What's Everyone Listening to?

[scotto]

[scotto]

[scotto]

[dime in the gutter]

[Clams]

New music Friday. Another new Dylan song, some new Pretenders and a new track from my man Ray Wylie Hubbard.

NP:

[dogstar]

I listened to Straight Outta Compton for the first time ever (ever, ever) this morning.

NP: Phosphorescent - Live at the Music Hall

[Clams]

[Zip City]

NP:

Pitchfork gives this a perfect 10 score. What say you?

[bovine knievel]

[Clams]

NP:

Pitchfork gives this a perfect 10 score. What say you?

Yeah it's getting lots of love on the interwebs today. I dunno. I'm not really feeling Fiona's angst. It's got a lot going on and not really in my wheel house.

[Zip City]

I'm listening to the Colin Meloy livestream right now. Might check out the Fiona later

[jr29]

Hell yeah ! A Goose Creek Symphony vibe on Down on the Farm.

[bovine knievel]

[rlipps]

I love this album, my favorite thing Brent Best has ever been a part of. So glad I got to see the DBT/Drams tour

[Clams]

Beatles abbey road

[cortez the killer]

AllMusic Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

The story behind Great American Saturday Night goes like this. Back in 1978, Bobby Bare delivered it to Columbia and, upon hearing it, the label decided to shelve it and it remained in the vaults until 2020, when BFD excavated the record and shared it with the world. No particulars are forthcoming in either the CD or its accompanying promotional campaign, so it's unclear where Great American Saturday Night would have fallen in Bare's discography, especially since he had a busy 1978, releasing both Bare and Sleeper Wherever I Fall. Great American Saturday Night doesn't sound especially like either of those records. Comprised entirely of Shel Silverstein compositions, it's of a piece with Drunk and Crazy and, especially, Down & Dirty. Like that 1980 LP, Great American Saturday Night is presented as a live album but it's all an act: the crowd hoots and hollers at indiscriminate moments, they sing along with songs that are unveiled here for the first time. It sounds like a party and, more than that, Great American Saturday Night sounds like a party record, the kind that was sold under the counter at a record store in the '70s. That's its considerable charm but also certainly the reason why Columbia didn't release it at the time; there's no way a major label would want to issue an album whose title phrase rhymes with "does anyone here want to fuck or fight." Profanities fly, there's a lament that "They Won't Let Us Show It at the Beach," and a vulgar original incarnation of a tune that'd later become "The Diet Song." There are slower moments, too, sentimental ballads recounting memories and loneliness, but they're palette cleansers on a big and bawdy record designed for beer drinking. Listening to Great American Saturday Night, it's hard to imagine it coming out in 1978, but it adds a bit of depth and dirtiness to Bare's middle-aged prime.

This is clever. Has a bit of a ¡Viva Terlingua! feel to it.

[Clams]

I need to check out that Bobby Bare

NP Lydia Loveless Somewhere Else. So good

[scotto]

[scotto]

[roland]

Preorder early digital drop! I really like it. There's some "fuck you" BJ songs, but now that he's not a 25 year old drunk, it's written much more eloquently.

[scotto]

[scotto]

[scotto]

[Clams]

The Red Hand Files
ISSUE #93 / APRIL 2020

What inspired the lyrics for Palaces of Montezuma?
SUE, DONCASTER, UK

Dear Sue,

I love ‘Palaces of Montezuma’. I really do. Amid all the obvious excesses of Grinderman, this song stands out as a simple and heartfelt declaration of human love, with a surreal and wonderfully fucked up lyric. It has a sort of versatile inner spirit that seems to work in any form. I played it a number of times, solo at the piano, on my In Conversations tour — I was able to slow it down a bit and lean into the lyric and that seemed to work great too. I got to know the song pretty well.

But even so, I’m not really sure what inspired the lyric. It’s not the sort of question I feel I have the authority to answer. These songs, you know, just present themselves. It seems to me to be essentially a cascade of increasingly bizarre and impossible acts of largesse, performed in the name of love. It seems to say, “I love you and I will give you the world — all I require is the smallest word.” What that word actually is remains a mystery — it may be love or sex or God or yes or thou or all — or not a word at all — a sigh — a grace. Whatever the word may be, it is essentially the whole world “contained in a grain of sand — that can barely walk, can’t even stand”. I suspect this idea may have migrated across time, and eventually found its way into the song ‘Ghosteen’, “There is nothing wrong with loving things that cannot even stand.” I don’t know. Just a thought. These ideas are wayfaring enigmas, for sure.

I just put ‘Palaces of Montezuma’ on the record player and had a listen and, hearing it again after so long, something occurred to me. I can’t help but think that the song was helped along its way by the sweetly loony Lou Reed song, ‘Andy’s Chest’, from his album, Transformer. Perhaps that was the initial point of inspiration. I’m not sure. I hope so. I love Lou Reed. I really do.

Love, Nick

NP: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds "Palaces of Montezuma"

[cortez the killer]

^^^^^
Great song & album. Love me some Grinderman. Clams wading beyond the whiskey pool.

NP:

[Zip City]

The new Fiona Apple is pretty good, some of it really good, but not 10/10 good

[Clams]

The new Fiona Apple is pretty good, some of it really good, but not 10/10 good

I don't doubt that it's as good as they say, but it's not for me

[bovine knievel]

[Shakespeare]

as much as i hate to ascribe too much current situation meaning to something that had been in the works for 15 years, this has really been the absolute perfect album for me lately. first few listens it felt more or less like a straightforward solo piano album. a good one, but perhaps short on melodies that stick, and at 75 minutes probably not something id find a lot of situations for. the more i read about the process behind it (in short, roger recorded MIDI piano tracks and sent them to brian, who tweaked them in ways subtle and gigantic as only he could. some of these tracks are derived from the exact same MIDI clips but i had no idea till i read it in an interview) the more i started to hear it more as a really developed soundscape than any sort of solo recording. ive been spending every morning with it lately and its really the perfect sort of calming influence, without being too cloying about it. i can understand the impulse to dismiss something like this for not being music for airports or apollo or any past eno ambient classic, but im sure glad it exists

[Shakespeare]