VMP Magazine

John Prine is the comedian who can make a room dissolve in laughter without getting mean or going blue. John Prine is wry without being cynical, tender without being sentimental; simple but not simplistic, basic but not boring. He is deeply empathetic, able to tell a character’s story without turning it into a platform for his own thoughts and beliefs—yet you can always feel his presence in his songs, like Hitchcock appearing as an extra in his films. John Prine can shrewdly pinpoint and thoughtfully describe life’s myriad absurdities and hardships but does so in a way that’s whimsical and humble, not weighty or self-involved. His is a talent that’s simultaneously easy to describe and hard to pin down—and it can be easy to miss the depth and dimension hidden in his songs.

In a 2000 interview with Danny Murray for the Minnesota Blues Hall of Fame, Odetta Holmes (that’s Odetta to you, me and everybody else) remarked, “We didn’t recognize back then that there was no way to put up a wall between one music and another,” referring to the blending and borrowing occurring in the early 1960s among artists playing folk music and artists playing blues music, as well as the overlap in the genres’ fanbases (one mostly white, one mostly Black). Odetta’s quip is a bit of an oversimplification: She’s right that you can’t stop artists from weaving aspects of the music they love into their own music, but industry gatekeepers can (and absolutely do) craft and cement narratives that sweep the contributions of an individual or of an entire community under the rug and refuse to promote artists who don’t support that narrative. To wit: Odetta’s music is not easy to categorize or neatly slot into any one genre, and in tandem with her one-of-a-kind voice, this was what made her great — but it was also one of the reasons she was never promoted to the degree she deserved to be, nor as popular or well-known as she should have been. Praise and acclaim for this sort of genre-bending was by and large a privilege reserved for white faces singing Black music. 

If you’re reading this, you may already know that Vinyl Me, Please is reissuing Townes Van Zandt’s debut album, For the Sake of the Song, as our record of the month for October 2018. You can sign up here. But there are other Van Zandt albums (and one excellent documentary about his life) that are worth your time. Check them out below.

Everyone who loves her has a story about the first time they heard Fiona Apple, which says as much about her music as it does about the kinds of people who are drawn to it: seeking meaning in every moment, slightly self-absorbed in the way all people who grapple with depression and anxiety are, a memory that’s a little too good. Most of the stories I’ve heard or read over the years are exactly what you’d expect: a private moment of rapture during a chance encounter with Apple’s music on the radio or in a store, a recommendation from a friend or a music magazine that ended with listening to Tidal over and over again in a bedroom behind a locked door. My story is a little different.

Some combination of pathological nosiness and deepening anxiety about how right-wing conspiracy-poisoned many of my loved ones have become compels me to continue periodically logging in to Facebook, even though I know better. And — partially attributable to Dolly Parton’s resurgent and expanding popularity, I’m sure — over the past several months, I’ve seen a screenshot of a certain tweet pop up in my feed numerous times: 

In the nine years and four albums since his first solo effort, John Moreland has grown and evolved personally and professionally. His body of work traces a familiar late 20s/early 30s trajectory: moving through trauma and discovering along the way that the healthier you become and the better you know yourself, the less fascinating you become to yourself. Today, he’s still the same accomplished musician, still simultaneously self-effacing and straightforward, tender and tough, imbuing every song with “Tougher Than The Rest” Bruce Springsteen Energy. But he’s also happy — and from this newly content place, eager to stretch his wings. His excellent fifth album LP5 embodies this moment.

With accomplished producer/former Centro-matic drummer Matt Pence behind the boards and drum kit and frequent collaborator/fellow Tulsa musician John Calvin Abney playing instrumental polymath, LP5 finds Moreland giving his songs a technicolor treatment. Stylistically, they’re polished, intricate without feeling fussy, warm like a memory. Substantively, they look to the world around them for cues and answers, rather than the contours of his own mind. On LP5, stars show up time and again in lyrics and song titles. It’s fitting, given Moreland’s ability to write so evocatively about grief — because starlight itself is such an apt metaphor for healthy grieving: it reaches across space and time to touch us; powerful enough to make itself known, but not powerful enough to completely illuminate the world. Affecting, but not too affected.

When I think about Aretha Franklin, I think about ecstasy: the feeling of completely abandoning the self, a state of expanded consciousness achieved through heightened concentration and profound emotion. For thousands of years, religion, drugs, and music (or some combination of the three) have proven reliable fuel for ecstatic experiences, as documented in writing ranging from terrible to sublime. In an example from the latter category, Milan Kundera uses the act of making music to explain this mystical state: “The boy banging on the keyboard feels … a sorrow, or a delight, and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into the state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation.”

Loretta Lynn is from the part of the country I call home, and loving Loretta Lynn feels like home — by which I mean she makes me simultaneously puff my chest out with pride and shake my head in frustrated disbelief: the love we feel for those we truly know, once we’ve acknowledged and accepted their complexities and contradictions. Like everyone who becomes famous, Lynn chose the self she presented to the world, but her public persona never attempted to cover all her blemishes, and she never raced to justify or apologize for the decisions she made — the type of honesty and self-assuredness that only ever makes you love the person more, even when some of the ways they express those qualities drive you mad.

