featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
March 12, 2023
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
Let's hazard a look at A Routes & Branches Guide To Feeding Your Monster, our hopefully-updated release calendar. This week Angel Olsen announced a companion EP to last year's excellent Big Time LP. Due April 14, Forever Means offers four additional tunes written during those sessions (Jagjaguwar). Purveyors of a genuinely original vibe, David Wax Museum returns with You Must Change Your Life. Scheduled for a May 5 release (Nine Mile), they call their new songs the best ones this band has ever made. We've been keeping our eyes open for a new project from Charlotte Cornfield since the Canadian songwriter's 2021 Highs in the Minuses. That wait is about over, with the announcement of Could Have Done Anything, courtesy of the Double Double Whammy label. Texas' Summer Dean was recently recognized as Best Honky Tonk Female by the Ameripolitan Music Awards. With impeccable timing, she has scheduled Biggest Life for a June 16 debut, on producer Bruce Robison's Next Waltz label. Finally, the son of John Prine turned quite a few ears with his 2022 "Ships In the Harbor" single. Tommy Prine announces his debut full-length, This Far South, due June 23 on the Nameless Knight label.
Here's another why hasn't anybody told me?! moment. If I'm not mistaken, Alabama's Drayton Farley appeared on our radar with the release of 2021's A Hard Up Life, which followed in the wake of a series of singles and EPs. Those early recordings are solo acoustic affairs - just Farley, his guitar, and a pretty dark outlook. Working with Sadler Vaden, Drayton Farley has shared Twenty On High, his debut full-band project.
Like the Alabama weather / Gets bad not get better / The truth is sad but it sounds better / In a quiet country song
That early work features some remarkable moments - Songs like "Keep Country Music Sad", " American Dream", "Blue Collar", "Southern Mother", "Lucinda". It might've taken producer Vaden and his company to lift them onto the radar of me and some other bloggers, but it shouldn't have. There's a deep appeal to Farley's primitive strumming and heartworn lyrics, an attraction that's not lost on Farley's new collection. The songwriter is supported rather than buried in the more deliberately appointed arrangements where he is joined by familiar players like Jimbo Hart and Chad Gamble.
Some writers have pointed out that Drayton Farley's voice bears a close resemblance to Jason Isbell. Farley himself acknowledges that Isbell's 2013 watermark Southeastern served to focus his songwriting after years of dabbling in harder stuff. I would argue in his support that Farley is not aping Isbell, and that it might be more careful a comparison to liken his artistry to Tyler Childers or Charles Wesley Godwin. It's an instrument that's both rugged and youthful, his delivery communicating weariness as well as tenderness.
Twenty On High opens with "Stop the Clock", engaging in a bittersweet look back at simpler times: These days I'd kill ten men a week / For a minute as a kid on Kornegay. Strummed acoustic expands into shuffling drums, chiming electric guitar and a current of organ, Farley pining Please won't someone stop. What follows serves to identify exactly what the songwriter yearns to escape about life in his later twenties. One of the year's best songs, "Norfolk Blues" bears an indelible chorus and ripping guitars, the singer fighting to create a life for his family that he realizes will always be just out of reach: Work all day until the day's all spent ... It's all the way it's always been.
Drayton Farley might be described as a blue-collar songwriter, though that's not because he fles the flag for the company cause. Where others might speak to a pride in their work or a comradery between the hard workers, Farley expresses concern for the toll the blue-collar life exacts on the body and soul. These thoughts they're all self-critical, he shares on the title cut. It's what he refers to as the call of the void on "Above My Head", a midtempo rocker that demonstrates the band's superb balance between acoustic and electric, substance over flash. It's the true working class mindset at a time when what's asked of us is not commensurate with what we bring home: The more there is / The more there is to lose / And that's what keeps me awake. Farley has called it the sweet Southern sadness, though these days it's endemic to our entire country.
