Songs of the Week: Take 5
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Stay Gold: First Aid Kit
The Swedish sister act First Aid Kit made a joyful two-night return to London’s Royal Albert Hall this week, supported not only by their regular musicians but the backing band of their dreams. The 65-piece Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Erik Arvinder, lifted us higher than our perch in the rafters.
Klara and Johanna Söderberg were here to revisit 2014, their last appearance in this majestic setting, when they were promoting their breakthrough third album Stay Gold. Golden it was. The title track is our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. We await a recorded version of this glorious reimagining.
The sisters’ enchanting harmonies were never under threat from the painstakingly arranged swirl of strings, flourishes of woodwind and brass and undercurrent of rumbling percussion. Arvinder had conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra during concerts with the Söderbergs in Stockholm early last year but this was a mission on a far grander scale.
Arvinder, known for his collaborations with artists such as Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Ariana Grande, Coldplay, Childish Gambino and John Legend, deserves our applause, not least for the dramatic use of the hall’s 19th-century pipe organ on the pre-encore climax of the heartbreaker Nothing Has To Be True. Talk about pulling out all the stops.
The song Stay Gold draws its inspiration from a Robert Frost poem Nothing Gold Can Stay, from his Pulitzer-winning 1923 collection New Hampshire, exploring the transitory nature of youth and happiness, and confronting the fear that hard work or love might not always be enough to protect us from life’s hardships.
The sun shone high those few summer days
Left us in a soft, wide eyed haze
It shone like gold
It shone like gold
But just as the moon, it shall stray
So dawn goes down today
No gold can stay
No gold can stay
The original album, their first for a major label Columbia, was recorded in Omaha and produced by Mike Mogis, the duo opting for a fuller sound and recruiting the Omaha Symphony Orchestra to play on the record, with arrangements by Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes fame. Only a 16-piece orchestra? Small beginnings.
We were reminded of the high quality of writing by sisters then in their early twenties and still grappling with the demands of adulthood: stirring opener My Silver Lining, Cedar Lane and The Waitress Song (‘Girls they just want to have fun, and the rest of us hardly know who we are’) remain outstanding tracks, not forgetting the haunting ballad Shattered & Hollow:
Now I am tired but resolute
That I’d rather be
Striving than settled
Oh, I’d rather be
Moving than static
Oh, I’d rather be
By your side
We are gonna get out of here
Run from all the fears
Follow what we once held dear
When will we get out of here?
Johanna was 17 and Klara only 14 when they signed their first record contract in 2008. Now they’ve each become mothers, continuing to enjoy side projects while taking time out from the rigours of touring. The sisters were once described as ‘romantics in an unromantic world’ but their maturing lyrics revealed a darker side, their own version of Scandi noir.
The pre-publicity material suggested that the second half of the Albert Hall shows would be stripped back, perhaps just the duo with their own band. But thankfully the orchestra stayed in their seats to adorn more recent tracks from Ruins and Palomino as well as tributes to First Aid Kit’s biggest musical influences: a stunning cover of Paul Simon’s America which brought the great songwriter to his feet when they performed it in front of him in 2012, a poignant homage to Dolly Parton (I Will Always Love You), and their own Emmylou, a paean to country music romance from their second album The Lion’s Roar that famously reduced its subject to tears.
What if our hard work ends in despair?
What if the road won’t take me there?
Oh, I wish, for once, we could stay gold
What if to love and be loved’s not enough?
What if I fall and can’t bear to get up?
Oh, I wish, for once, we could stay gold
When the London visit was first announced, the two women admitted to feeling teary-eyed about the thought of it. Now it was our turn to have something in our eyes. Have no fear, for Klara and Johanna the gold will not be fading soon.
Horse To Water (Acoustic): Tall Heights with Darlingside and Henry Jamison
A song born a decade ago has come out to play again, and what a celebration it is. The Boston duo Tall Heights have revisited their acclaimed album Neptune, inviting old friends to add a little lustre. The gorgeous Horse To Water, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is the first sample of their reimaginings. Drink in the harmonies.
