Wilson taught himself to play guitar at age 30 and—with a wife, three kids and a career as a technician at a fiberglass manufacturing plant—he released his first LP at age 35. The year was 1975 and the LP was New Beginnings, released on Monument Records (home to records by Roy Orbison, Kris Kristofferson, Tony Joe White, Willie Nelson and Robert Mitchum). “Back then I was making money—now I’m making music,” Wilson said of his new beginning. I’m really fucking inspired by that. Next time you’re taking a sober inventory of your life’s checklist, in fact, feel free to file him next to Leonard Cohen. I certainly do.  Allow this comparison to add some much-needed levity to the post-inventory emotional tableau you’re left to lay gaze upon, and not because these two didn’t “begin” their body of artistic work until their 30s. The number—Malcolm Gladwell be damned—is  less important than the fact that they risked jumping into the kid’s pool at a time when there were many on the sidelines who probably had plenty to say about their ability to stay afloat on the shallow end.

New Beginnings is the album that I recommend you dive into first. My favorite song, however, is a gorgeous number called “Loose Change“, the title track to his third LP from 1977. This goes out like a werewolf-bound silver bullet to fans of Townes Van Zandt’s first seven LPs and Willie Nelson’s in-betweener ’70s material like Phases and Stages and Redheaded Stranger (neither of which really fit into either of his more lucrative and famous outlaw country or standards crooning phases). It’s a tale told from the voice of a pan-handling wino, and I just love to hear Wilson sing it:

Living ain’t easy, but dying ain’t, too / And hanging on just leaves you like me / I’d leave women and whiskey alone if I was you /
But I ain’t and I ain’t likely to be
The reason for coming up to you this way / Wasn’t my story, but simply to say
Loose change, loose change / Have you got some to waste / Not for my supper / But to buy me a taste
Loose change, loose change / Have you got some to spare / When I drink my fillin’ / The good Lord be willin’
Someday I’ll have some loose change to share

Wilson first landed on my radar (as I’m sure is the case with most of his fans my age and younger) when I saw the documentary Heartworn Highways a few years back when it was reissued on DVD. The film (which also features Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle and David Allan Coe, among others) opens up to Wilson looking absolutely ragged but sounding golden, the total embodiment of the outlaw country musician from that time, tightrope-walking the seemingly divergent images of the hard livin’ badboy and the wise grandfatherly sage, imbued with a sense of poetic urgency and emotional vulnerability. His pockmark-chiseled face is rife with mythological import, a physical manifestation of the rivet-laden dynamic of his deep voice.

The songs that Wilson was making did not align with the taste of popular country music fans in the mid- to late-70s, a fact which ultimately led to his leaving the music industry altogether in 1980. The four LPs’ worth of songs that he did release, however, are the stuff of outsider folk junkie gold. Tone angels smile down upon these songs, just slightly too smart to really go for the big hooks, yet soulful enough to not get lost in the monochromatic morass. Though it’s terribly sad that Wilson is no longer with us—especially after he released his first album in 29 years last year (on Drag City) and we maybe were in store for more songs—I can’t help but feel that this is maybe the start of a new chapter for Wilson (the storied Final Chapter), one in which his material might finally get the sort of acclaim that’s due. He had a lot to share, and it all started with him stepping up and saying it out loud with a little melody. His new beginning is one for the ages, and hopefully will inspire many others.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in Bloomington, Indiana, where many graduate students take solace in stories of starting a meaningful, creative well into one’s thirties.  Ahem. Previously, Chris has brought us wonderful tunes from the likes of Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion, Mad Season, Donnie & Joe Emerson, Pip Proud, and Dwight Twilley.

I remember where I was. I was sitting in my old office, where I worked from 2004 to 2008. The only window in the room was my computer screen. Man, did I see a lot through that screen during those four years. I remember somebody cold-sending me the link without any other info. I clicked it and there was Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Dwight Twilley, a man whose music I knew very little about aside from the fact that it was respected by the nerdy-yet-unimpeachable power pop literati. I got a crash course. Looking like a Doors-era Val Kilmer at the keys, Twilley leads his band through a hall of fame-worthy lip synch performance in the video (shot for the ill-fated Saturday morning UK kids show The W.A.C.K.O. Show), giving words, melody & boogie to something I’ve been feeling my whole life.

All my life I’m looking for the magic /  I’ve been looking for the magic

Never had it been put so well to me, made so simple. Looking for the magic. It’s what’s been driving me since adolescence, propelling me through life. My pursuit of the magic is, for better or worse, what’s been establishing both my hierarchy of priorities as well as my criteria for happiness. It’s the hydra-headed good and bad angel moored between my shoulder blades with a tight grip on my reins as I gallop through life. Coming in so many sizes & shapes, it is not always easy to find.  But when you do find the magic, nothing need be left to imagination.

