The Benefit of the Free Man

The Benefit of the Free Man are not afraid. They mine the dark places of the human psyche, extracting beauty from the loneliest places. Their warped metaphors and shifting dynamics form a type of sonic dance with the listener, and the emotions they express echo through space like voices in an empty ballroom. This is Dylan and Cohen jamming at David Lynch’s house, after conjuring the ghost of Bach.

Advertisement

David Crosby Is An Old Man

Today is the seventy-first birthday of David Van Cortlandt Crosby.

“Americana”, Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Neil Young has reunited the greatest garage band in the world for this latest weird masterpiece.

RIP Earl Scruggs

 

Earl Scruggs was a innovative instrumentalist who helped to define American music in the 20th century, and as a result influenced every banjo player who came afterwards.

Neil Young’s America

In an earlier post, I wrote about the return of Neil Young’s greatest musical foil, the immortal band of rock and roll primitives called Crazy Horse. With his announcement that he was reuniting with his most famous backing band, Neil also hinted that there was a new album on the way, and fans began to drool with the idea of the return of the full, “classic” Crazy Horse sound. Uncle Neil has finally revealed the details of this project, and although it is indeed a new Crazy Horse studio album, it comes with a couple of characteristic curve-balls.

Babes, Blood, and The Bayou

Ryan Warner is a raving lunatic of the greatest kind.

Awesome Tune: “Jack Orion”

Today’s Awesome Tune is the amazingly dark title song from Bert Jansch’s 1966 masterpiece “Jack Orion”.

Birthday Blues for Bert

Bert Jansch was one the greatest acoustic guitarists who ever lived. He revived folk music in the 1960s and inspired other musicians to mine traditional sources for material. His fingerpicking technique borrowed from jazz, folk, classical, flamenco, and virtually every other traditional guitar style. He also helped to preserve and advance English folk music at a time when rock and roll was taking over the popular culture, and in the process he infused these stylistic techniques into modern rock via his massive influence on contemporary guitarists such as Jimmy Page and Neil Young.