Posts Tagged ‘Allison Moorer’

Today’s Top 5: Sunday, 9/1/19

Posted: September 1, 2019 in 2010s, 2019, Allison Moorer, Courtney Marie Andrews, Crazy Horse, Neil Young, Pono, Roberta Flack, Simon & Garfunkel, Today's Top 5, Top 5
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It’s early Sunday morn as I write, and Roberta Flack is killing me softly with her songs. My trusty Tribit headphones cover my ears, and – though Bluetooth capable – are plugged into my Macbook Pro via an M-Audio Micro DAC. It’s a plug-in sound card that, as the picture shows, is just a tad larger than a thumb drive, and enables me to listen to 24-bit, 192-kHz music files in all their glory without first copying said files to my Pono player. 

A MacBook Pro can output 24/96 through its headphone jack, of course, by switching the settings in the MIDI utility, and the sound quality is quite good for both high-res files and the Neil Young Archives, which streams up to 24/192. But this $100 Micro DAC improves the sound, be it through my headphones or solid Logitech Z623 THX-certified 2.1 computer speakers.

I should mention that, a few summers back, I stopped using the Pono player on a regular basis. It overheated once, then twice, and then a few more times during the summers of ’16 and ’17 while I was out and about, and then, while listening in our den one hot-and-humid afternoon, it didn’t just overheat, but fried the 128g micro-SD card inside. (I made the “mistake” of listening while charging.) By that point, however, I’d already grown tired not just of adding and subtracting files from my micro-SD cards, but of toting two gadgets around.

Around the same time, I decided to give Apple Music a go. While there was a drop-off in quality, there wasn’t a drop-off in what – to me, at least – is the most important factor when it comes to music: emotional quotient. And, truthfully, what I hear via my iPhone or MacBook Pro is better than what I enjoyed via the Realistic stereo system my parents gifted me with for Christmas ’77  and the Realistic cassette deck I installed in my little brown Chevette in ‘85, to say nothing of staticky AM radio. All things are relative, in other words. Sometimes “good enough” is enough.

Yet, when at my desk and in the mood, I often fire up the Vox app and play some of the high-res files I collected from 2014 through early ’17 – or just stream from the NYA site. How to enjoy that music to its fullest? While there are many options, some of which are rather pricey, for me right now it’s the M-Audio Micro DAC. It gets the job done.

And, with that, here’s today’s Top 5: Sunday, 9/1/19. 

1) Roberta Flack – “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” A few years back, Diane and I watched Killing Me Softly: The Roberta Flack Story, a one-hour documentary about Roberta’s ascent to stardom, on (I think) Amazon Prime. For me, it was something of a revelation – I picked up a few of her albums from the Pono Store in the weeks that followed. This, her rendition of the Simon & Garfunkel classic (found on her 1971 Quiet Fire album), is just mesmerizing. 

2) Simon & Garfunkel – “American Tune.” One of Paul Simon’s greatest songs, from his 1973 There Goes Rhymin’ Simon album, was given the Simon & Garfunkel treatment during their now-legendary 1981 Central Park concert. The lyrics are as appropriate now as they were in ‘73: “And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease/I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/or driven to its knees/But it’s all right, it’s all right/We’ve lived so well so long/Still, when I think of the road/we’re traveling on/I wonder what went wrong/I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong.”

3) Courtney Marie Andrews & Deer Tick – “You’re the One That I Want.” Speaking of duets… and to lighten the mood… there’s this clip of a Grease cover, which I just discovered last night. Trust me when I say, “It’s electrifying!”

4) Courtney Marie Andrews – “Downtown Train.” Speaking of Courtney, she’s part of the forthcoming collection of Tom Waits songs, Come on Up to the House, which also includes Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer, Rosanne Cash, Iris DeMent, Phoebe Bridgers and Patty Griffin, among others.