The duo, guitarist Tim Harrington and cellist Paul Wright, called on the Vermont singer-songwriter Henry Jamison and their Bostonian buddies Darlingside to sprinkle magic dust on a song that was a standout 10 years ago. Jamison had opened for them during the album’s promotional tour, and Darlingside have been regular collaborators.
Tall Heights are celebrating a milestone viewed as much a homecoming as an anniversary. Ten years after the release of Neptune, the album that helped propel their harmony-rich sound towards a wider audience, the two childhood friends who are now fathers have regained ownership of the master tapes from their old major label.
To mark the return of their property, the duo will release in November a 10th anniversary deluxe edition of Neptune, unlocking the vault on unreleased B-sides from the original recording sessions along with new versions of Spirit Cold, River Wider and Horse To Water. Darlingside’s heavenly harmonies, which adorn the latter love song, enhance any project they are invited to breathe new life into.
The night sky had broken, the new year had spoken
I was beside myself, I stood out in the cold
In an empty parking lot, my breath was streaming hot
I willed the car to start to bring me home to you
Oh, lead me back from the darkness like you do
Before I knew you, I lived in the rearview
To wish back an image of myself I thought was true
So now when colors fade and on that day of days
I needed you to say it wasn't one to rue
Oh, and lead me back from the darkness like you do
Tall Heights’ story began beneath a low bar, Harrington and Wright busking on the streets of Boston. The duo first collaborated at high school in their suburban home town of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, before they chanced their arm in Boston where they funded their debut album with a marathon 100-day busking session.
The magical blend of Wright’s alluring cello and the pair’s soaring vocal interplay has been rewarded with a burgeoning respect. Their early albums occupied folk territory, more Simon & Garfunkel than Bon Iver, but Neptune marked a shift into the world of synths and loops without ever allowing their core strengths of acoustic guitar, cello and dreamy vocals to be compromised. Post Neptune, they expanded that sound, working with Ben Folds as songwriting partners and members of his touring and recording band.
Tall Heights provide us with an entertaining insight on their website: ‘In the fall of 2015, we found ourselves forlorn and bemused, driving across the Midwest on a release tour that was, once again, not selling many tickets. The music we were promoting represented an ambitious new sound that we were really excited about. And yet, in the silence of my parents’ minivan, we were both struggling to stave off the nagging question: What the hell are we doing?
‘I’ll never forget that van ride and those feelings in the minutes before our career shifted. Suddenly, our phones started dinging with text messages and phone calls informing us that our song Spirit Cold was trending on all the viral charts of this new streaming service called Spotify.
‘It’s been 11 years since that ride. Spirit Cold and the rest of this album, Neptune, came out a few months later, signed to a major label. It really changed our lives. It brought us opportunities, experiences, personal and career growth, and achievements that amaze us to this day.
‘As we celebrate a decade of Neptune, it’s worth noting that she’s ours again. After a 10-year licence with the label, we are deeply heartened to welcome these songs, these masters, this intellectual property back as entirely our own.’
As Darlingside quipped about the song to which they have contributed their majestic voices, this was a seriously well hydrated horse. A sound from Tall Heights to lead us back from the darkness.
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers: Rhiannon Giddens
Nashville-based roots musician Rhiannon Giddens spans the genres and the centuries on her latest album with a song about hope. Just what the world needs now. Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, the title track and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem written 165 years ago. Her message has stood the test of time.
The poem uses the bird as a metaphor for salvation, a symbol of hope during hard times and of resilience in the face of destructive elements. The three stanzas, in so-called hymnal or ballad meter, are repeated by Giddens with emphasis on the opening verse. The melody, delivered soulfully, has a traditional folk feel.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all
And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm
I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet never in extremity
It asked a crumb of me
The Massachusetts-born Dickinson’s poem appeared in a collection discovered by her younger sister Lavinia and published posthumously 30 years after it was written. Its title by then had been abbreviated to Hope, with her trademark sprinkling of dashes and capitalised nouns. Only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, mainly dealing with nature and mortality, were published during her lifetime.