No doubt about it, this song has the magic. Its production (credited to Bob Schaper and Oister, the latter of which was the original name of the Dwight Twilley Band) is perfect. The keys set the pace, the bass sets the bop and the slap delay vocals are the sirens on top of this streetcar in hot pursuit of ecstasy. It’s unclear whether Twilley is aware that he’s swimming in it, barely keeping his head above crazed water, nearly drowning in magic as he asks for more. Another heaping portion, please.

It was released in 1977, on his second album Twilley Don’t Mind, on Shelter Records–a label owned by Leon Russell and also home to J.J. Cale, Russell himself, The Gap Band and up-and-coming rocker Tom Petty (yes, that’s a pre-stardom TP on bass in the video, looking VERY Janice Muppet from The Electric Mayhem). It’s a perfect song. It’s a modus operandi.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in Bloomington, Indiana, and he’d like you to know that this entry technically classifies as “April,” which means that today is April 34th.  Adjust your calendars, and expect a May joint anytime now.  In the meantime, refresh yourself with his magic words on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion, Mad Season, Donnie & Joe Emerson, and Pip Proud.

We were praying at the end of time / Praying for release
And we said “Hey, Gus” / He drove the bus
“Is God really made of love?” / I asked Gus, “Is God really made of love?”

In just the few short minutes, Proud re-establishes his own peculiar worldview; one which he would flesh out over the next few years in a series of new albums released by the esteemed Emperor Jones (whose impeccable roster of outsider songwriters—second only to Drag City’s in the heart of this ditch digging leftist—reigned supreme throughout the ’90s). A label press release from ‘98 nailed his vibe when it said that Proud “wasn’t reinventing the wheel, he was levitating above it, laughing and waving below to all the trappings of the earth.” Proud’s existentialist worldview—of a particularly compassionate variety—is dusted with a mystical luminescence. He’s seeking to know God. And you get the impression he’s been screaming into the abyss for a very long time, seeking acknowledgment of some sort, yet has gone unrecognized. So he turns to the wise Gus. 

He held my hand so limply  / Like a lily of the field / ”Hey, Gus, is God really made of love?”
We are made of violent storms of drought and floods and fires / He had a few teeth missing / Like he was a garlic flower
But he spoke to us / ”Hey, Gus, is God really made of love?” / ”Hey, Gus, is God really made of love?”

Gus is reluctant to go on record. Proud, however, is not easily discouraged. His craggy voice is full of a childlike natural wonder, as if Werner Herzog took a long soak in the bath of time and emerged, toes soft as slugs, preternaturally hopeful and willing to sing.

I ate some dirt and wondered / I wandered / On about a million years sorta crept by me / With all that dirt and desolation
I saw cities rise & fall and all things encompassed and passed into compost / ”Hey, Gus, is God really made of love?”

Spectral guitar sounds take shape above a low jangle and hum. A violin sobs in the bushes. The particular patina of tape hiss contributes to the sense of decay, suggesting an emotional & artistic credibility usually reserved for the audio verite of field recordings. Following in the tradition of the pop devotional, it is decidedly less dewy-eyed than George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (the high water mark of said tradition). Proud’s questioning takes the shape of a mantra, but is a different sort of prayer than Harrison’s.  Unlearned in the concept of privilege, he feels he’s entitled to an answer.

And now I pray at the end of time / With a fervor that comes more with boredom than fear
I pray for a release with the tenderness of my mother’s breast / ”Hey, Gus, is God really made of love?” I shouted
He turned as he burnt the rubber and he replied / ”Sure he is. Sure he is. Sure he is.”

And, with that, he is satisfied. For now.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in Bloomington, Indiana. Dig his previous thought-grenades on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion, Mad Season, and Donnie & Joe Emerson.

I hope you’ve hit play by now. 

Knowing next to nothing about Donnie & Joe, I’m left to construct my own mythology based on what breadcrumbs have been left behind. ”Baby” comes from the album Dreamin’ Wild, which was released in 1979 as the first (and most likely only) release on Enterprise and Co Records. It bears all the hallmarks of a privately-pressed LP and was most likely funded by the parents of young Donnie & Joe, who appear to be somewhere between bonin’ and votin’ ages. Much ado can be made of the earnestness (a cynic would call it cheesiness) of the record cover. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there.

