Blog: The Driftwood Singers Present

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. A friend stopped me on the street yesterday to point out that I was riding a skateboard with an iced coffee in one hand and an iPhone in the other. Not a pretty sight, I conceded. Forty-year-old father of three, skateboarding . I only bought the board last week, my first time riding one in 22 years. [...]

I've been stewing in this new/forthcoming Damien Jurado record for a few weeks now. The alchemical transformation of downerism into uplift is an ongoing mystery. There's a stretched horizon of mellotron, a staggered backing vocal response to the main lyric, echoing hand-claps, a bleak crossroads where Lambchop and Lee Hazlewood intersect under it all. JP was listening the other day before she knew what it was and said "I guess I like My Morning Jacket more than I thought." "Cloud Shoes" -- Damien Jurado Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, [...]

Here at TDSP, the rate at which we go back in time is at least five times the rate forward, essentially leaving us terminally in the 1970s. But we still do go forward occasionally. Some. A bit. Now and then. And now, after Hugo Chavez finally made the world safe for Twitter, when it's probably nearly jumped the shark, we're now on board for this thing. Lefty, me, is getting his Tweet on. RIGHT HERE! If you bother with this sort of thing, follow us. It's where a lot [...]

There was some delicious false hope in the air today. A taste of spring that was snatched back as soon as the sun went down. But while the fantasy lasted I got out with the kids (waddled in mud and slush), pretended it was warm, stood in the sun and walked around the block. Started reading the most recent Nick Hornby book -- a pleasant, sensitive plot-centric counterbalance to the awesome manly pressure-cooked rage and absurdist dissolution of the new book of Sam Shepard stories (like a tincture of Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy served as a literary boiler-maker) that [...]

• Free energy - hope child

The Detroit Harmonettes pass the obscurity test. Can't find much of a trace on wikipedia or elsewhere on the web, and one has to bore down deep into rare European compilations to track down a trail. Their apparent vanishing act is probably complicated by the fact that their name is very much like a more well known gospel vocal group, the Harmonettes (out of Chicago, I think). I got this track off of a record called Detroit Gospel. It was on the Gospel Heritage label, a division of the British label Interstate Music. There are about six other groups on [...]

Found a beautiful compilation of early Charlie Rich in a junk shop in Red Hook today ( Songs for Beautiful Girls , Pickwick/33). I'll forgo the overstatement: maybe the most soulful white man ever recorded. As Mr. Poncho put it: sounds like Elvis, only smarter. Britt Daniels of Spoon weeps into his pillow at night wishing his band could achieve the sound in these songs. The production is pure late 50s Sun Records, but even more subtle and sophisticated than usual, pushing more into black music than others were willing to go, [...]

I used to work on a farm with a couple yoga teachers, and they'd stop in the row and teach us some stretches. We came up with the theory of "opposite yoga postures" with regard to bending and weeding or standing and hoeing -- basically mixing up the effort to not get all bunched up and knotted. Some tension. Some release. I went to a yoga class this morning. My first. The class was just the thing. A vacation from the self. A deep-breathing encounter with all the inconvenient truths of the body and the mind. There's some deep-tissue reckoning [...]

The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch--Brian Eno Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.

Everybody here knows I'm a big fan of the 1970s "Fat" Elvis, so lemme cut to the chase: I hadn't realized how deep my fascination was going to run until Dave W. dropped the boxed set, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70s Masters," on me. It's a massive, devastating, moving, triumphant, tragic, funny, oddly experimental and seriously surprising listening experience. If you're not ready to embrace the Big E, a bunch of bloggy words won't necessarily help sell you, though I'd highly, HIGHLY recommend the second volume of Peter Guralnick's biography, "Careless Love: The Unmaking of [...]

I love vinyl record albums -- a LOT. But when you're approaching 40, it starts to become a little embarrassing, doesn't it? It's like, dude, get a job and raise your frickin' children stedda taking up shelf space and piping off about Gilbert O'Sullivan, will ya? Believe me, I know. But to paraphrase Woody Allen trying to justify his affair with Soon-Yi, the ear wants what the ear wants. So here's what mine wanted this year, more or less: an assortment of crackly old vinyl tracks pulled from hither and yon, stray stacks on sidewalks in Brooklyn, crusty old smoke-stained [...]

