back up. Moorer portrays a woman who endures life with an abusive drunkard until she decides endurance is no life at all: “She usually makes a right to work but turns it to the left/Thinks she might head west.” Lauderdale, meanwhile, finds salvation while pouring whiskey into an empty heart: “I guess you just can’t fall too far.”
3. Chris Thile’s “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground”/Bobby Osborne’s “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down”. Thile covers of-the-moment hipsters White Stripes, Osborne covers eternal hipster Kris Kristofferson, but whether it’s “If you can hear a piano fall you can hear me coming down the hall” or “Somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing,” it’s all of a piece — the past, present and future of bluegrass.
— DAVID CANTWELL
Chop the child in half
Winnowing the year’s records down to a list of your twenty favorites is hard enough, but oddly, it’s even tougher when the universe is narrowed to the roots-based nebula of No Depression. Do you limit your choices to items that fall within the magazine’s editorial purview, thus ensuring that your two cents count? Or do you, out of some mix of vanity and integrity, cast Kucinich votes for records that don’t fit into the ND aesthetic?
Whatever that is. We make room for reissues from Motown and the slick country crooners Alabama, but not the latest from Def Jam or from emerging Nashville superstars Sugarland. My ballots in previous polls have pushed the issue, giving tactical nods to Kanye West and Brooks & Dunn, but because at least a couple other voters didn’t do likewise — a stipulation for being included in the final tally — those choices didn’t impact the aggregate. So what’s a musical ecumenist to do?
Have it both ways, of course. This year, apart from such not quite out-of-bounds choices as Regina Spektor and Spearhead, my official ballot reads like a fairly straight ND ticket. In the top 10 are inevitables ranging from Bob Dylan and Rosanne and Johnny Cash to Todd Snider and Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins. Plenty of ND-friendly lesser-knowns make the cut as well: precocious singer-songwriter Libby Johnson, ascendant rock gods the Hold Steady, resurgent cult faves Howard Tate and Andy Fairweather Low. (For those who might be curious, my complete ballot, and those of other voters, should be up on the magazine’s website by the time the combined tallies are in print.)
Meanwhile, the ballot of sorts that follows is a stab at broadening the discussion: an annotated list of the kinds of records — three pairs of new releases and one reissue — that someday I hope will fit under the ND umbrella. After all, with globalization being here to stay, what is American, much less Americana, music anyway?
1) Ghostface Killah, Fishscale (Def Jam)/The Coup, Pick A Bigger Weapon (Epitaph). Hands down the best two albums I heard all year. The first is from a logorrheic Wu-Tang alum whose raps are as unhinged as Dancing In Your Head-era Ornette and as hooky as Shaft. The latter is the latest from funkadelic parliamentarians who’ve made as many great albums as any pop (OK, semi-pop) act in the last decade. Inspirational refrain: “I’m here to laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor…and help the damn revolution come quicker.”
2) Darko Rundek & Cargo Orkestrar, Mhm A-ha Oh Yeah Da-Da (Piranha)/Balkan Beat Box, self-titled (JDub). Balkan Gothic and Balkan beatsmithing, respectively. Rundek is a droll hedonist from Croatia with a debt to Beefheart and Weill; BBB is a Brooklyn duo with DJ dreams that encompass Hebrew trance prayer, Moroccan rai and a pair of rhyming “Bulgarian chicks.” Both records will take your breath away.
3) Sugarland, Enjoy The Ride (Mercury Nashville)/Keith Urban, Love, Pain & The Whole Crazy Thing (Capitol Nashville). The two most expansive offerings to come from mainstream Nashville all year. Sugarland’s meaty, beaty amalgam of southern rock, pop, gospel and soul just might be as fresh as any commercial country album since Brooks & Dunn’s 2003 disc Red Dirt Road. Meanwhile, from its genre-bending contents to the slapdash metaphysics of its title, Urban’s latest suggests he might be positioning himself as Music Row’s answer to Prince. He might not be deep, but he can do it all, a lot like Vince Gill.
4) Moby, Go: The Very Best Of Moby (V2). As Americana as Aaron Copland or Harry Partch, with Alan Lomax samples supplying credibility and transcendence.
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
The latest past
Whatever else the “surveying the past, present and future” line that graces the cover of this publication can signify, its rhythm may seem to suggest a pretty steady flow of the American musical stream from one of those discrete units to the next.
One real-enough phenomenon that can get missed in this schematic picture is the occasional rise and fall of which part of the past is doing the most heavy lifting at the moment. Musical events of the past year underscore the point.
When No Depression first got going, there was a very marked and utterly appropriate attraction to the remaking and reuse of older country music. Today, the magnet of interest seems to be pulling musical artists toward revisiting and revamping soul, gospel, and some blues.
