Eric Wood - Don't Just Dance

Each soul has a voice that speaks to a mystery
Well hidden in someone’s dark spirit
Its song may well penetrate many an ear
Yet only one truly can hear it
To this one its meaning is poignant
His heart can hardly hold it
This pawn in the hand of this powerful poem
Is exalted far beyond the poet

From…. "Let My People Go" by Eric Wood

The music of Eric Wood has been described as intense, compelling, intimate, provocative, poetic and personal by many critics in the U.S, Canada and Europe. An American amalgam of jazz, folk, country and rock meets Brazilian and Middle Eastern musical idioms in his music. Together, they weave the raiment for the poignant, lyrical writings rendered in Wood’s smoky, baritone voice on his new upcoming CD release. Simultaneously romantic & political, Wood occupies a never too far off, yet still somewhat isolated location in the American song-writing landscape. "This sounds too much like it’s really what Eric Wood’s music must be for it to be the result of some calculated gesture," a Music Reviews Quarterly writer reported. In another very recent review of Eric’s first CD, Letters From the Earth (Tangible Music TG129), in London’s MOJO magazine, Pat Gilbert writes; "As a 40something songsmith, Eric Wood ought to have some encyclopedic pedigree. But a 30-year career that started in Ohio’s coffee houses, took in Nashville in the early 70s and ended up in the bars of New York’s East Village has seemingly left an indelible blank on the pages of Guinness and Macmillian." He calls Eric’s first CD "an unhurried melt of folk, blues and wee-hours jazz, often operating over subtle Latin rhythms and unobstrusive strands of jazz instrumentation (vibes, marimbas, sax). It’s a belated solo debut that’s astonishing for it’s gleefully understated musicianship and emotional authenticity."

The new Eric Wood CD, to be released in September on Appaloosa Records /IRD, establishes his musical diversity and extraordinary lyrical prowess with a new band, in a context all its own.

Eric came from an austere background in the Appalachian foothills near the Ohio /West Virginia border. Factory workers that had migrated from mostly Eastern Europe, indigenous hillbillies, and Amish families shared both the turf and the troubles. Each group held tightly to their own beliefs, religions and types of folk music while to the dismay of them all, the radio blasted the new unholy, British invasion music to their kids. While the older music was marrow deep in Wood’s bones, it didn’t calcify until it was thoroughly saturated with the new. To the entire neighborhood’s dismay, Wood’s more than slightly "loosely wrapped" adoptive mother (as he refers to her) often listened to the music of Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles and early Bob Dylan at high volumes. These voices sounded so severe in this environment, even the most open-minded individuals in his home-town had great difficulty listening to them. Eric heard these sounds early on and never thought twice about them. They were just more music to his ears. But life with his mother’s volatile personality nevertheless proved impossible even for him. He left home in the late `60s at the age of 15 to establish a new life among the leftover Beats and newcomer Hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district. There, more rhythmically compelling Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk influenced music, brought to his ears by local bands who were mixing it all up, exposed Wood to new currents through which he’d learn to make all those previously diverse forms flow together freely.

Soon after this crucial point in his ever-more musically enriched life, Eric Wood suffered life-changing injuries from a severe car crash that left him hospitalized and without his own brain’s memory-forming functions for more than a year. It was during that time that he turned to writing songs as a way to capture the thoughts and emotions that would otherwise escape him. Songwriting became a kind of temporary memory and a road map out of the convoluted confusion the injuries caused. This is when the songs of one of his mother’s favorites, Bob Dylan, came back to his mind. Suddenly they were the only thing that made perfect sense to him. He began to search for the recordings of other Dylan contemporaries and subsequently came to hear and especially love Tim Buckley (who Wood’s music is sometimes compared to) and Joni Mitchell.

Recovery came slowly and left Eric with a singular new direction. Within another year, he was performing his own songs nationwide at college concerts and coffee-houses. While functioning as the opening act on a Pure Prairie League tour, Kris Kristofferson heard his music and offered him a publishing deal at Combine Music in Nashville. After moving there, Eric held staff writing positions at two other publishing houses and produced 2 recordings that the country music establishment found very difficult to swallow. They were never released. Wood’s rhythmic orientation, lyrics and melodies weren’t going to lead him to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. He left for New York City in 1979. In the subsequent 20 years, Wood recorded & performed with top jazz players including Bobby Previte (Depth of Field) and Lindsey Horner (Koch Records) performing at the Bottom Line and The Knitting Factory to growing audiences. Subsequent U.S. tours with Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin and Richard Thompson brought more fans and critics to hear him. Finally in 1997, Eric was signed in New York to Tangible Music and his first CD was released. It garnered high critical acclaim from many publications including Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune and Rolling Stone, as well as a front page, Giancarlo Susanna review in one of Rome’s largest newspapers, La Unite. More European acclaim in Musica, Late For The Sky, Muccio Selvaggio, JAM Magazine, MOJO, Rock ‘N Reel and many others soon followed. Buscadero rated it #8 in the top 10 albums of 1997. And Billboard Magazine rated Letters From The Earth #9 in a "Year End Critics’ Poll". This was quite an accomplishment for a debut record. One solo European tour and another with Wood’s entire band soon followed.

