ROUTES & BRANCHES
featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
October 27, 2019
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust

Another month has come 'n gone, leaving some quality music in its wake.  Here's an accounting of our favorites (it's in order of appearance):

WHAT's SO GREAT ABOUT OCTOBER?!!  
Wilco, Ode to Joy  (dBpm, Oct 4)
Alexa Rose, Medicine for Living  (Big Legal Mess, Oct 4)
Dead South, Sugar & Joy  (Six Shooter, Oct 11)
Chris Knight, Almost Daylight  (Drifters Church, Oct 11)
Big Thief, Two Hands  (4AD, Oct 11)
Cody Jinks, After the Fire / The Wanting  (Late August, Oct 11, 18)

Also released this week is Pocket Moon, the twenty-somethingth album by Simon Joyner.  The Omaha, Nebraska songwriter has been a sporadic presence on our playlists, especially for his masterful country-tinged Grass Branch & Bone and his relatively political-minded follow-up, 2017's Stepping Into the Earthquake.  Since his earliest records, he's been critically lauded for music that can be intimate, close to the bone, challenging and revelatory.  Through it all, Joyner has remained focused on his vision, a homespun strain of folk-rock woven around his bruised vocals and impressionistic poetry.

Joyner has collaborated with trusted producer and instrumentalist Michael Krassner for nearly every one of his albums, and has demonstrated a similar commitment to the players that surround him.  In a candid Aquarium Drunkard interview with Wooden Wand's James Jackson Toth, Joyner conceded, the less comfortable people are, the more I enjoy what they do in my band.  In order to foster that spirit, collaborators are rarely familiar with the songs they're recording.  For the Pocket Moon sessions, he left Omaha for Krassner's Phoenix studios, and even tasked the producer to assemble a small diverse cohort of unfamiliar musicians to back him.

Any overtly political statements are left behind on the new LP, gathering instead a pocketful of intimate portraits in a chamber folk setting.  Joyner has always been more of a painter than a storyteller, a lyrical impressionist still capable of eliciting real emotion from the way he stacks words. He calls for prayers for his Omaha home as strings swell on the lovely acoustic "Blue Lullaby": Where the corn bows before a sad river / And the cicadas sound like radiators.  The piano-based "Blue Eyed Boy" provides another of Pocket Moon's recurring pastoral scenes, pictures of home that are as often slightly unsettling as they are romantic: Kudzu covers your Grandpa's Ford / Moths nest in Grandmere's shawl / Papa greases the wheelbarrow wheel / 'Everything must work' he smiles.  Stick around for the song's outro, an evocative acoustic guitar and piano, with ghosts of pedal steel.

 A lifelong practitioner of analog recording, Joyner's work isn't anchored in any specific tradition or period.  Songs will recall artists like Phil Ochs and Tim Hardin, but may also earn comparisons to more contemporary figures like Bill Callahan or Will Oldham at his most grounded.  Even the record's fullest moments, "Sean Foley's Blues" for instance, are hushed and melancholy.  With brushed drums, piano and strings alongside a rare organ, a friend is bid adieu: I know how precious time itself is / When you're passing, spending or killing it.

Pocket Moon's arrangements are lovely, serving as a perfect counterbalance to Joyner's cracked and weathered voice.  "Yellow Jacket Blues" and "You Never Know" are the CD's most direct tracks, both featuring vestiges of country.  "Tongue of a Child" evokes Leonard Cohen's deceptively flat, deadpan delivery, coupled with a slightly Latin rhythm and a satisfying extended piano/fiddle passage.  The songwriter has admitted, I like things most when they're on the verge of falling apart.  These songs are hardly ramshackle, but there is an abiding feeling of hesitance or humility throughout these sessions, a spirit that serves them well.

Simon Joyner's songs are imminently quotable.  Many of his lyrics were gathered in a 2015 book, under the title Only Love Can Bring You Peace.  For all the detail and the namedropping on his new record, he's never quick to give away a song's punchline.  Listeners are left with sometimes vague impressions, however poetic they may be.  There's a sinister Nick Cave spirit to the album's title track, the recurring squeal of metal on metal joining the ominous strings: 'Stick that butter knife in here' the wall socket whispers.

