I recently had oyceter visiting me, and we had a lot of fun playing songs for each other. Here's some music I either recently found or enjoyed or played, which you might enjoy too. Due to my total crash-and-burn last time I tried to offer download links, I'm instead providing links to individual songs on youtube, and to the CDs on Amazon.

Starwalker, by Buffy Sainte Marie. She's a history turner, she's a sweet-grass burner/and a dog soldier. Discovered at the National Museum of the American Indian, this is probably my favorite song I found this year.

Starwalker (MP3 download).

The whole CD is great, and also features this storming protest song (which I did know from the Indigo Girls' cover): Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (live with Robbie Robertson.)

Coincidence & Likely Stories

More Buffy Sainte-Marie

Remember the Name, by Fort Minor. Ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will. Fantastic song, ostensibly the autobiography of the group, really about being an artist. This is my favorite song off the album, but the whole thing is fantastic.

Remember The Name (Album Version) [Explicit] (MP3 download.)

Rising Tied (Album.)

I also introduced Oyce to Johnny Cash's wonderful "American" series: heartfelt, gritty, sometimes funny, always world-weary, amazing Johnny Cash. ("My favorite book is Cash, the autobiography of Johnny Cash, by Johnny Cash.") If you haven't heard of these, they're Cash's comeback recordings of old songs, new songs, surprising songs, filled with all the experience of his whole remarkable life up to that point.

Like a Soldier (video). This song got me through a lot of really bad times. I'm like a soldier getting over the war... I don't have to do that any more.

Heartbreaking original video of "Hurt". (A commentor remarks indignantly, "If U dislike this U have no soul.")

American Recordings (Reis)

One (video). U2 cover. I like Johnny Cash's version better. In fact I think that's true of pretty much everything he covers, except for the outtake of Steve Earle's "Red Right Hand" on the outtake set.

American 3: Solitary Man (Reis)

American IV: The Man Comes Around

Last week I was at the Jim Henson Company, and a guy I know, a musician who works at the music studio which shares the lot, came up and said, "Got fifteen minutes? Want to see something amazing?"

I followed him into the music building, where I got to watch and listen to Abe Laboriel Jr, a drummer and the son of a famous bass player, drum on a track that was being recorded for... a singer-songwriter whose name I didn't recognize, sorry. His drumming was amazing and he moved like a dancer, like he'd lost himself in music, so fluid and impassioned and graceful that I could have watched him with the sound off.

I wish I could share that session with you all, but since I can't, have some videos instead, though they don't do anything like justice to being able to watch him from ten feet away, in bright light and with nothing between us but a pane of glass:

Assorted videos.

In the comments to my prose poem Nine Things About the Oracle, I discovered that some of my readers were unfamiliar with the great singer-songwriter-giutarist Richard Thompson. The horror!

I lean toward his heartbreaking songs of heartbreak. But I've included some of his hard-rocking songs for those so inclined. I also highly recommend his song "Al Bowlly's in Heaven," which would go on my "Songs of PTSD" CD if I ever burned one along with Bruce Springsteen's "Shut Out the Lights" and Tori Amos' "Me and a Gun," but I don't have it to hand.

Though I unfortunately can't give you any Fairport Convention (I had quoted their song "Crazy Man Michael" in the poem), I do have some of his solo work on my computer, along with some he did with Linda Thompson. If you enjoy, please consider buying the albums.

Beeswing. Maybe that's just the price you pay/For the chains you refuse. Buy the album from Amazon: Mirror Blue

When the Spell is Broken. You keep handing me that same old line/It's just straws in the wind this time. Buy the album from Amazon: Across a Crowded Room

King of Bohemia. Did your dreams die young? Were they too hard-won? Did you reach too high and fall? Buy the album from Amazon: Mirror Blue

Oops! I Did It Again. Yes, really.

Waltzing's For Dreamers. Buy the album from Amazon: Amnesia

Put it there Pal. You're so full of love it leaks out like a sieve. Buy the album from Amazon: you? me? us?

Don't Renege on our Love. If love is a healing/why should we forsake it. Buy the album from Amazon: Shoot Out the Lights

ETA: "Crazy Man Michael" in comments.

Vote for the most angst-worthy traditional ballad! I have cited some, but forgotten the names of others, so feel free to make your own nominations and/or provide titles.

Note: Apparently strike-throughs don't work in polls. I did not mean to suggest that there is a traditional ballad where someone gets turned into a giant robot chicken, nor that there is a traditional ballad about myself.