5) Allison Moorer – “The Rock and the Hill.” One album I’m anticipating is Allison Moorer’s Blood, which will be released alongside her memoir of the same name in late October. If this tasty track is any indication, it’s going to be flat-out great. (If you’re so inclined, head over to Allison’s website and pre-order both it and the book. And then check out her online journal, which is always an interesting read.)

And one bonus…

6) Neil Young & Crazy Horse – “Milky Way.” Another album I’m looking forward to is Colorado, which is also due out in October. It features Neil backed by a reconstituted Crazy Horse (with Nils Lofgren on guitar in place of Frank “Poncho” Sampredo). This, the first single, is both stirring and subdued at once.

Today’s Top 5: Of Questions & Faith (aka Joan of Arcadia, Part II)

Posted: July 8, 2018 in 2010s, 2018, Allison Moorer, Bruce Springsteen, Bryan MacLean, Joan of Arcadia, Kasey Chambers, Maria McKee, Natalie Merchant, Paul Weller, Shelby Lynne, Top 5, Van Morrison
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We finished the second and final season of Joan of Arcadia yesterday. For those of you counting at home, that means we whipped through the 23 Season 1 episodes and 22 Season 2 episodes in exactly 22 days. One of the things I like about the series is that it avoids the typical pitfalls associated with dramas that explore faith and humanity. Within the show, as in real life, faith leads to questions, doubts and realizations, but never easy answers.

One of my favorite moments comes near the end of its run, in the “Common Thread” installment. God commands Joan to return to knitting, a hobby she stopped when she was a kid. As always, there’s far more to the episode than just that; we don’t just see Joan casting on, stitching and purling for the next 40+ minutes. I’ll skip the rest of the story, however, to the moment in question, when Joan gently rebuffs her folks, who are trying to ease her guilt regarding a bad decision made by her former boyfriend, Adam. “I mean, we’re all connected like the scarf. One piece of yarn, if you cut it up into little pieces, it’s useless. You can’t make anything out of it. I am responsible, partly. We all are…for everything that we touch and everything that touches us.”

It’s never us vs. them, as much as we sometimes wish it so. It’s us vs. us. 

And, with that, here’s today’s Top 5: Of Questions & Faith (aka Joan of Arcadia, Part II)…

1) Kasey Chambers – “Abraham”

2) Van Morrison – “When Will I Ever Learn to Walk in God”

3) Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer – “Into My Arms”

4) Bruce Springsteen – “Rocky Ground”

5) Paul Weller – “Can You Heal Us (Holy Man)”

And two bonuses…

6) Natalie Merchant – “I May Know the Word”

7) Maria McKee and Bryan MacLean – “Sweet Dr. Jesus”

Today’s Top 5: Personal & Universal

Posted: February 17, 2018 in 2010s, 2018, Allison Moorer, Bette Smith, Courtney Marie Andrews, H.C. McEntire, Sarah Louise, Shelby Lynne, Top 5, Whitney Rose
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Thursday night, Diane and I journeyed to the Sellersville Theater in Sellersville, Pa., to see the country-flavored singer-songwriter sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer.

As expected, the set was almost the same as when we saw the two last August at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, given that the tour is in support of their note-perfect covers album Not Dark Yet. And, as expected, this show was as magical as that one. The lone change of substance consisted of them swapping their cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium” for Shelby’s “Miss You Sissy” (from her I Am Shelby Lynne album).

One performance that crawled into my subconscious this night was “Is It Too Much,” the lone original from Not Dark Yet. It’s a stark, powerful piece about the heavy emotional weight they’ve carried since their teen years, yet the lyrics are applicable to all who’ve weathered tough times. The mark of much, though certainly not all, great art is that it’s simultaneously personal and universal, restrictive yet expansive.

Live, it was even more stirring and spellbinding than on album.

Another highlight: their cover of Jason Isbell’s “The Color of a Cloudy Day.”

During the show, Allison – whose online journal is littered with interesting essays – discussed a piece she’s writing for a friend’s book about places. She said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that where we’re from shapes us as much as who we’re from. Think about it. (As Shelby then exclaimed, and this is a near-exact quote, “that’s some deep shit!”)