These sessions with Sadler require more of Farley as an artist who has to this point simply accompanied himself on an acoustic guitar. Spurring him onto bigger things, Sadler and his band reserve some of their best work for "Devil's in NOLA". Like a Sturgill Simpson number with a rubberband bounce, it's a rare road story-song that becomes a reflection on temptation and discipline. It's also a prime showcase for the record's musicians. "Alabama Moon" is a gorgeously simple piano and fiddle arrangement featuring a backing vocal from Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, reportedly recorded in the back of a touring van. Even on the album's sole solo track, the closing "All My Yesterdays Have Passed", Farley musters a genuinely beautiful and moving vocal, and hazards a glint of anticipation: There's a sun behind this darkness / This darkness cannot last.
On previous work and on Twenty On High, Drayton Farley doesn't dodge the dark, he does some heavy emotional lifting. On "How To Feel Again" he rallies those who have followed him to these places. With Kristin Weber's soaring fiddle, the song sways and rises until it achieves almost anthemic proportions:
What if I told you you ain't so alone? / There's a whole lot of folks who feel just as strong / About the lives that we live, the places we're from / We should all be so proud of how far we've all come / This life is not easy, it'll kick you around / Keep your heart a little heavy and your ear to the ground / Life swings, you swing harder, don't ever back down / Every day that we've lost, another day we have found / Here we all have the right / We all have the right to be something real
Amen.
ROUTES-cast MARCH 12, 2023
- Willi Carlisle, "All of the Redheaded Stranger" single (Carlile, 23) D
- Ellie Turner, "Daughter" When the Trouble's All Done (Muhly Grass, Mar 24)
- Layng Martine Jr, "Let the World Go By" Music Man (Bloodshot, May 19)
- Eilen Jewell, "Crooked River" Get Behind the Wheel (Signature Sounds, May 5)
- Zara Alexandra, "Going Back" Osage Oranges Comin Down (3978651, 23) D
^ Drayton Farley, "Alabama Moon" Twenty On High (Hargrove, 23)
- Logan Halstead, "Good Ol' Boys With Bad Names" Dark Black Coal (Halstead, May 5)
- Summer Dean, "Biggest Life Worth Living Is the Small" Biggest Life (Next Waltz, Jun 16) D
- Tender Things, "I Can Love" That Texas Touch (Tender Things, 23)
- Nude Party, "Stately Prison Cell" Rides On (New West, 23)
- Nickel Creek, "Where the Long Line Leads" Celebrants (Repair, Mar 24)
- Amanda Fields, "Lucky (ft Cruz Contreras)" What When and Without (Are and Be, 23)
- Luke Laird, Lori McKenna, Barry Dean, "Girl Crush" Songwriter Tapes Vol 2 (CN, Mar 17) D
- Shana Cleveland, "Faces In the Firelight" Manzanita (Hardly Art, 23)
- Angelica Rockne, "White Cadillac" Rose Society (Fluff & Gravy, May 5)
- Charlotte Cornfield, "You and Me" Could Have Done Anything (Double Double Whammy, May 12) D
- Tallest Man On Earth, "Henry St" Henry St (Anti, Apr 14)
- War & Treaty, "Up Yonder" Lover's Game (Mercury, 23)
- St Paul & the Broken Bones, "Lonely Love Song" Angels In Science Fiction (ATO, Apr 21)
- Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, "Florida" Fall Line (Strolling Bones, Apr 7) D
- Angel Olsen, "Nothing's Free" Forever Means EP (Jagjaguwar, Apr 14) D
- Hold Steady, "Understudies" Price of Progress (Positive Jams, Mar 31)
- No Ones, "304 Molino Way" My Best Evil Friend (Yep Roc, Mar 31)
- Scott McMicken & THE EVER-EXPANDING, "Reconcile" Shabang (Anti, Mar 31)
- Ratboys, "Black Earth, WI" single (Topshelf, 23) D
- New Pornographers, "Pontius Pilate's Home Movies" Continue As a Guest (Merge, Mar 31)
- Rose City Band, "Slow Burn" Garden Party (Thrill Jockey, Apr 21)
- Caroline Rose, "Tell Me What You Want" Art of Forgetting (New West, Mar 24)
- Matthew Logan Vasquez, "Untouchable" As All Get Out (Nine Mile, Apr 7)
- Sunny Sweeney & Jamie Lin Wilson, "Red Dirt Girl" single (Aunt Daddy, 23) D
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