A downtempo ballad, “Baby” is, it would seem, filled with soul.  Yet how in the hell could these two prom night casualties have anything that could be even remotely construed as soul? Isn’t soul — like wisdom — something you earn over time, as you meet timeless criteria that was written in the stars long before man’s beating heart had taken shape, before the philosophy of aesthetics & character had ever been articulated? I imagine that most of us hope that’s the case. But I’m not ready to bequeath such an honor to the brothers Emerson, whose teenage souls heard nary an alarm bell when they not only posed for the glamour shot with butterfly collar shirts unbuttoned halfway down their hairless chests, but then opted to immortalize themselves for all of history by actually choosing one of the shots as their LP cover.  From where does this soulful sound come?

Unless there’s some Milli Vanilli action going on, these guys may be simply illustrating that soul is an expression, a veneer. “Baby” is soulful because it mimics what we understand as sounding soulful. These two go-getters may have simply listened to their favorite records, targeted the most soulful word they could (”baby”) and repeated it over and over again (mumbling the rest of the words with abandon, while every once in a while throwing in a “makin’ love”,  ”moonlight” or “sandy beach”). And they totally nailed it. I’ve heard “Baby” over 70 times in the last month and it’s not getting tired.

(Thanks to Soul Sides for putting this on my radar.)

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in ever-soulful Bloomington, Indiana. Bone up on his previous entries on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion and Mad Season.

The members of Mad Season (members of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees), have had their fair share of nights away at sea. “Wake Up,” the first song on their lone album Above, is a mini-epic document of their grasping into the darkness, seeking some shore. The steady-yet-woozy marimba (played by drummer Barrett Martin) adds a crucial sixth sense that too many rock songs lack, and makes the piece feel more like Terry Callier, Angelo Badalamenti or even Bitches Brew than a grunge-era Seattle supergroup. That’s the revelation of Mad Season: it shakes up the lazy (but easy to succumb to) notion that the grunge tidal wave was a shallow one-trick pony, more style than substance. Under its heavy canopy of negative space, it feels more like jazz than rock.

Over a minute into the song, Layne Staley’s inimitable, soulful growl surfaces:

Wake up young man, it’s time to wake up / Your love affair has got to go / For ten long years, for ten long years / The leaves to rake up

We’ve all got leaves to rake up, but Staley’s leaves, caked in primeval dirt, are heavier than yours. That’s why he registers, and why you believe him.  Later, he’ll break the calm with the horrifying “For a little peace from God you plead,” while Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready solos as though he’s still trying to earn his way into the classic rock pantheon.  An awe-inspiring peak.

It’s tough to talk about this song, or anything Staley was involved with, without talking about what a heavyweight he was. Aside from a few ham-fisted lyrics, there wasn’t anything about him that wasn’t tough. You might not favor his band or his songs, but there was no doubt that he was the real deal; a dark rock anti-hero. When Alice in Chains released Dirt, they openly promoted it as a concept album about Staley’s ongoing addiction to heroin, which eventually led to his death by overdose in 2002. Layne Staley as Doc Holliday.

Like the coast on the horizon, I sense an all-out Alice In Chains renaissance happening in the hard rock/metal realm in 2010, not just with the reformed band releasing an album that is apparently quite good (and quietly approaching gold sales status), but also with an onslaught of artists openly proclaiming them as a creative influence on their work. We’ll see…

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana–where flannel is remarkably still very hip. Dig his previous entries on Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, and Dion.

We leave a canyon behind us each summer. Each year its yawn grows more massive, and the echo from the shout that we wail from its rim resounds deeper and longer.  Dion knew this. By 1972, the former pop sensation had long since outgrown the narrow parameters that the pop charts afforded teen idols (heroin addiction didn’t fit Tiger Beat, I suppose) and was a half-decade into making singer-songwriter albums well below the mainstream’s radar.  It was this year that he released the album Suite for Late Summer which contains the sublime “Didn’t You Change“, one of my favorite odes to coming of age (ranking with Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” and John Duigan’s cinematic masterwork The Year My Voice Broke).  The reflective vibe of the song is established with an acoustic guitar introduction, soon followed by stately piano and wistful harmonica.  Then his voice comes in and you realize what made Dion a star in the first place.

Wasn’t it fun / chasing the sun / for a blur of wings streaking the air.

It’s a wiser voice now, with more to say and plenty of patience for the telling. He knows when to sing with the pedal steel and when to let it sing for him. It’s a chorus-less song, but never do you feel it lacking for emotional moments.

Didn’t you change / oh didn’t you rearrange / my life with a wave of your hand / happy to be oh just running with me / leaving footprints behind in the sand.

