This Is the Kit – Silver John
Kate Stables grew up in the UK and later relocated to Paris, where she records as This Is the Kit. Earlier this month she released her third album, Bashed Out (produced by Aaron Dessner and featuring a host of talented musicians, including Rozi Plain, who featured in our last playlist). Stables has said “The main reason for doing what I do is the exchange with other people,” and what I really love about her songs is how much they feel like conversations. This track, Silver John, enters on such a lovely lilt before becoming something more urgent. The way Stables sings the line “We’re not ready yet” – with a half-break and a sudden insistent force, is particularly lovely. If you want a taste of Stables performing live, here’s a rather excellent Blogotheque performance from a few years back.
Gill Landry – Just Like You
The official biography for Gill Landry describes the Louisiana native as “a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, adventuresome photographer, hitchhiking gentleman, self-taught painter, shadetree mechanic, and then some”. He’s also been writing songs and playing guitar, banjo and pedal steel for Old Crow Medicine Show since 2004. His new album – his third, is out in late June, but for the time being he’s on the road with Laura Marling (with whom he recently duetted). This track is a warm, sweet taste of the longer record – all rich harmonica, dusky vocals and regret. It’s a familiar landscape for an American songwriter of a certain tilt – all darlin’s and dreams of New Orleans and a woman reading Bukowski in her underwear – but it’s a landscape Landry paints with great tenderness.
Justin Vernon/Spoon – (Time’s Gone) Inside Out
This summer I’ll be heading to Wisconsin to attend the Eaux Claires festival, with a lineup put together by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of the National. In recent weeks, there’s been a steady putter of trails released in advance of the festival – an official announcement and short excerpts from Michael Perry’s book Population 485 singing the praises of Wisconsin in the summertime, and then, a few days ago, a video of Vernon covering Spoon’s Inside Out (here rechristened Time’s Gone Inside Out). It’s a strangely affecting video: he’s sitting alone at a keyboard, at night, beneath a tree just beginning to bud. Lights flare up and die down, and around him you can hear the bluster of the breeze. I do love the original, but in this setting, in Vernon’s hands, the song becomes something else, something painful and wonderful and utterly mesmerising. Roll on July.
Elizabeth LaPrelle – I Fall to Pieces
After last month’s playlist, a reader kindly pointed me in the direction of Elizabeth LaPrelle, a singer and banjo-player from Cedar Springs, Virginia, who specialises in Appalachian ballad-singing – studying it at college, learning from masters such as Sheila Kay Adams and Ginny Hawker, and following field recordings and the advice of family and friends. You can see a lot of those performances – soul-stirring renditions of traditional tunes such as Pretty Saro and Hop Old Rabbit – on YouTube. But I particularly love this one, where she’s singing with a band for a cover of I Fall to Pieces – written by Hank Cochran and released by Patsy Cline in 1961. It’s performed live at the Floyd County Store in the Blue Ridge Mountains as part of the monthly Floyd Radio Show broadcast, which LaPrelle co-hosts, and gives a lovely taste of her voice and all the sour, sharp desperation it holds.
Bill Fay – War Machine
In the early 1970s, British pianist Bill Fay released two albums on one of Decca’s offshoot labels. They had little impact at the time, but in the decades that followed they gathered cult status, attracting big-name supporters in the shape of Nick Cave, Jeff Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke, and were finally reissued in 1998, followed by some demos and late-70s recordings. Over a decade later, Fay was approached by an American record producer named Joshua Henry who had been introduced to Fay’s music by his father. It was Henry who tempted Fay back into the studio to record 2012’s gorgeous Life Is People, and Henry again who produced this year’s offering, Who Is the Sender?, to be released this month. This track, War Machine, is particularly stunning.