Sure, there have been key exceptions, but they do underscore the rule. Relatively young and fierce yet practiced bands such as Old Crow Medicine Show and the Waybacks (From The Pasture To The Future, their latest was called) still touched country bases provocatively this year — but they did so in ways that evoked old-time acoustic music generated before the split between country, blues, and jug-band “folk jazz.” Somewhat related acoustic rockers the Duhks certainly explored black gospel more than country (Canadian or American versions) on their 2006 release Migrations.
The coal-hot center of roots-revival interest today, demonstrably and sure enough, is in the unrestrained emotionalism and hard-earned optimism of soul-era R&B, as seen in the revived interest in Betty LaVette, Irma Thomas and, certainly, Solomon Burke, and the impact this year of an updater/reviver such as James Hunter. There’s also a congruent side dollop of smart, playful, swing-inflected vocalizing seen in releases by Gladys Knight, Catherine Russell, Madeline Peyroux, and soon, Cyndi Wheeler (blurring the jazz and bluegrass lines) — every one of them free of song-dumb diva histrionics on one hand, and any sense of camp or irony about what they’re singing on the other.
The preponderance among stunners of the moment of direct, smart women who interpret songs over the more familiar sorts of revivalists (trad-exploiting singer-songwriters, guitar slingers, spiky indie assault masters) is the sort of up-from-down shift that defines a new era at hand. And as David Cantwell was pointing out in this space a year ago, in his prescient look at the already noticeable soul bounce-back, this matter of what tone comes to the fore is not a simple matter of fashion, but of zeitgeist. We’re well into the decade with no name now, with electoral shifts that, like this hotter, warmer music, suggest people are once again interested in connection more than disconnection.
— BARRY MAZOR
Asking the unaskable
Though I rarely know a year in advance what the album of the year will be, I was certain last January that 2006 would not see a stronger release than Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac. Cash has consistently held herself to the highest creative standards, but the deaths of her father, mother and stepmother over a period of little more than two years had pushed her artistry higher and deeper than ever, transforming feelings of loss, grief and anger into music of cathartic redemption.
When this magazine assigned me to profile Cash, I was reminded of the occasional conflicts between one’s best journalistic instincts and basic human instincts. Death had made Johnny Cash larger than life, through a series of posthumous anthologies, reverential tributes and a well-received biopic that reduced a complex legacy to a feel-good fairy tale.
Part of what made Rosanne’s album so compelling was her attempt to reclaim her father from myth, to make him less of a god, more of a man. Yet Rosanne’s release came at a time when her father’s profile had never been higher. Might not her own album benefit from this resurgence of interest in the late Johnny Cash?
There’s no question that Rosanne’s decision to record an album inspired so intimately by her family would pay dividends in terms of publicity. So how does a journalist ask the unaskable? Are you cashing in on your dad’s memory? I couldn’t ask that of Rosanne, nor did I believe it. When a great artist deals with devastating experiences and overpowering emotions, she turns them into great art. That’s her job.
And my job was to get the best possible story. To do so, I had to ask some version of that question, one which would acknowledge that this album was arriving at a commercially propitious moment. When I raised the issue toward the end of the interview, I fumbled toward a question about how, though I didn’t think there was commercial calculation in her writing about her father, some people might. Rosanne responded:
“It’s all about my experience, my psychic terrain and my own music….It’s certainly not going to be marketed as anything about Johnny Cash.”
No harm, no foul, or so I thought. Yet a few days later, after I’d returned from a brief vacation, I received a message from Rosanne’s publicist about how upset she’d been with the question.
And in subsequent interviews with Rosanne, I saw how journalists reaped the benefits of a question they were too decent to ask. Take the extended profile in The New York Times, which accorded her more Sunday space than she’d received in years, and where it was noted that she “bristles at the suggestion, which some have already registered, that Black Cadillac exploits her family’s fame. ‘What am I supposed to do, go in the corner and hide because the world wants to make my father an icon?'”
In my day job, I teach university students whatever I’ve learned about journalism. One of the profiles we often discuss is an interview I did with a former Texas A&M journalism student named Lyle Lovett, who had dropped the major because “there were lots of questions I would think I should ask, but I knew it was none of my business.” He knew I had to ask him about his separation from Julia Roberts, which appeared to provide thematic inspiration for his recent album. I knew that their relationship was none of my business. But there would have been a big hole in the story without his response to the question I had no business asking.
— DON MCLEESE
Surveying the rest
This year provided further evidence of the resurgence of soul music: Its powers of barrier destruction are great as ever. Cat Power went to the Memphis source and made the album of her and most of her contemporaries’ career. Solomon Burke went to Nashville and nearly did the same. Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere isn’t really hip-hop, rap or electronica; it’s definitive post-capitalist soul, every sound free-floating and defying laws of ego inflation and genre ghettoization. Radio couldn’t kill the thrill of “Crazy” with guns.