No album ever came to slay quite like A Night At The Opera came to slay.

In only two full-length albums and a handful of EPs, Courtney Barnett has mastered the art of finding purpose in purposelessness and seeing the sublime in the mundane. She attends an open house only to spiral into deep speculation about the life of the now-deceased woman who once called this place her home. She channels the anxious sweet ache of a mind preoccupied with pining for an absent lover. She spends an afternoon gardening, only to suffer an allergy attack that turns into a panic attack that turns into an uncomfortable self-realization while lying in a hospital bed. With a journalist’s attention to detail, Barnett creates worlds and populates them with vivid characters. She handles her subjects’ stories with care, yet tells them in ways that leave nothing about her characters’ inner workings to the imagination—and she writes with such wit and self-conscious charm that we can’t help but want a window into Barnett’s mind, too.

That window has always been a little smudgy. Barnett’s songs are simultaneously straightforward and evasive: an exercise in externalizing difficult feelings in order to more easily cope with them and accurately assess them. Yet as the title of her excellent new album Tell Me How You Really Feel unsubtly insinuates, Barnett is getting more comfortable with the idea of being vulnerable. On opening track “Hopefulessness,” she establishes this new edict in her own words—“Your vulnerability is stronger than it seems”—and, in quoting Carrie Fisher’s words, helps us understand how she arrived in this place: “Take your broken heart/ Turn it into art.” Tell Me How You Really Feel is equal parts diary and manifesto, topical and timeless, filled with lots of good advice to herself and to all of us. At times, it’s an outlet for helpless rage, but it also digs deep, finding Barnett pushing to understand her own mind and working hard to understand other people (including her own internet troll). At heart, it’s an album about understanding limitations and figuring out to flourish anyway; finding balance between striving for better but being gentle with yourself and others (“I know you're doing your best/ I think you're doing just fine/ Keep on keeping on/ You know you're not alone”). If only all important lessons were sung so clearly and by such a formidable talent.

The 50 Best Record Stores In America is an essay series where we attempt to find the best record store in every state. These aren’t necessarily the record stores with the best prices or the deepest selection; you can use Yelp for that. Each record store featured has a story that goes beyond what’s on its shelves; these stores have history, foster a sense of community and mean something to the people who frequent them.

One of the great and unexpected delights of my life has been the ease with which I have been able to find adults who, like me, were once dreamy children growing up in the middle of nowhere. The non-magical explanation for this phenomenon is that opportunities are scarce in rural areas, and kids who are wired this way crave what cities offer and plot the courses of their lives toward the goal of one day living in one of them. But it shouldn’t be that easy to find My People another among millions of other people, and thus it often feels as though each of us is equipped with a homing beacon: imperceptible to the naked eye, but highly effective at pulling kindred spirits into our orbits. It happens time and again in my personal life, and also in the art and artists I’m drawn to: Lyttelton, New Zealand’s Marlon Williams and Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan folk duo Kacy & Clayton (second cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum) are among them. From the time they released their debut album in 2011, the latter have drawn comparisons to the Laurel Canyon folk rock of the 1960s — and New Zealand’s favorite son Williams’ otherworldly croon calls Jeff Buckley, Chris Isaak, and Roy Orbison to mind (to wit: many Americans’ first introduction to Williams was his turn as the lead singer of an Orbison tribute band in Bradley Cooper’s 2018 remake of A Star Is Born). Both artists make music that is absolutely distinctive yet deeply familiar, making their collaboration on Plastic Bouquet the satisfying fulfillment of a “no shit” prophecy.

Courtney Marie Andrews is generous, and her generosity colors the art she creates and her approach to creating it. She sees songwriting (as well as her output as a poet and a painter) as more than an instrument for catharsis: In her capable hands, creativity is a teacher, tool, and “balancing mechanism for the mind and the heart.” When we spoke, she also emphasized her firm belief that even your most personal experiences no longer belong to you and you alone once you commit them to song: after you translate them to this medium, they’re part of the broader human experience, there for anyone who might need them to be a mirror or a map. It doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that Old Flowers could be both.

When I spoke to Tanya Tucker about While I’m Livin’, her first album of new material since 2002, we talked about the term “comeback” and I was thoroughly unsurprised to hear that she hates that word: she, the woman Rolling Stone introduced to its readers back in 1974 with a cover bearing the message “Hi, I’m Tanya Tucker. I’m 15. You’re gonna hear from me.” “Comeback” implies a lack of agency; that others coerced you into silence, rather than your own choice. For someone like Tucker, who has been in the public eye since she was 13 years old and, over her 47-year career, has grappled with everything from Hashimoto’s disease, to major depression, to a freak accident during a facial peel that left her with second- and third-degree burns and permanently altered her voice, the decision to take several long hiatuses from recording and performing feels entirely understandable. And when you hear this album, you’ll be so, so glad she’s back.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week's album is John Prine's Tree Of Forgiveness, his first album in 13 years.

Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them

took me suddenly to his heart: I would die from his

potent Being. For the Beautiful is nothing

but the onset of the Terror we can scarcely endure,

and we are fascinated because it calmly disdains

to obliterate us. Every angel is terrifying.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy (trans. Leslie Norris and Alan Keele)