We assume Giddens had doves in mind rather than hawks when singing of Dickinson’s bird of peace. She explains: ‘This is most certainly a time where hope is needed more than ever. I was sitting in a hotel room pondering this poem when the tune was downloaded into my brain. I sang it for Niwel [Tsumbu, the Congolese guitarist] and he finished it with his beautiful harmonic movement. Art reaches across generations and continents to be completed, sometimes, by folks who will never meet.’
The 10-track album is a celebration of Giddens’ North Carolina roots and the musical alliances she has developed over a 20-year career. The collaborators, headed by co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, include longtime bassist Jason Sypher, her Italian partner Francesco Turrisi on accordion and percussion, the aforementioned Tsumbu, her first bandmate from The Carolina Chocolate Drops Justin Robinson on fiddle, her sister Lalenja Harrington on vocals, nephew Justin Harrington on bones, Powell’s daughter Amelia on acoustic guitar and vocals, and Charly Lowry on vocals and percussion.
Says Giddens: ‘Louisiana, the Congo, Italy, the Carolinas – all of these influences and people coming together to make something: that is American music. It’s how American music came to be, and that was the original thought of creating a band with the musicians that I’ve been playing with for years, and featured on this album.’
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers, like many songs within her canon of work, speaks of the universal bond of human experience. Her aching contralto blends beautifully with Turrisi’s eerie accordion and, elsewhere, with whatever instrument the versatile Powell chooses to pick up.
Four of the tracks were penned by Giddens and Powell, including the radio-friendly single Carolina Rain. More impressive is the poignant Wish In Vain, the pair trading verses on a song tackling the global refugee crisis – ‘trying to imagine being torn from all you know and how those you love never really leave you’.
I wish that you and my love
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
Were underneath the stars above
Without a penny to our name
I'm here for twenty years or more
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That you'd come walking through my door
My heart once more for you to claim
The album was largely recorded live with no frills and few overdubs at Powell’s Cypress House studio in Breaux Bridge in his native Louisiana. Giddens admits she cannot play without stomping, which is obvious from the atmospheric, banjo-led opening track Angel Fire Rise. Background noise, ambient footsteps and the chatter of musicians before takes were retained.
Giddens’ restrained rendition of the Elizabeth Cotten classic Freight Train, honouring the legacy of her fellow North Carolinian, transported me back to my childhood and radio plays of Nancy Whiskey’s 1957 hit. Cotten was once a nanny for British folk singer Peggy Seeger whose family ensured the song’s copyright was restored to her.
Another with North Carolina heritage and legendary figure of indigenous music, Pura Fé, is celebrated with Going Home, Lowry helping her host to raise the decibels. Giddens’ duet with her sister on the a cappella Walk With Me is a further gospel-soaked gift for the listener.
The Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning musician continues to defy the constraints of time as a multi-disciplinary artist. She plays the lead in forthcoming film An Ode To Mary Jo, having served as a consultant and contributed original music to the acclaimed movie Sinners. Recent projects have included an opera, a ballet and children’s books.
Her album with all-women supergroup Our Native Daughters and work as artistic director for the Silk Road Ensemble were ground-breaking. Giddens’ mission has long been to raise the profile of black musicians whose contributions to American music history have been overlooked or even erased.
Hope may be the thing with feathers but it is also the inspiring voice and music of Rhiannon Giddens.
Don’t Look Back: Buddy Miller (with Dan Penn)
Buddy Miller, elder statesman of Americana, has been too busy producing other artists’ music for the last 15 years to entertain an album of his own. Until now. His latest self-titled work contains fine creations of his own but our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com is a lively, lovely cover of the 1965 Temptations hit, Don’t Look Back, in harness with another songwriting great, Dan Penn.