Folk music, freak or protest or otherwise, felt as vital as ever. An unknown collective from London, the Memory Band, quietly released a suite of Anglo-American traditionals and originals, sounding as fresh and of-the-moment as Fairport Convention did 40 years ago. And any list of the most important music of 2006 would do well to consult Neil Young’s mega-blog of antiwar songs — all folk because they embody the most necessary hopes. Amelia White’s “Black Doves”, the Mammals’ “Alone On the Homestead”, Josh Ritter’s “Girl In The War”, Graham Parker’s “2000 Funerals” — they’re all songs of the year.
The old man, though, remains peerless. Dylan made the best album of 2006 for simple reasons: He’s smarter, funnier, and more madly musical than everybody else. His visions have execution; his wheels are still on fire.
— ROY KASTEN
God bless Neil Young for just putting it out there. Not that I’d argue Living With War stands with his best work (it’s not even my #1 pick) but Young seized with both hands the obligation of an artist to prophesy, to hold a mirror up to society and raise Cain about it.
Calexico’s Garden Ruin exemplifies the poetically rendered allegories of implosion that emerged on so many 2006 releases. Tim Easton, Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint, Josh Ritter, even Kris Kristofferson had songs in that category. The Dixie Chicks treated a subtler theme: threats to our personal freedoms, the very things we were brought up to believe might be worth fighting for. Jesus H. Christ & The Four Hornsmen Of The Apocalypse gave our malaise an arch, intellectualized and hilariously satiric twist.
But Young gave us songs we could actually sing, songs to express our common rage and commitment to change. It’s songs like those that have sustained transformations throughout American history. To hear a few, just listen to Bruce Springsteen; his collection of Pete Seeger’s union songs, peace songs and civil rights songs, performed off-the-cuff in the back-porch spirit that defines them, arrives not a moment too soon.
— LINDA RAY
I picked Teddy Thompson’s Separate Ways as my #1 album of 2006 because it’s definitely been the one I’ve played the most. It’s also the most underrated album of the year and the best crafted of the lot. It’s all there: the songwriting, the vocals, the instrumentation. Rosanne Cash, who holds my #2 slot, has been a fan of Thompson for years, recording a duet with him on her 2003 release Rules Of Travel and touring with him. Thompson also got a little bit of attention for his contributions to the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack and to the Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Man. Separate Ways, Thomspon’s second album, belongs in the collection of anyone who has great taste.
— SILAS HOUSE
Many fine songwriters and far more mediocre ones hit the rocks trying to write songs responding to Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans. Those who wanted to address it musically found covers more effective, and many found Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” irresistible. But no one song can speak to the complexity of the experience at a human level, so the Dirty Dozen Brass Band covered the whole of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. With horns and human voices, the Dozen reproduced the dialogue going on about the state of the city and country for anyone who wants to hear it.
The Pine Leaf Boys and the Lost Bayou Ramblers provide real hope for the future of Cajun music, not by modernizing it but approaching it from contemporary perspectives. The Lost Bayou Ramblers go postmodern with Une Tasse Cafe, becoming a fictional 1940s radio swing band to examine the period when the musical border between Louisiana and Texas was fluid. The Pine Leaf Boys are less conceptual, but they play with the style and energy of musicians raised on rock ‘n’ roll. That doesn’t mean they’re sloppy — far from it — but they play like the music is alive and not mummified for a museum.
Everything Elvis Costello touches sounds like Elvis Costello, and it’s rarely emotionally as precise or affecting as you’d like. But by giving Allen Toussaint a guided tour of Toussaint’s own catalogue on The River In Reverse, he reminded the world of the breadth of Toussaint’s greatness, in the process uncovering songs that spoke to the million human dramas that are a part of the Katrina story.
— ALEX RAWLS
Year-end lists are as much of a holiday-time tradition as Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I’ve compiled lists in years when nobody asked, and for a time produced top-ten countdown cassettes like some sad-sack, vinyl-loving loser from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. That’s why I declined the invitation from No Depression to submit my twenty favorite albums and restricted myself to the classic ten. Twenty choices are for wusses who can’t make up their minds. Ten picks are for those who can handle the humiliation of making a bad choice.
My top five is usually pretty solid. This year, I feel secure with discs by Bob Dylan, Madeleine Peyroux, Los Lobos, the tag team of Costello & Toussaint, and T Bone Burnett. As is often the case, the bottom five leaves room for doubt, serendipity, and historical judgments. Was the Dixie Chicks’ album just too self-involved to stand the test of time? Did Solomon Burke get too much extra credit for recording in Buddy Miller’s living room? And while I like plenty of Vince Gill’s four-disc opus, didn’t he more succinctly cover the same sweep of styles on 1998’s The Key? Still, will I regret pushing the talented veteran off my list in favor of the fast-maturing heartthrob John Mayer? Ask me in a year.
— JOHN MILWARD