( Which is worse, to elope with the Devil or get pregnant by your brother? )

1. Most people learned that the good fairy turned Bunny Foo-Foo into a goon, though there are a few outliers voting for "goose," "goo," and "gnu." What did you all think a goon was, anyway? I pictured a big blobby-looking, yet sinister creature, like the Staypuff Marshmallow Man.

2. Nobody but me has ever heard of "Bangum," which my Dad taught me. I knew this before I did the folk song poll, but lived in hope. While writing the poll, I discovered that it's a variant of Child Ballad 18, "Sir Lionel." And also possibly a variant of "Froggy Went A-Courting," though I think that just refers to the tune, and frankly I don't see the resemblance. Apparently the traditional refrain is "dilly down."

This is "Bangum;" Dad used to occasionally vary it by making it a dragon instead of a wild boar.

There is a wild boar in these woods,
Killy quo, killum
There is a wild boar in these woods
Killy quo
There is a wild boar in these woods,
And it breaks men's bones and drinks their blood
Killy quo, killy quo, killy quo qum.

Bangum took his wooden knife
Killy quo, etc...
And swore that he'd take that wild boar's life

Bangum came to the wold boar's den...
And he found the bones of a thousand men

They fought nine hours in that day...
And the wild boar fled and it slunk away

"Oh Bangum did you win or lose?"
And he swore by Jove he'd won the shoes.

3. "Pat Worked on the Railway" seems quite obscure, as well, but I've seen it in folk song books, while I've never seen "Bangum." Dad has no idea where he learned it, either.

4. Paul Robeson recorded the best versions ever of "Motherless Child," "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," "Shenandoah," and "Balm in Gilead." If I had any of his albums on CD instead of tape, I'd prove it.

5. Stagger Lee was a bad, bad man. He shot Billy Lyons/DeLeon/Dilly for his brand-new Stetson hat, or sometimes just because, and sometimes did other, unspeakable things to him. Billy had a wife, and sometimes she takes revenge. In all the versions of "Stagger Lee" that I've come across, if anyone ever gets back at him, it's a woman. In Nick Cave's unspeakably obscene version on Murder Ballads, Stagger Lee's woman throws him out in the cold and rain, and tells him never ever to come back here again. This makes Stagger Lee's woman the biggest bad-ass on the entire album, in my opinion.

6. I found a couple articles on "In the Pines," but none shed much light on its essential mystery. It's a spooky, haunting song. Who else knows these lyrics: "His head was found in the driver's wheel/And his body it never was found"?

7. I can guess where everyone heard about Mighty Casey, but I was surprised that so many people knew about Casey Jones. Is "one hand on the whistle, one hand on the brake" a story you learned in school?

While listening to Luka Bloom's very nice live album, Amsterdam, I noticed a phenomenon which I have observed before: the desperate search for a rhyme, with resulting funny lyrics in otherwise serious songs.

The song "Perfect Groove," which is generally fairly serious, includes the couplet,

I'm looking for the perfect food
That's not undercooked or stewed.

Shades of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland!

Hearing it, I was reminded of an extremely intense song by the Call which has one line that consistently makes me burst into inappropriate laughter (a common problem with me, admittedly):

I saw a sick man
On a sick bed
Scorned by the world
Like he had two heads.

Tell me your favorite examples of poets whose search for a rhyme turned up corkers like, say, Neil Diamond's intelligent furniture:

I am, I said,
But no one was there
And nobody heard me
Not even the chair

Song downloads at the bottom-- don't miss them!

First, the food porn: My parents and I met at Pinot Hollywood, an old and classy restaurant which I hadn't been to for about six years. It has two huge mirrors on the wall, which provided a startling moment when a waitress opened one and stepped through-- they're actually doors to the wine cellar.

There was a special Valentine's Day preview menu with four courses, which I ordered with the intent of mixing and matching with my parents' orders. So I traded my stepmother a goat cheese and roasted tomato terrine for a bowl of "melted" onion soup with the onions cooked down to sweetness, and we all shared a purple endive salad and a salad with greens, bacon, and pickled white asparagus. For the main course, my stepmother had the sea bass, which was rich yet delicate (I had a bite), I had the herb-crusted filet mignon with mashed potatos and carrots, and dad had the lamb loin. The waiters switched Dad and my orders, but what we got was so good (and we're so absent-minded) that we gobbled down half our plates before we realized what had happened and switched them. Since we were planning to share anyway, no harm, no foul. For dessert, I had a luscious vanilla mousse studded with strawberries, my stepmother had a brownie with mint ice cream, and Dad had vanilla, pistachio, and chocolate mini-creme brulees. To drink, I had a Cosmopolitan with dinner and coffee after.

