Sniffles

Leö caught the sniffles yesterday - he's had a lot of company lately, so a cold wouldn't be surprising. I hate it - no, anything he comes close to scares me. So he can stay away from being sick for the time being.

Here's a couple pics of him, one with Jack, who has taken an immense shine to him.

pic w/eyes open




pic w/jack

State of Country Music

There seems to be a battle among music lovers over what country music is, and where it should go. On one hand are the Nashville Music Row types who follow the Clear Channel market, chasing whatever the latest thing that worked and repeating it ad nauseum. Gretchen Wilson is the thing? Great - let's get tons of odes to being a stupid hillbilly redneck smalltown bumfuck. Let's get Big & Rich to write Faith Hill a tune about being backwater all this time - maybe people will then forget that she was a Loreal model and that her last album cast her as being an uptown elite - not that anyone noticed anyway, given its sales.

On the other hand, you have No Depression elitists - they're the new breed of college educated, upper income urban dwellers, that supplanted the folk movement of the 60's with today's alt-country/Americana, snobbish music fans who think they are the true descendants of the Carter Family brought to earth to wrest country music away from Nashville. They worship at the altar of Gram Parsons, and all the bands that Uncle Tupelo has wrought. Whiskeytown, The Waco Brothers, and the entire Bloodshot Records label travel down this road.

Both camps attempt to claim Hank, Johnny and Willie as their own, and both have merit. But while these two groups have been racing in parallel to see where to take (and how far they can separate) Country music, prominent artists from each camp have been looking backward, offering their take on what it used to be, with interesting results.


Martina McBride, one of the most prominent female singers in Nashville the past decade, just release Timeless, a collection of interpretations of some of country's greatest from mostly the 60's and 70's. Ryan Adams, an artist the alt-country faithful wish would come back to the fold, issued Jacksonville City Nights, a collection of originals based on his idea of what country music from that same era sounded like.

Martina's version of country is actually wildly different than the version she typically records. So much so that she even cast aside her producer, and recorded it herself (he adds liner notes and is thanked in the credits). She only used vintage instruments and mics, went with less instrumentation than normal and sang in a much more restrained manner. The thought that went into this resulted in easily her best sounding record ever. Her song selection is impeccable, pulling out chestnuts from Ernest Tubb, Jeannie Pruett and Sammi Smith - artists that most young'uns don't even know, and giving them new life. And Martina often uses the same phrasing and cadence when singing the songs, chopping syllables when she might have stretched it out on a new song - this was particularly noticed and appreciated on her equally heartbreaking run through Connie Smith's Once a Day. Sometimes the emotion falls flat in her singing, but it's a minor quibble with such a massive and successful undertaking.

Ryan Adams second release of 2005, Jacksonville is a more concise and entertaining effort than his earlier, and still quite good Cold Roses. It's also his second album with his backing band The Cardinals, and they are proving to be as adept at mimicing musical genres as he is at writing to them. They honky tonk their piano runs, there's tons of steel geetar, and the mood just feels old. The cover art also does a great job at imitating the album covers of that era (much the same way the new Faith Hill video imitates the styles and Lee Ann Womack styled her album cover).However, his songs aren't as immediately catchy as on Timeless. This doesn't mean they aren't good, however, as "A Kiss Before I Go" is a fantastic drinking song, and "My Heart Is Broken" has a timeless feel to its balladry. It would be hard to compare his songs on this record to those of Timeless, as those were songs written my many of the greatest writers of any genre.

And the winner? Country music fans. They are getting some first-rate music from artists trying to expand their boundaries by looking backward, and find that the past is rich resource. For Nashville, it is a way to celebrate the legacy in a classy manner often forgotten by many of the hamhanded guys out there. For Americana, it's a way of remembering that Nashville is Music City USA for a reason - the sounds they created there were the template.

Cardiologist Visit

Brenda and I took Leö to the cardiologist yesterday for his bi-weekly visit. He continues to gain weight (yeah!) and is only now starting to get the fluid buildup common with babies with a hole in their heart. So we got some prescriptions to flush out his fluids and moderate his blood pressure, which should keep the blood from repeatedly going to his lungs.

The doctor also said he has good muscle tone for a baby with Down Syndrome. I don't exactly know what that might mean for the future, but for now I can only take that as a positive sign.

Leö is eating better yesterday and today than he did on Tuesday, which was kind of a fiasco. I was in charge of giving him his bottle, but he pushed it away for two consecutive feedings. This was bad on two levels: We wasted two bottles of milk; and poor Brenda didn't get much sleep that night, as he fed four times that night - every two hours. We're all tired at the house, none more than Brenda.

Musically, I picked up a nice collection - the 3-cd A Treasury of Northern Soul - there are really no liner notes to speak of, so I'll have to do some research into what labels and locales each artist is from, but so far it sounds like a solid in unspectacular compilation. I also want to write about the new Bettye LaVette - will do so when I get a bigger moment - but it's shaping up to be one of my favorites of the year.

First Post

This is going to be a work in progress, until I get my footing about the technical aspects of the blog down, and the focus of what to post. My initial intention was nothing original, just a venue to write about some of the music I have been listening too lately. While that may be easy enough, here is a quick list of (some) of the music I have acquired in the month of October:

1. Shreveport Southern Soul - The Murco Story
2. CocoRosie - Noah's Ark
3. Ted Nash - La Espada De La Noche
4. Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye
5. Portastatic - Bright Ideas
6. Marty Erlich - News On The Rail
7. Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine
8. Greg Dulli - Amber Headlights
9. Children of Nuggets - Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era
10. Atmosphere - God Loves Ugly
11. Slint - Spiderland
12. Sonny Clark - Dial 'S' for Sonny
13. Joe Henry - Tiny Voices
14. Betty LaVette - I've Got My Own Hell To Raise
15. The Roots - Tipping Point
16. Liz Phair - Liz Phair
17. Martina McBride - Timeless
18. Aimee Mann - The Forgotten Arm
19. Iron and Wine/Calexico - In The Reins
20. Happy Apple - The Peace Between Our Companies

Do I like all of it? Don't know. Hell, I can't say I've even heard all of it. But I want to. That was part of my intent for the blog - to force myself to sit long enough to give the music I acquire a well deserved listen before I move on to the next thing.

Most blogs about music that I've seen tend to focus on one style of music, the writer's favorite. Which is fine - they should write about what they love. Myself, I tend to devour styles and artists like I may never hear them again. So I'll go through a Barbra Streisand phase, then a funk phase, then decide Wham! was it, then zip through all nine Beethoven Symphonies - no, I need to hear all the Blue Note albums featuring Grachan Moncur, just after I listen to this Carter Family compilation. You get the picture.

It's a great big musical world out there. Forty thousand plus albums get released every year. I want to hear every damn one of them.

Now that I've stated what the blog is about, I need to say, that that might not be what the blog is about. Brenda gave birth to our third child on October 9. If I'd been quicker, I would have named him after John Lennon, with whom he shares a birthday, but alas, I settled for Leö Gerard.
He's a total joy to have in the house, and Brenda and I are so happy with the way Jack and Will have taken to him. Leö was born with a ventricular septal defect, a large hole in his heart, that will require surgery in several weeks. He is eating well and is healthy despite this, so our main focus (besides knowing more as much about this procedure as possible) is to fatten the boy up so he's big and healthy when it is time for the operation.

Leö also has Down Syndrome, so that is a second step in our education process with this third child. We have already received a wealth of information from friends and from the the Down Syndrome Association of Minnesota, and add to that Brenda's special ed background, and we're still not quite prepared for the road ahead with this little guy. But we're looking forward to seeing where it takes the five of us.