The Official Country Music Thread Genre • Page 75

Yeah it was so sadly forgettable. I’m excited for the new EP which is just the three of them around one microphone. They’re doing a tour like that too. Definitely going out to that show.

Saw them at Michigan international speedway a few years back and other than a group of my friends there were like 20 other people there. They did their encore in the middle of the crowd. One of my favorite live music memories ever.

 

“Plain To See Plainsman” is such a simple little song but I can’t get enough of it. That melody is so great.

 

I like the last Lone Bellow record more than the second one, but they're both just okay. For me, though, they have not lived up to the promise of the first LP. I kind of just feel like they're really good vocalists but only okay songwriters.

 

We had a similar experience with them inside of this beautiful church in Dallas. If i can find anything from that on Youtube i'll post it!

 

you guys think we'll ever get another sam hunt album?

 

I'm not the biggest live album guy but Isbell sounds good on that new live album

 

I've had the Isbell live album for awhile and I haven't gone back to it much. Those live versions are good, especially "Cover Me Up," but the set feels like such a missed opportunity to me. No Petty covers, no versions of live standouts like "Speed Trap Town" or "Children of Children," no versions of his DBT covers, which have been better than ever on recent tours. Hard not to be a little disappointed in it, considering what it could have been.

 

Yeah I only listened to a few songs, I had to listen to Elephant cause that's like my favorite song ever, but unlikely I would listen to that album much.

 

agreed. ESPECIALLY the absence of "Never Gonna Change" which is incredible live, extended guitar solo duels and all.

 

Seeing Ruston Kelly at the Mercury Lounge on Tuesday. Very excited... “Just For The Record” has become one of my favorite songs from this year.

 

I get that he wanted it to be a collection of songs from the last three albums, but I would have done some things differently.

 

Lucky. I saw him a few months before the new album came out and he played a couple new songs but obviously I didn't know them yet. And I love just for the record, the way he delivers that line is brilliant.

 

I have no idea if he's popular or not, but anyone listen to the new Whitey Morgan and the 78's cd out today? I heard "What Am I Supposed to Do" a while back and loved that song.

 

I listened and enjoyed it, but right now I’m more into the Dillon Carmichael that came out today. You should def check it out if you haven’t.

 

Yeah I just finished a spin, it's good

 

Calling this record "country" is an oversimplification but wanted to post this somewhere. Incredible write-up of what is definitely a top 5 of all time record for me. Came out twenty years ago this summer. If you've somehow never heard it, fix that.

Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road Album Review | Pitchfork

 

i really wish i liked Colter’s voice more. steven hyden described as like a looney tunes cartoon hound dog and... he’s not far off haha.

 

Must be country music week over at Pitchfork!

The Story of Outlaw Country in 33 Songs | Pitchfork

This is a good feature that just went up, but skipping the 90s is kind of a head scratcher. Plenty of good artists left off, including some who did some really great work in that period from 1988-2005 when they don't have any songs...Dave Alvin, Buddy Miller, Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, just to name a few that I think would fit within how they're defining the genre. Also I get why they picked "Guitar Town" as the go-to Steve Earle song but damn if the man hasn't written a couple dozen better songs since then.

I love that they picked "You Can Have the Crown" as the representative Sturgill song though. What a great piece of music that is, and uproarious to boot. However, and yes I know I'm apparently the only person on earth who thinks this, but picking "Cover Me Up" as the representative Isbell song is a bad move. Sometimes it feels like that song and that record are the only part of his catalog that most critics are capable of writing about. More to the point, the pre-sobriety stuff, while as a whole of a lesser quality than the post-sobriety stuff, is also way more "outlaw country." I mean c'mon, Sirens of the Ditch exists. That record screams "outlaw" to me (sometimes not in a great way).

Overall not a bad piece though, and Steve Earle's tales of '70s Nashville at the top of the article are something else!

 

I also personally think that the STL/Southern Illinois crew (mostly Uncle Tupelo/Bottle Rockets) should get a nod in their direction when we talk about "outlaw country" since that loosely-defined genre has obviously become a moving target since the 80s or so. After all, the boys from Belleville collaborated with the very same Mr. Doug Sahm that the article mentions as the source of the genre, and the Bottle Rockets recorded a really great record of all-Sahm covers around when he died. But I digress.

 

Really tough for me to stomach any Pitchfork country music coverage with how they’ve ignored or treated the genre over the last few years. Honestly, really tough for me to stomach Pitchfork at all anymore.

 

As for picking "Cover Me Up," I agree that it's pretty low on his list of "outlaw" songs, but it's definitely his signature song and was the game changer that took him to the level he's at today. If you don't pick that one, I think the problem becomes which song you pick.

Also, kind of odd to me that they don't have anything from Stapleton on here. Maybe it just feels too weird to call him outlaw now that he's such a huge star. But Traveller really changed the way a lot of people thought about country music, and the second half is definitely as "outlaw" as anything they picked from the 2010s.

 

Have I shared Sinead Burgess in here yet? This record has been wrecking me lately.

 

Yeah I meant to say something about the Stapleton omission too.

I'm with you on P4K more broadly but Deusner, who seems to have had a hand in this, is generally pretty good.

 

He’s hit or miss for me. He’s not super kind to Isbell, and he wrote a pretty questionable thing about Courtney Marie Andrews earlier this year (albeit, not for Pitchfork). I looked at the contributor list for this, though, and two of the writers are Marissa Moss and Brittney McKenna, who are both good and very tapped into the country scene. They also are not usually Pitchfork contributors.

 

Had tickets to Turnpike on Friday in Detroit and the band just cancelled all their shows in November. So bummed.