That Dion didn’t repeat that verse later as a chorus is the most magically restrained aspect of this song, and perhaps of his entire career. A decade earlier he certainly would have repeated it. And it would have been the right thing to do. It would have been a massive hit. Perhaps this restraint is less a sign of growing wiser, and more a signal of Dion losing his edge? Hard to tell. And beside the point.  In ”Didn’t You Change”, Dion achieved his fullest expression as an artist. And that is a beautiful thing.

Why couldn’t we reach from silence to speech / like a river that longs for the sea / stopping to share an occasional prayer / in the shade of a leaf-heavy tree.

The tale goes that we all have a season where the game changes for us, that developmental fulcrum by which all transitions are measured. And for some reason it’s easier to spot that season when — for many days in a row — the sun is high in the sky, our shirts are off and a body of water sits close by.  And we — enjoying that truly epic season; the one for the books. Dion had his. You can hear it.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana–where summer never ends, but is only paused for a few months each year. Here’s his entry on Van Morrison, and Caroline Crawford.

Portia Sabin: I think labels are caught in a cultural bind: No one really wants to know what a label does; it’s like the sausage factory. Even long-established bands have a hard time talking about what labels do.
…
Mac McCaughan: I don’t know. I think that bands are into labels because bands — at least most of the ones we all work with — are music fans. Music fans, like baseball fans, also have a sense of history and an interest in the trajectory of things, not just the current moment. So, when we toured in New Zealand for the first time, I was as excited about meeting the people at Flying Nun as anything.
Chris Swanson: I agree. Music fans want as much information no matter how esoteric it may seem to a casual fan.
Portia Sabin: I agree that bands are into labels; I’m talking about people understanding what labels do. I think there’s a semi-willful lack of understanding.
Chris Swanson: Now that labels don’t run studios as much as they used to, it definitely is more abstract what our role is.

A great roundtable discussion about the future of indie labels–featuring our friend Chris Swanson, as well as Jagjaguwar’s Darius Van Arman–over at Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix blog.  There’s tons more great stuff–including lots more from Merge’s McCaughan and Matador’s Gerard Cosloy–where this brief bit came from.

Little substantial information exists about Caroline Crawford, but in this case I’ll use my ignorance as an advantage.  The lack of a factual framework only gives me more space to mythologize as to the origin of that voice, and to co-author a context worthy of the dreamy journey on which “Riding On Your Love” takes me. This is a song that I strap myself in for when cueing up—not due to its velocity or power, but because anchoring my body down in some fashion allows my senses to soar. What fun is a kite, after all, if not tied to a child’s wrist?

Produced and written in 1978 by Bohannon (most known for a namecheck in Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”), “Riding,” like Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” occupies that cosmic nexus of soul, funk and slow disco.  Atmosphere is king, the lighting is impeccable, the snifter overflows, and the joints are pre-rolled.  The dance floor is surrounded by cushy couches on which to spread out and lie down: this is not an incongruity, but a balance. When we boogie to this song, we do so with sensual abandon —eyes closed, head back, shoulders rolling, arms swaying and fingers wiggling like bait in a fresh-stocked stream.

The guitar comes not from the speakers as much as from the walls, the drums & bass from the floor and the vocals from the chandelier. Crawford’s not here to tell a story, at least not the type that we’re accustomed to hearing. Her minimal lyrics interweave with wordless vocalizing to form an impressionistic, trance-inducing aria. That the song occupies space in the way that it does is a testament to Bohannon’s genius. That it fills the room with presence — the kind that never requires a second introduction — is a testament to Crawford’s.

Do stop by. I’ll be here all night.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from within the marble-lined confines of Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana to present his song of the month. Here’s last month’s entry.

The crown jewel of 1974’s hitless Veedon Fleece–definitely his weirdest record since Astral Weeks–“Masked Man” is mid-period Van in peak form, just under 30 years of age and wailing with a most specific strain of weird Celtic passion: it’s transcendental acoustic R&B. He is REACHING for those notes and nailing them. It’s a petrified, isolated tune (”Oh ain’t it lonely / When you’re livin’ with a gun / Well you can’t slow down and you can’t turn ’round / And you can’t trust anyone / You just sit there like a butterfly / And you’re all encased in glass / You’re so fragile you just may break / And you don’t know who to ask”), that somehow feels hopeful through the sheer force of vocal will. From his thick Irish chest he forces a gale through his pipes and out his mouth. It’s astonishing how much sound he forces out that small hole, like an ancient balloon mouth being squeaked by a sphinx.

And it sounds incredible with the windows down.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from the deepest reaches of Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in lovely Bloomington, Indiana. Chris will be presenting a song of the month here for the foreseeable future. Welcome.