In September 1999, the Eric Wood group’s 1998 summer tour will finally come to an end with the new release on Appaloosa /IRD Records. For Eric and the rest of his band (T. Xiques, Carlo DeRosa, Jeff Berman & Luis Perdomo), it actually began in the spring of `98 in the Brooklyn rehearsal space /apartment of string bassist DeRosa. The next two months were spent rehearsing and performing for audiences at The Living Room in NYC where they worked up new songs Eric planned to record as well as older material from Wood’s first CD for their scheduled upcoming tour dates in northern Italy. Then, during the Eric Wood group’s Italy `98 tour, an impromptu live recording session was arranged at B&B Production Studios near Ferrara, Italy. It was only a couple of days before their headline performance date at the Sotta Le Stella festival at Ferrara (Dylan headlined the year before). But the band had too little studio time left to listen back to the tracks before another band came in. The tapes were subsequently stashed in a gig bag and not heard until Eric later returned to the states. While still in Italy, Franco Ratti at Appaloosa /IRD Records suggested to Eric that he record his new CD for that label. Wood agreed, not knowing he was already carrying the crucial tapes in his bag. Later, the project was completed at World Studios in NYC. During one of his 1998 performances in Italy, singer-songwriter Cristina Dona’ ("Tregua" Mescal-Mercury) joined Eric onstage. The memory of her magic voice singing with him prompted Eric to send some of these newly recorded tracks back to Italy for Cristina to sing on.

Ray Wylie Hubbard - A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment ( Hint : There is no C)

It wasn’t that long ago that Ray Wylie Hubbard allowed to an acquaintance that he wouldn’t mind being a hybrid of Guy Clark and John Lee Hooker. Now, I’m no seer or mystic, but my instincts suggest that wish came true. And then some. A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There is no C) confirms it.

Ray Wylie Hubbard writes the kind of songs that make you want to ride along no matter where he’s going, because you know it’s gonna get strange somewhere along the way. The references to Muddy Waters being as deep as William Blake (“I really do believe it,’’ Ray says) and lipstick pickups, resonator slides, the dreams of drunken poets, deceased call girls, opium, wasp’s nests, clouds growing a tail, his ability to segue seamlessly from primal exclamations of carnal lust into songs about salvation without pausing for irony;
and a craftsmanship that manages to rhyme mescaline and gasoline and Volkswagen with dragon while painting vivid portraits of characters both real and unreal, all evoke a sense of place that is larger than life but in no way made up.

Anyone who’s followed Ray Wylie Hubbard over the long and winding path he has traveled already knows he possesses the kind of exceptional gift for observation that any songwriter yearns for. His sense of wonder is tempered by an accumulated wisdom and knowledge that comes with experience that has elevated him into the Wylie Lama of Texas Music, freely imparting songwriting verities to all kinds of aspiring musicians, which allows him to lay all his cards on the table and let the listener decide what it all
means.

In case you’re wondering where he’s been since his last album Snake Farm, Ray’s been writing, only he moved out of the song category to test his chops as a screenwriter, conceiving an outlaw western straight out of the Peckinpah school of blood and vengeance (“set in 1912 so we can have a Buick and a motorcycle and automatic weapons well as horses”). That his first screenplay actually got funded, filmed and slated for release is a testament to the caliber of his writing, the fact that Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, and Lizzy Caplan appear among the ensemble of accomplished actors speaks volumes of the respect he has earned among his peers.

Besides the movies, a weekly Tuesday radio show and constant touring as well as producing other artists, his focus remains fixed on the song - constructing and performing stories set to music that resonate like no one else’s. Not for nothing is he the dark literary, cat daddy of Americana songsters who was outlaw long before it was cool.

But don’t take my word for it. Ray Wylie is far better versed explaining how the sacred and the profane, the yin and the yang, the eternal and the now, the hippies and rednecks, the saved and the damned are all part of the same conversation.“I like to look at both enlightenment and endarkenment,” he declares. “I feel comfortable observing each.

Now I really feel like I gave up the right to judge anybody a longtime ago. With my behavior back in my twenties and thirties, I don’t have that right. I really don’t.” That doesn’t stop him from taking note of what’s going on around him. “It’s so turbulent right now,” he says. “Like the idea of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That’s pretty strong and scary stuff, especially since I try to stay here in this Pollyanna world of hope and idealism I’ve created, but I’m able to get in that mind set and look at it and write it from the point of view of one who believes it.”

“In ‘Rise Up,’ I can go in there and see the need for that kind of Salvation and understand why that need is there but then read about Chet Baker and heroin and think, yeah, man, it does make the deep things appear (which he captures in ‘Opium). “I feel very fortunate, being able to see that, but not really go there.”

“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and “Rise Up,” two straight up gospel pieces that could be sung in a four square church are “straight, basic fundamental Pentecostal Bible,” Ray explains with a sly grin. “Then all of a sudden I write about a naked woman in ‘Drunken Poet’s Dream.”

