Jim Sullivan – Plain As Your Eyes Can See
A late-60s, LA-based singer-songwriter who never made it. He recorded one great lost album, the recently reissued UFO, which was first released in 1969, before he quit the west coast to move to Nashville. In one of rock’s great mysteries, his abandoned car was found on a desert road near Santa Rosa; he was never seen again. I love his voice – a kind of windblown Fred Neil – and the psych/folk-jazz sound of the album.
Ed Askew – Blue-Eyed Baby
Ed Askew is American painter and singer-songwriter who first recorded in 1968, and now, aged 75, lives in New York City. This recording was made when he was 71 with a clutch of well-known New York musician-fans including guitarist Marc Ribot. The music curls and peals like a circus carousel; the words, half-spoken, half-sung, seem full of innocence and experience.
Marvin Pontiac – Small Car
John Lurie, now 63, is probably most famous for forming the Lounge Lizards in 1978, or his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s early-80s movies Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise. Marvin Pontiac is a fictional character he created for an album released in 1999 – The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits – framed as a posthumous collection of songs. The low baritone rumble of the spoken-word delivery – half Robbie Robertson, half Leonard Cohen – over the gentle afro-influenced loops and artless backing vocals is warm, dreamy, psychedelic, touching.
Sharon van Etten – Remembering Mountains
In 2015, Tompkins Square issued an album of interpretations of lost Karen Dalton songs and sketches drawn from personal papers and manuscripts kept by a longtime friend and guitarist. This reading by Sharon van Etten of Remembering Mountains is very beautiful. “Now your time is your own / You’ll be alone and sit in your room / Remembering mountains / Do you think the seasons changed / Without your heart?”
Elmer Bernstein – Hud (main title theme)
On 1 January 2015, I set myself a challenge to watch one movie a day throughout the year, catching up on missed classics, unwatched directors, lost gems. I got as far as May, having watched more than 150 films before I imploded. But in the midst of it I watched Martin Ritt’s 1963 black-and-white, cowboy-Greek-tragedy Hud, starring Paul Newman. Apart from being a great film – Patricia Neal’s performance in particular – what stayed with me was the music. Bernstein’s simple score of bleak Spanish guitar is as dry and sorrowful as tumbleweed.
- Ben Watt’s new album Fever Dream is released on 8 April on Unmade Road, through Caroline,