And, with that, here’s today’s Top 5: Personal & Universal.

1) Courtney Marie Andrews – “The Kindness of Strangers.” I shared this song from Courtney’s forthcoming May Your Kindness Remain album a few weeks back, but not this video, which she released on Thursday. She talks about it, and other things (including once crashing on Chris Pratt’s couch), in this GQ UK article.

2) H.C. McEntire – “A Lamb, A Dove.” The lyric video for the lead track from McEntire’s solo debut, Lionheart, is little more than a time-lapse of a sunrise. But it’s as amazing and addictive as the song and album.

3) Whitney Rose – “You Don’t Own Me.” In a Billboard article, Whitney says of her latest single, “[Y]ou can’t turn on the news these days without seeing that it’s just as relevant now as it was when Lesley Gore released it in 1963. I want everyone in the world to know this song and I want everyone to believe the words. I may not have that kind of reach but I wanted to do my part.”

4) Sarah Louise – “The Field That Touches My House and Yours.” Sarah Louise, who’s half of House and Land, has a new album titled Deeper Woods due out on May 11th. Back in my old folkie days, I’d have played it alongside the hand-me-down songs of yore, and listeners would likely have thought it was a lost treasure. It has that kind of vibe.

5) Bette Smith – “I Found Love.” I have to thank Highway Queens for introducing me to this soul singer, whose cover of the Lone Justice song on her Jetlagger album has drawn plaudits from the Little Diva herself. Maria shout-tweeted (in response to a tweet from me) “I LOVE THIS SO MUCH MORE THE ORIGINAL”

(And, finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Diane for the picture up top!)

Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer in Philadelphia, 8/25/2017

Posted: August 26, 2017 in 2010s, 2017, Allison Moorer, Concert, Shelby Lynne
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Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer’s new album, Not Dark Yet, is a sublime set that finds the sisters adding a wondrous luster to borrowed gems penned by the likes of Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt and Merle Haggard, among others. In a way, it’s the sonic equivalent of jewelry row in Philadelphia – or, to change metaphors, an exhibit at the Museum of Art. Each painting reflects and transcends the reality that birthed them. But when the Moorer sisters performed the same 10 songs last night at the World Cafe Live in West Philly, it was as if those paintings morphed into a spellbinding motion picture filled with shadows and light.

Shelby, for her part, radiated a colorful Janis Joplin-like vibe. “Thank you for coming out on a Monday night,” she crowed at evening’s start, apparently unaware – until the laughter kicked in – that it was Friday. Allison, on the other hand, maintained a more restrained demeanor. But when their voices blended together as one, such as on this Louvin Brothers classic…

…or this Jessi Colter classic…

…well, what can be said? The magic they created was astounding. In a similar vein, when they weaved their voices in and out, and traded lead vocals, such as on Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” the stark beauty of the confessional (“Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear/It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”) stunned the audience into silence.

By far, the most moving moment of the set – at least for me – came with their rendition of Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms.”

On album, as the clip above shows, it’s hypnotic. But live? It’s an epiphany. I’m kicking myself now for not recording it.

I’d say the same for their entire 80-minute (give or take) show. It was a mesmerizing night filled with shadows and light, darkness and hope, the chosen songs shedding insights into life itself, though those insights are damned difficult to put into words.

One of the things I most enjoyed: their obvious affection for one another – and the music. At one point, Allison stepped close to her sister and seemed to encourage her to take the next verse; Shelby mouthed “you sure?” – and then did so with relish. And Shelby, when waiting to chime in on the chorus or take the next vocal, looked like a supernova in the midst of a musical galaxy, burning brighter with each chord. It was cool to witness.

One more thought: Obvious from the featured clips is that none of them are mine. We had front-row seats, which gave us a great view of Allison – especially when she sat at the keyboards in front of us – but a somewhat distant view of Shelby. Rather than swing my iPhone back and forth (and give myself whiplash in the process), I took a few pictures and left it at that.

Here’s a good one of Allison: