Music Spectrum

My wife and I recently had occasion to drive from our home north of Chicago to a small town in Nebraska for a conference being held at a retreat center there. The last hour of the drive was along a two-lane highway with a few small towns to slow you down a bit. As we drove, the Farewell Drifters’ Yellow Tag Mondays kept us company, urging us forward on our adventure and retreat even as they sing about rolling down the window and finding every side road (“Love We Left Behind”).

Playing a laid-back, new bluegrass, the acoustic instrumentation rocked the car gently past the prairies, the Kum & Go stations, and the grain elevators. The band’s five voices join in harmonies that rose up to meet the Union Pacific trains running alongside U.S. Highway 30. The band’s songs tell tales that work like old radio shows that take into another world, your imagination traveling across the airwaves (especially on songs like “Sunnyside Drive”).

The instrumentation definitely matches bluegrass with its lack of percussion and comprising of guitar, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, and banjo. However, the songs gently echo pop songs with their sing-a-long quality and bounce, such as on “All We Need.” Of course, “Virginia Bell” kicks up its feet for a barnstorming, bluegrass stomp. The instrumental “I’ve Got Your Heart in My Hand, and I’m Gonna Squeeze” works like the more bluegrass side of Solas and meets the road as it speeds back out of a small town and onto the open highway.

The Farewell Drifters
Thirty Tigers

Black Prairie is a string band made up by three members of the Decemberists (Chris Funk, Nate Query, and Jenny Conlee) along with Annalisa Tornfelt and Jon Neufeld. These musings and imaginations are brought on by the music more than any suggestion that this is what Black Prairie had in mind while putting the songs together.

Call it the power of suggestion, but the mournful strains of the bluegrass that opens Feast of the Hunters’ Moon certainly sounds as if it came from a black prairie—dark, no moon, wet with leftover rain, and staring back towards a flickering light in a cabin down the way which slammed its door only minutes before casting out the subject of the song “Across the Black Prairie.” Only the accordion can evoke the happiness that once danced in that cabin, but the drone of the rest of the instruments is working to cancel that.

With a voice like Pieta Brown, Annalisa Tornfelt sings her way into the “Red Rocking Chair” that ghostly rocks in the wind on the porch of that cabin in the black prairie night.

On the third track, we’re released from the black prairie vision, brought into town, and sent scurrying on a plaintive chase in the “Back Alley,” a bluegrass song that nevertheless calls Solas to mind—a Celtic connection to Appalachia.

The plaintive chase comes to a halt at the door of an Italian bar where the accordion and fiddle take on a foreboding air for “Ostinato Del Caminito.” Ignoring the stares of the suited gentlemen at the bar, you make your way to the backroom where two lovers dine by candlelight listening to the sway of “A Prairie Musette.” Then without fanfare, Tornfelt becomes a sultry singer on a dark corner stage for “Crooked Little Heart,” dangerously coy as a chanteuse accompanied by a fiddle and a guitar brought in from that black prairie scene with a lyric seemingly pulled from Greg Brown’s vision.

Leaving by the back door, we come to another plaintive scene in the back alley as “Annie McGuire” jokes around with her boyfriend while on a smoke break from her job at the seamstress shop. She’s ready to go out on the town, her boyfriend’s clearly thinking of dancing with Miss McGuire, but there’s the sad lovers’ reality of a job which must pay the bills.

Meanwhile, out on the street a reporter passes by, walking slowly with the weight of the day clinging to him, as he thinks again of the story he just put to bed for tomorrow’s edition: “Atrocity at Celilo Falls.” That sadness follows the reporter right to the open doorway of the dance hall where “Tango Oscuro” plays. Half-watching, the reporter stares at the beautiful girls twirling the evening away. He’s soon joined in the doorway by Annie McGuire’s boyfried. Both men are mesmerized by the movement of happiness while hearing their own Black Prairie song in their downcast souls—a tone that clings to this tango.

The men drift away from the doorway before they see a lone woman step outside with the drifting sound of the crowd singing a chorus together. “Single Mistake” finds her singing her own song, only loud enough for her own ears, wandering the sidewalks because what else could she do? The evening of dancing couldn’t take away her longing for the cabin she left so long ago for the city. And now her life isn’t what she wanted at all.

That cabin still waits for warmth to enter back in but mainly it just creaks with pain under a “Full Moon in June,” a tentative tune testing the ability of the black prairie to rise up with fresh hope.

