It's good to know what you like, but only up to a point - at a certain point, having too defined an idea of what you like becomes an obstacle to openness and to fresh experience, and sometimes I wonder if my own tastes in music are heading in that direction. But there's nothing to shake off thoughts of that kind like hearing something new and great, squarely in the strike zone of 'what I like' - in this case, modern alt-country-folk - but cutting through in a way that reminds me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place.
It's really first song "Aeroplane" on this 2007 record from the Everybodyfields, hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee, and showing that they've got a way with this kind of genre-straddling americana. Four bars of strummed guitar, then come the fiddles and steel string, a yearning male vocalist (Sam Quinn) joined soon by plangent female harmonies (you can never help but think of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in this kind of connexion, but they really are both the archetype and the exemplar), and we're off for three and a half minutes of confident, high and lonesome balladeering that struck me, hard, the first time I was listening to it, and doesn't seem to be wearing off at all - it's the kind of song that lodges in the throat and in the chest, that seems like a single falling swoon from start to finish. It's wonderful.
Next song "Lonely Anywhere" is gorgeous too, Jill Andrews taking centre stage on a slow, sad one that falls halfway between Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, but more fragile and abandoned than either. And the rest of the album, while it doesn't reach the heights of that opening pair, goes on in a similar vein; I mentioned Gram & Emmylou before, but in fact the most immediate reference point for the Everybodyfields is Whiskeytown, if Caitlin Cary had done more of the singing. All in all, a find, and a reminder, and the ideal soundtrack for this time of year, as the year begins to wind down and we fall towards summer.
It's really first song "Aeroplane" on this 2007 record from the Everybodyfields, hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee, and showing that they've got a way with this kind of genre-straddling americana. Four bars of strummed guitar, then come the fiddles and steel string, a yearning male vocalist (Sam Quinn) joined soon by plangent female harmonies (you can never help but think of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris in this kind of connexion, but they really are both the archetype and the exemplar), and we're off for three and a half minutes of confident, high and lonesome balladeering that struck me, hard, the first time I was listening to it, and doesn't seem to be wearing off at all - it's the kind of song that lodges in the throat and in the chest, that seems like a single falling swoon from start to finish. It's wonderful.
Next song "Lonely Anywhere" is gorgeous too, Jill Andrews taking centre stage on a slow, sad one that falls halfway between Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch, but more fragile and abandoned than either. And the rest of the album, while it doesn't reach the heights of that opening pair, goes on in a similar vein; I mentioned Gram & Emmylou before, but in fact the most immediate reference point for the Everybodyfields is Whiskeytown, if Caitlin Cary had done more of the singing. All in all, a find, and a reminder, and the ideal soundtrack for this time of year, as the year begins to wind down and we fall towards summer.