Penn is an old soulmate and a writer of classic soul-ingrained songs such as The Dark End Of The Street and Do Right Woman, Do Right Man. Miller and Penn trade verses on the Motown track, written by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White. Smokey produced the original recording, sung by Paul Williams, for the flip side of The Temptations’ Top 20 hit My Baby.
Robinson and White, fellow Miracles, had teamed up for the previous year’s David Ruffin-led My Girl. Don’t Look Back has melodic similarities. The Miller-Penn interpretation is no less soulful for its understated performance.
Miller didn’t take the lyric’s advice; looking back can be deliciously rewarding. The song acts as a reassurance to the sceptical that finding true love is worth all the heartache. There is a typically impressive Miller guitar break as the McCrary Sisters add joyous heft to the chorus and middle eight…
If you put your hand in mine
We’re gonna leave all your troubles behind
Keep on walkin’ and don’t look back…
The past is behind you, let nothing remind you
Nashville-based Miller, who hails from Fairborn, Ohio, reinforces his reputation as a generous collaborator. Shawn Colvin, who played in his band in New York in the Eighties, sings on You Never Really Get Over It while old cohorts Jim Lauderdale and Larry Campbell join a supporting cast who include the country soul duo The War And Treaty on Jesse Winchester’s Lay Down The Burden Of Your Heart, Emmylou Harris, Lee Ann Womack, Ashley Munroe, Elizabeth Cook and Teresa Williams.
Regina McCrary contributes memorably to the gospel-tinged Ruby Hang On and she and her sisters enhance another early Temptations cut, As Long As I Have You. Ruby Hang On was written by Julie Miller who co-penned three other tracks with husband Buddy: the aforementioned You Never Really Get Over It, Losers’ Celebration and the aptly named Masterpiece In The Sand. Julie, to whom Buddy dedicates the album, is a brilliant lyricist as the latter meditation on the fragility of life illustrates:
We make our palaces grand
Put a claim on someone’s land
But all the works of our hands
Are just a masterpiece in the sand
Penn, feted for his long songwriting association with fellow Alabamian Spooner Oldham, co-wrote the Sixties masterpiece, The Dark End Of The Street, with session guitarist Chips Moman. The definitive version by James Carr was released two years after Don’t Look Back. As my colleague Phil Shaw wrote in his 2017 blog about the track, Penn satisfied his desire to write ‘the best cheating song ever’.
Miller’s weathered vocal provides the perfect thank you to his friend with a cover of Penn’s more recent composition on their shared pet theme of mortality, Not Enough Time To Change.
This road I’m on is all I know
Some days high and some days low
Folks say I’m stuck in the wrong lane
But there's not enough time to change
Apart from Carr, beneficiaries of Penn’s early prolific songwriting included Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Charlie Rich, Percy Sledge and The Box Tops. He seemed happier with the interpretations of others to his own recordings, preferring the relative quiet life of producing.
For those of his admirers perplexed at his limited studio output Penn, at 84 Miller’s senior by a decade, released Smoke Filled Room earlier this year. Check out Blues Of The Month Club and Battling The Blues, both southern soul gems. We doubt if he ever felt the need to say: Buddy, can you spare a rhyme?
Carry Us Home: Billy Strings
Billy Strings, the ground-breaking totem of bluegrass music, makes a welcome excursion into Americana territory on his latest album, So Much For Goodbyes. The Michigan-born master of the acoustic guitar provides our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com with the beautiful ballad Carry Us Home. There are so many strings to this songwriter’s bow.
Strings, born William Lee Apostol 33 years ago, dedicated his fifth studio album to his mother Debra who died last year at 64. Debra, whose collage work contributed to the album cover artwork, died of a drug overdose, just as Strings’ biological father had when Billy was only two. ‘I thought he must have loved heroin more than me,’ he told the New York Times. It is remarkable that such a chaotic back story – Strings himself fell prey to hard drug use after leaving the family home at 14 – could not derail what would become a successful crossover career. A biopic in the making?