But morning comes to reveal that this cabin on the black prairie really isn’t that far from its neighbors. While the night may have left the cabin reeling with sadness, a neighbor’s farmhouse greets the morning with activity, brightness, music, and “Home Made Lemonade” under the big tree in the front yard. With a courageous step up to the cabin’s front door, an invitation is offering to come on over for lemonade. The darkness could drag everybody down, but the farmhouse family just strikes up the lively tune again.

Meanwhile, the one who slammed the door on the cabin the night before, she sits in the black prairie contemplating “The Blackest Crow” she’s ever seen. The wind blows with an ache that she knows so well. She misses the invitation for lemonade. She cannot see the city from where she sits. She keeps her back to the cabin. She watched the crow as it stands on an old fencepost. She contemplate sinking into the prairie to add to its blackness.

Black Prairie
Sugar Hill Records

I remember watching Clint Back or some such pop country guys on TV in concert. The songs seemed cheesy and his image seemed borrowed—like the guy was an actor in a film about a country singer. However, he was surrounded by some incredible musicians. When they were allowed to play above the pop soup background, you could tell that they had the chops. Yet, soup background is what you want if they show is all about the pop country idol frontman.

There’s no pop sound on John Cowan’s New Tattoo. Cowan is the frontman, but the whole band get to shine. Cowan’s voice comes out of pure Nashville country, but the treatment here by his band reaches back to his New Grass Revival days. The boys lend a Ricky Skaggs bluegrass warmth with Bela Fleck-like banjo leads like what Ryan Shupe & the Rubber Band are doing.

Elsewhere, it’s no surprise to find Darrell Scott lending his songwriting talents here, because Cowan and band have that Scott-like groove which blends a blues-funk-rock into country-influenced rock. You can’t hear the funk anymore, but it’s left an indelible stamp on the country.

While the songs on New Tattoo are mostly covers, Cowan truly sounds as if he’s made the songs his own (much in the way this month’s feature artist, John Hammond, has done with the blues). Yet, the talking point of the album is an original song buried as the last track, “Drown.”

Cowritten with Darrell Scott, the song tells the story of Cowan’s own experience of being sexually molested as a child. The song is a stylistic departure, which is a disappointment, in that the melodramatic piano-led tune feels forced.

However, there’s nothing false about the story; it’s not a conjured-up tension heard in the painful lyric. The piano is ornamented later in the song by a toy piano, emphasizing the innocence lost.

Cowan gives voice to the pain of child abuse, and the difficulty a survivor feels in the aftermath for years to come. Plus, rarely do we hear males talking about their molestation experience; Cowan may give other men and boy courage to speak about what was done to them.

Thank you to John Cowan and Pinecastle Records for the review copy.

File under AltCountry Surf Rock Bluegrass.

The Outlaw Family Band puts out a sound that hearkens back to the Appalachian Hills (bluegrass), the Central Valley (Neil Young), the Ozarks (Uncle Tupelo et. al.), and Santa Cruz (surf’s up).

Their self-titled disc was released a year ago, but a book/DVD, Ride of Our Lives—Roadside Lessons of an American Family, released later this month features their music.

Last year’s disc opens with an AltCountry intro section to “Queen of Desire” that is only a hint of the things to come. When the song actually kicks in, there’s banjo bluegrass with train track trap rhythm and a wah-wah guitar solo out of some Classic Rock radio station static. Like Jonathan Rundman and Beki Hemmingway’s Tennesota, “Birchmont Hotel” is an exploration of bluegrass through a two-step, downtrodden blues.

As Mark Corsolini’s drums welcome a new rhythm for “Caroline,” the Outlaw Family Band take a Squirrel Nut Zippers approach to a swing fiddle tune that channels the spirit of Stephen Foster (much as the Squirrel Nut Zippers do on Perennial Favorites). While traditional bluegrass doesn’t include drums, Corsolini’s drums are one of the cohesive elements to OFB’s unique sound. The acoustics on this recording make the drums sound as if they were recorded in an old church on the main square of some antebellum town. Those acoustics add to the sepia-toned dust that is getting brushed off in the rocking going on.

Where 16 Horsepower also explore a New Bluegrass sound taking a turn towards the dark Swans tone, OFB touch that higher-toned indie rock sound. “Ravenswood Getaway (Part 1)” is a bluegrass rock country stomp with members trading solos on this instrumental named after a street in the band’s hometown of Chicago.

The epic tale of “Waste of Time” is where the Neil Young comparison comes center stage. It’s a Southern Rock blues with some help coming down from those Eastern hills and hollers.

Thank you to the Outlaw Family Band, Slackjaw Records and Hapi Skratch Entertainment for the review copy.