Category: Series of posts
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Top 40 Over 40.4: Prarie Wind
I don’t usually pay much attention to stories about the circumstances in which a particular record came to be. However, the stories about the timing of this record are an exception. Neil Young made this record in Nashville in 2005, shortly before going to the hospital for surgery for a brain aneurysm. Combined with the […]
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Top 40 Over 40.3: Dimanche a Bamako
My next fave record in this series is Dimanche a Bamako by Amadou & Meriam, which came out in 2005. I have to thank this record for introducing me to the amazing music that has come out of Mali over the years. I heard this album on the radio after it came out on WERS […]
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Debt.3: South Dakota
Ever wonder why you get so many credit card offers from banks in South Dakota? You know, those loud envelopes with low introductory APR’s that turn around and clobber you with 25% interest rates a few months later? Rates that bury folks in debt, just like the arid storms that buried much of South Dakota […]
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Top 40 Over 40.2: Let England Shake
When I quit making records in 2001, I had a lot of different thoughts bolting around my brain. One of them was that since musicians almost always do their best work in their 20’s, I was heading for a period of diminishing creative returns, even if that didn’t mean diminishing rewards in terms of money […]
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Top 40 Over 40.1: She walked in through the out door
Emmylou Harris : Coat Of Many Colours (1977) I’ve just finished listening to Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris. It’s a phenomenal record. Why have I never heard anyone talk about it? Below the above picture you’ll find a link to an early clip of her covering another underrated songwriter, Dolly Parton. Could it be that […]
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Debt.2
“We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art […]
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Debt.1
Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.) The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular. He used to teach at Yale but moved […]
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A Real Misty Mountain Hop
I’ve been listening to this sehr schöen album called “Schwarzwaldfahrt” repeatedly this week. It was recorded by two improvisational musicians, Han Bennik (from the Netherlands) and Peter Brötzmann, (from Germany,) in 1977 (I think.) They loaded up a car full of instruments and recording gear and traveled to record in the middle of the black […]
johnhdavis / inundation records 