Nashville-based Strings, whose stage name was coined by an aunt, has always used his guitar wizardry as a coping mechanism whenever adversity strikes. Fine songs have been created out of the personal wreckage. Many of the 16 tracks on So Much For Goodbyes (which could almost be classed a double album) are a reaction to his mother’s passing. ‘It was a rough thing, losing my mom, and my guitar has always been that kind of friend – where I can lean on it to deal with all these feelings.’
Despite the grieving this is no funeral march; the rapid-fire arpeggio runs and jam-band barn-stormers beloved by his fans are not forsaken. But the quieter, reflective moments are the ones to treasure, as are the powerful lyrics. Carry Us Home features just two acoustic guitars, those of Strings and Bryan Sutton. The way the instruments interweave in a cascade of sound is exquisite, heightening the sense of longing. The song was written in collaboration with Joe Henry whose poetic leanings are evident here:
The iced-over river
Still braiding its chain
The heart will break open
Until it remains
Torn deep and worn
As our father’s refrain:
Oh boys, which side are you on?
We brought down the lighthouse
It fell like a tree
In the grey of the blues
Ever singing in me
The riderless horse
That stands at the sea
Just waiting to carry us home
The previous track, Burn The Other End, could not be more different in style or tone. The incredible Strings band come out to play for a smouldering slice of bluegrass noir. Our virtuoso duels in turn with Billy Failing on banjo, Alex Hargreaves on fiddle and Jarrod Walker on mandolin – with producer T Bone Burnett and Jack White on raucous backing vocals.
Royal Masat is on upright bass but there are no drums; music this percussive rarely needs further rhythmic help. Strings’ innovative guitar picking – the speed is matched by subtlety – is extraordinary. No wonder Willie Nelson described the three-times Grammy winner as the John Coltrane of bluegrass. Again, the lyric is potent:
Guilty, resenting what I’ve done
Traded everything I love for what I have become
Wasted, no wonder I’m afraid
Always struggling to justify the sacrifice I’ve made
This will break
I just can’t
So I will burn the other end
In Mill Town Flood Strings channels his inner Levon Helm in a nostalgic tale of love found and lost, echoing The Band’s The Weight with its call-and-answer chorus augmented by Lindsay Lou’s vocal. I’m One Of Those stays in Muir, the village near Ionia where he was raised – ‘seeing the ghosts walk down the sidewalk’. The gorgeous gospel-flecked, Louvin Brothers-style Wrestling An Angel is another standout: ‘Precious creator/ Maker of time/ Please don’t you let me/ Waste all of mine.’
Strings can certainly thank his stepfather Terry Barber for introducing him to the bluegrass greats Doc Watson, Del McCoury, David Grisman, Bill Monroe, Tony Rice, John Hartford and Earl Scruggs before the boy discovered Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and heavy metal. He is among the greats now. ‘Terry raised me and taught me how to wipe my ass, tie my shoes, and play guitar,’ Strings said of the man he made an album of covers with in 2022, Me/And/Dad.
But mom remains the overarching influence. The raw Still I Crash was written not long after her death and Strings talks directly to her. He is her legacy. ‘She was such a beautiful person, so creative, and I’m her greatest creation,’ he told the New York Times in a fascinating, generously candid interview. Strings has a young son who provides a precious incentive in his continued sobriety. ‘My goal is to be there for him, forever.’
The little devil on his shoulder reminds him that he is playing for his own survival away from those tempestuous times in a meth house – ‘all this generational trauma has to stop with me’.
Whose wall is this
Suddenly stands in my yard?
Aloof and unmoving
And scathing and hard
Like the face of lost time
Embattled and scarred
Dreaming of all yet to come
When the light will play tricks
On the innocent sky
Bring it to close
Like the day by and by
Time will stand still
For both you and I
Just waiting to carry us home
Memories of his mother will always carry Billy Strings home.
Spent way too long on Poki last weekend — started with one puzzle game and ended up trying like five different ones. Everything loads right in the browser which is nice when you just want something quick without installing anything. The variety is honestly what keeps me coming back.