Lead Belly lived a blues fantasy: a murderous outlaw in and out of incarceration singing prison songs in front of guards and convicts alike.
Category: blues
Clarice Lispector’s 1973 work ‘Agua Viva’ is written in the syllabic flow of a perfect novel, but expressed through streaming narratives and hellishly opaque metaphor. An outline. I think Bob Dylan had the same idea on ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ – to write passively with lyrical latitude and have faith that between alien […]
On an unusually tempoed record, Bobbie Gentry ticketed a safari of her hometown. Folk, soul, blues, and rock were cross hatched, exhibiting the oneness of context-heavy music. While Ode To Billie Joe is not blessed with the most natural flow, the tracks come to purr with Southern verve and the synesthetic particulars of Mississippi life: […]
Son House (1902-1988) lived the life of several souls, with the talent of one, the resentment of another, and the misfortune of the next. There was a religious lens to his movements: one which birthed enormous transgressional shame and almost certainly cultivated that inimitable melancholy in 1928. This is House’s never-before-heard 1964 return, recorded shortly […]
25 years of experience in getting the crowd dancing at local parties in the middle of the Sahara is the base for ‘Agadez’. Call-and-response vocals take backstage to a tapestry of trebley guitar solos and relentless drums. Meanwhile, staples of desert blues permeate throughout, with reflective lyrics tied to their hometown’s (Agadez) place at the […]
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