As is my habit, I revisited much of Simon Joyner's back catalog in preparation for this Episode, from his earliest, more mercurial work to his his most celebrated project, 2012's double-LP Ghosts.  While each gesture has arrived with its own musical ideas, there's an impressively consistent thread that can be followed from album to album.  There are no outstanding mercurial moments that find Joyner indulging a whim to create something entirely other.  He might be addressing this creative process on "Time Slows Down in Dreams": The dusty bars of the spider's web / Catch wounded notes as they leave my head / And that is how the black widow is fed / On broken melodies.

- Yola, "Fly Away" Orphan Offering  (Yola, 16)
- Wood Brothers, "Alabaster" Kingdom in My Mind  (HoneyJar, Jan 24)  D
- Tim Barry, "East Texas Red" Roads To Richmond  (Chunksaah, 19)
- Kelsey Waldon, "Black Patch" White Noise/White Lines  (Oh Boy, 19)
- John McCauley, "Rough Around the Edges" single  (McCauley, 19)  D
- Whitney, "Southern Nights" Light Upon the Lake: Demo Recordings  (Secretly Canadian, 17)
- Mikal Cronin, "Lost a Year" Seeker  (Merge, 19)
^ Simon Joyner, "Tongue of a Child" Pocket Moon  (Grapefruit, 19)
- Hallelujah the Hills, "Running Hot With Fate" I'm You  (Discrete Pageantry, Nov 15)
- Ags Connolly, "Meaning Of the Word" Wrong Again  (Finstock, Nov 1)
- Allison Moorer, "Ties That Bind" Blood  (Autoetic, 19)
- Jerry Leger, "Justine" Time Out For Tomorrow  (Latent, Nov 8)  D
- KORT, "Let's Think About Where We're Going" Invariable Heartache  (City Slang, 10)
- Erin Enderlin, "Sweet Emmylou" Faulkner County  (Black Crow, Nov 1)
- Cody Jinks, "It Don't Rain in California" The Wanting  (Late August, 19)
- Sarah Lee Langford, "Growing Up" Two Hearted Rounder  (Cornelius Chapel, Nov 8)
- Charlie Parr, "Running Jumping Standing Still" Charlie Parr  (Red House, 19)
- Dead South, "Black Lung" Sugar & Joy  (Six Shooter, 19)
- Jeb Loy Nichols, "Black Rooster" June is Short July is Long  (Compass, 19)
- Chris Knight, "Crooked Mile" Almost Daylight  (Drifters Church, 19)
- Trigger Hippy, "Full Circle and Then Some" Full Circle and Then Some  (Turkey Grass, 19)
- Chatham County Line, "Route 23" Route 23  (Yep Roc, 05)
- Aubrie Sellers, "Worried Mind" Far From Home  (Soundly, Feb 7)
- The Deer, "Swoon" Do No Harm  (Keeled Scales, Nov 1)
- Itasca, "Only a Traveler" Spring  (Paradise of Bachelors, Nov 1)
- Left Arm Tan, "69 Reasons" Alticana  (LAT, 13)
- David Dondero, "Presidential Palace of Pornography" Filter Bubble Blues  (Mama Bird, Jan 17)  D
- Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, "Cold 100" King of This Town  (BARK, Jan 24)  D
- Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster, "There is a Vine" single  (Big Legal Mess, 19)  D
- Mark Eitzel, "Gentle On My Mind" Music For Courage & Confidence  (New West, 02)


Don't neglect to add the following Very Special R&B Episodes to your daily planner:

* Favorite Songs of 2019:  November 24
* Favorite Records of 2019:  December 8
* Christmas Episode:  December 22
* Favorite Albums of the Decade:  January 5

Since we last convened, new stuff was added to A Routes & Branches Guide To Feeding Your Monster from Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster, who this week shared an EP of covers, outtakes and b-sides from his solo records.  We added Wade Bowen atop our list of holiday music for 2019.  His Twelve Twenty-Five will land on November 8, way before we really need it for our seasonal purposes.  That same day, Fruition will release Wild As the Night.  Looking into the New Year, we slotted a trio of unrelated records for January 24 release.  Wood Brothers will present Kingdom In My Mind, while we'll get King of This Town from Blackie & the Rodeo Kings.  Also, great to see something new from David Dondero, whose Filter Bubble Blues will happen that same day.  Finally, set March 6 as the birthday of Ron Pope's next effort, to be named Bone Structure.

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