So what’s up with the unusual title song? “It is my honoring Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven,’” he says, breaking into a conspiratorial smile. “That is my favorite poem of all time. It still is. I re-read it and as I was going to bed I thought, I should write something like this. I couldn’t use a raven so I used a black sparrow. And it started. It was so weird, just laying in bed thinking, OK, here’s Edgar Allen Poe, he’s drinking, he’s just lost the most precious thing in his life and all that. What would happen if I was in that frame of mind and suddenly this bird lands by my bed? What would it say? 'A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C).' ''

He continues “ Finally, a little bit later, came the line I’d heard my grandmother say when I was a kid, ‘Heaven pours down rain and lightning bolts’– that line kind of sums it all up for me as far as everything, really... Heaven is this beautiful place and yet it pours down rain and lightning bolts on both the just and the unjust. So being mindful of this, I was reminded of one of my wife Judy’s spiritualisms ‘the days I can keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, those are good days,"’

“When it’s all said and done and the record is released whether I ride through the streets in a chariot with rose pedals falling upon me and thousands cheering my name or I find myself standing against a wall being asked if I want a cigarette and a blindfold, I am extremely grateful for each of these songs. And if the truth be known, after every song I write I always say, 'thanks' '' With a keen eye of observation and a wise man’s knowledge, Ray Wylie Hubbard composes and performs songs that couldn’t spring from anywhere else but out of his fertile rock and roll bluesy poet-in-theblistering- heat southern noggin.

Hint: the answers are all within A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment.

Steve Earle - Townes

GRAMMY WINNER

We are proud to announce that last night Steve was presented with the award for Best Contemporary Folk Album at the 2010 Grammys for his most recent album, “Townes.” This is Steve’s third Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album

Steve Earle’s new album Townes, is his highly anticipated follow up to the Grammy Award winning album Washington Square Serenade. The 15-song set is comprised of songs written by Earle’s friend and mentor, the late singer-songwriter, Townes Van Zandt.

The songs selected for Townes were the ones that meant the most to Earle and the ones he personally connected to. Some of the selections chosen were songs that Earle has played his entire career (“Pancho and Lefty,” “Lungs,” “White Freightliner Blues”). He learned the song “(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria” directly from Van Zandt. Earle taught himself “Marie” and “Rake” specifically for making this record. Earle recorded the New York sessions solo and then added the other instruments later on in order to preserve the spirit of Van Zandt’s original solo performances to the best of his recollection.

The track “Lungs,” was produced and mixed by the Dust Brothers’ John King and features Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine/The Nightwatchman on electric guitar.

Earle met Townes Van Zandt in 1972 at one of Earle’s performances at The Old Quarter in Houston, TX. Van Zandt was in the audience and playfully heckled Earle throughout the performance to play the song “Wabash Cannonball.” Earle admitted that he didn’t know how to play the tune and Van Zandt replied incredibly, “You call yourself a folksinger and you don’t know ‘Wabash Cannonball?’” Earle then silenced him by playing the Van Zandt song “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” not an easy feat due to its quickly-paced mouthful of lyrics squeezed into just over two minutes of song. Their bond was immediately formed. On Townes, Earle and his son, singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle (named after Van Zandt) trade verses on the tune, a song the two of them have been playing together since Justin was a teenager.

The songs selected for Townes were the ones that meant the most to Earle and the ones he personally connected to (not including selections featured on previous Earle albums). Some of the selections chosen were songs that Earle has played his entire career (“Pancho and Lefty,” “Lungs,” “White Freightliner Blues”) and others he had to learn specifically for recording. He learned the song “(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria” directly from Van Zandt, and taught himself “Marie” and “Rake” specifically for the album’s recording. Once a song he played during his live show, Earle relearned “Colorado Girl” in the original Open D tuning that Van Zandt played it in. Earle recorded the New York sessions solo and then added the other instruments later on in order to preserve the spirit of Van Zandt’s original solo performances to the best of his recollection.

When speaking about Townes, Earle stated, “This may be one of the best records I’ve ever made. That hurts a singer-songwriter’s feelings. Then again, it’s some consolation that I cherry picked through the career of one of the best songwriters that ever lived.”

Townes Van Zandt’s debut album, For The Sake Of The Song, was released in 1968. His last, No Deeper Blue appeared in 1995. His life and songs are the subject of the critically acclaimed 2006 documentary film, Be Here To Love Me. Van Zandt died in 1997 at the age of 52.

While being a protégé of Van Zandt, Earle is a master storyteller in his own right, with his songs being recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Travis Tritt, The Pretenders, Joan Baez and countless others. 1986 saw the release of his debut record, Guitar Town, which shot to number one of the country charts and immediately established the term “New Country.” What followed was an extremely exciting array of twelve releases including the biting hard rock of Copperhead Road (1988), the minimalist beauty of Train A Comin’ (1995), the politically charged masterpiece Jerusalem (2002) and the Grammy Award Winning albums The Revolution Starts…Now (2004) and Washington Square Serenade (2007). Earle also produced the Grammy nominated album, Day After Tomorrow, by the legendary Joan Baez in 2008.