I listened to more new music this year than I have in a long while. Not sure why. A new phase. Obama. End of the World. But even so, music made by people under 40 (or for that matter, living people) still constituted only about 15% of the music in my life. Most of it was still crackly old jazz and soul albums. I only supply this Top Six list out of some misguided need to tell people I still care about social conventions and hierarchies and 20th Century magazine year-end roundups and, generally speaking, other human beings. [...]

I stumbled on Jim Sullivan, streaming on dinky speakers on my laptop. It's shaggy music, with one toe water-logged in the rippling, sometimes scum-topped, pool of soul-folk -- some damaged DNA shared by Van Morrison, Joe South and maybe even Mac Davis. The other toe, I don't know. It's an adult portion. Sullivan sings in places with that wonderful self-limiting effect used by people like George Jones, it's like applying a volume pedal to your vocals, so that the signal sort of swells and then fades, with a weird tapered curve. The energetic strumming brings to mind Gordon Lightfoot. There's [...]

The first step is admitting you have a problem. There's also a step involving the realization that you don't have control. I just reached the step where I find some scrap of music on my iPod and I don't know where it came from (I have this feeling that Lefty may have dropped it on me, or maybe even posted it here already) or who it is, and I have to accept that it's the abiding mystery -- and the vaporous otherworldly shapes that form between my ears when I put this music on: the assertive tambourine, the lush-and-lumpy horns, [...]

Today I am reminded of the famous Herman Melville quote: " To produce a mighty blog, you must choose a mighty theme ." Done and done. I didn't get on the bus until it was down the road a ways, but I'm enjoying the ride. Thanks, boys. Part One Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks. Every so often I like to perform a test on myself (no, not that kind, silly!). It's [...]

Solitude and isolation have their place. But -- in honor of four years of digital musico-kaffee/(bean/bourbon/we ed)-klatching -- here's to solidarity, computer-aided communistics, brother/sisterhood, shared strife, shared joy. Altogether now. This first one comes from the ultra-rare 1968 debut single by singer Kathy McCord. It's the first track on the fine compilation Women Blue: 16 Lost US Femvox Classic, released in August on the Past and Present label. McCord sings with overflowing emotional quaver, shivering vibrato and bluesy phrasing. The tune is "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "You Are Always on My Mind" locked in an estrogen death [...]

Here's a Driftwood statistic worth noting: this site's authors have made five children since we began four years ago on Nov. 1, 2005, at 8:45 p.m. A lot has happened, but perennial themes tell a story: controlled spoilage , the curdling of tastes , aesthetic relativity , the world-weary shrug one eventually adopts in the face of overwhelming evidence that things probably aren't going to get much better than they are right now. You'd think we would have quit by now. But always, eventually, somewhere in the hidden folds [...]

1.) It's hard to believe, but the rate of retro exploitation has sped up so fast that it's acceptable start copping Pavement records, as if new listeners were too young to actually pick up on it. This either signifies that I am officially ancient or history is folding in on itself so fast that 2012 will indeed herald the end of the world. Never had I imagined a day when my own generation's music would become source material. Then I heard this band Cymbals Eat Guitars , which sounds so much like Pavement I'm almost [...]

As I mentioned, my brother dropped by the other week. He had his external hard drive. There was a lot of data dumpage going on. I retrieved some tidbits from the memory banks. I'm still excavating and unpacking. This was one of those tracks that I remembered from a mixed tape. It got played over and over. Etched in. Intaglio of the air. Wax print on the brain folds. Sonic seepage. There was so much transpiring in so little real time. Southern-fried tabla. Synth squiggles, muskrat sounds, circuit-board didgeridoo. Cornmeal drone. And the lyrics: "milquetoasted love." I could never sign [...]

You Better Run--Pat Benatar You Better Run--Dorothy Love Coates & the Original Gospel Harmonettes You Better Run--Iggy & the Stooges Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.

Line notes. Commenatry on vinyl LPs. Pop, rock, folk, prog, indie, so much more. Love.