Steve Earle is a singer-songwriter from Scherz, Texas. He says his childhood consisted of getting beaten up by rednecks named Otto. You'd call most of what he does country-rock, but his albums are tremendously varied, from hard-rockers to ballads to bluegrass. He writes terrific story songs, beautiful love songs, and fiery political albums. He's a leftist activist, and the energy of his concerts makes me think of what I've heard Bruce Springsteen was like when he was younger. Steve Earle keeps singing till the club shuts down. He has an engaging, badass, rousing stage presence, and you can see why women like him (he's been married six times and counting.) He can also be quite funny.

He started his set with a series of blazing hard rock songs with his band, The Dukes-- "The Revolution Starts Now," "Ashes to Ashes," "Copperhead Road," the brilliant story song "Taneytown," and about six more that I don't remember. Oh, and he managed to sing the only song he's written that I really detest, the misogynistic and embarrassing "Condi." Then he played "Christmas in Washington," said we got our asses kicked in the last election but the game isn't over, and encouraged us to keep fighting. He said it had been good to go out of the country on tour and "get a look at the debacle from outside of the insane asylum." He sang a beautiful version of "Jerusalem," which I wish I could link to but for some reason that album is not downloading. I think a couple of his songs were new-- I'd never heard them before.

For an encore, he sang "Galway Girl," dueted on the traditional "Carrickfergus" and his own "You're Still Standing There" with opening act/girlfriend Alison Moore, and sang a Rolling Stones song I didn't know and some obscure sixties song which I also didn't know, but my Dad said had been really popular back then. We got out at the stroke of midnight.

Links are to song downloads-- get them now, they'll only be up for seven days.

Ellis Unit One
is from the compilation album Dead Man Walking, which also has terrific songs from Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits-- and this is the best song on the album. It's a classic example of great art coming from politics, and people will still be listening to it long after the death penalty, one way or another, is no longer an issue. It's heartbreaking, a wonderful example of the power of looking an issue from an unexpected point of view, and makes brilliant use of a snippet of a very old song.

Taneytown is another story song, from the excellent album El Corazon. It's from the point of view of a young black man who doesn't seem to be quite all there mentally, and I can't believe Earle pulls that off without sounding like an ass, but he does. The duet vocal is by Emmylou Harris. I love the dissonant opening chords.

I Feel Alright, from the also-excellent album of the same name, was inspired by Earle's time in jail after he hit bottom as a junkie. It's a crackling, defiant rocker about coming back from disaster, better and stronger and unashamed.

You're Still Standing There, a gorgeous, very country duet with Lucinda Williams. They sound like they're related. Also from I Feel Alright.

The Devil's Right Hand. Showcases Earle's unusual accent-- well, it sounds unusual to me, but maybe it's your basic Shertz, Texas. A classic badass country song in the tradition of "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." The switch in word referring to the victim in the line beginning, "I shot the dog down..." is one of my favorite subtle songwriting moments. From what I and many people think is Earle's best album, Copperhead Road.

Johnny Come Lately. Also from Copperhead Road, this is one of my all-time favorite story songs. I may discuss why in a later post after you've all listened to it, but to explain exactly what literary devices it uses to such brilliant effect would involve massive spoilers. Download, and pay attention to the lyrics. The backing band is the Pogues!

Further album recommendations:

Jerusalem has some misfires, but its best songs-- the beautiful "Jerusalem," "John Walker's Blues", and the bleak yet strangely comforting "Ashes to Ashes" are brilliant.

Transcendental Blues and Exile 0 are excellent, solid albums with lots of good songs and no clunkers.

The Mountain is a bluegrass album. The title song and "Dixieland" are two of Earle's best, but a lot of the rest of the album is mostly appealing if you already like bluegrass, which I don't particularly.

Train A Coming is a very good acoustic album with a lot of covers of people like Townes Van Zandt.

I don't recommend The Revolution Starts Now unless you're a completist, and though lots of people really like the early albums Guitar Town and The Hard Way they're not my favorites. The live album Shut up and Die Like an Aviator doesn't really capture the fire of his concerts.