Willie Nelson is a living legend – a multi award winning country music icon, an actor, an outlaw, a political activist, and a prominent campaigner for the reform of the drugs laws. He’s also a working musician who spends over 200 days a year performing. His latest album Country Music was released a few days before his 77th birthday. It’s produced and masterminded by T Bone Burnett, a comparative youngster at age 62. Burnett selected the material (only the first song, Man With The Blues, is a Willie Nelson original) and recruited the musicians - including banjo master Riley Baugus and double bassist Dennis Crouch who had also worked with Burnett on Raising Sand, the Grammy winning album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant.
It’s a good album which is very easy on the ear, but not a great album. The band are faultless, they serve up some musical treats and create a rootsy old-style country sound. There’s quite a bit of bluegrass which is good to hear, and the choice of songs is excellent including such old-time gems as Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down, Dark As A Dungeon, and the best of the bunch, the closing track Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It’s solid rather than amazing, there’s nothing here likely to make you sit upright in your seat, and the arrangements are very much built around Willie Nelson’s rasping languid delivery.
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Li(f)e, the 4th album from Rhode Island rapper Sage Francis, isn’t the easiest of listens. It demands attention. Words pour out, sometimes in a rapidfire delivery, and each track is teeming with images and ideas. There are several big chances of pace and musical style between different tracks.
Sage Francis is a spoken word poet and veteran of many poetry slams, and an indie rapper. On this album he has consciously tried to integrate hip hop and indie rock by some imaginative methods, getting rock songwriters to write numbers which were then interpreted by Francis and his band, which included musicians such as Califone’s Jim Becker and Tim Rutili.
The dominant theme of the album is about the evils of religion. Francis, not surprisingly, has plenty to say on this so let’s just quote his words : “This is just an underlying theme that acts as a departing point for the rest of the album’s subject matter. There’s humor and sorrow and politics in there as well. The title Li(f)e is an amalgamation of the words life and lie. What about life is a lie? Let me count the ways. What we’re told about race, gender roles, beauty, war, food, drugs, sexuality, capitalism, and history – all a gang of lies. I feel it in my gut, I write it with my hands and I speak it with my mouth.”
The album has some great moments. The opening track, Little Houdini, is a fabulous tale of prison break based on an obscure news story, while the final track The Best Of Times is a nakedly honest childhood memoir – “I stumbled upon this letter that I had written to my girlfriend a few years ago explaining where I was in life and what I was hoping to accomplish. And the first line of that letter is the first line of the song. It just sparked all these really intense childhood memories and ended up being my own little movie with words.” Some of the heavier rock tracks don’t work so well, but strongly recommended are The Baby Stays on which the slower guitars and drums nicely complement the social realist lyrics, and Love The Lie where we see the slam poet and the impassioned social critic at his quickfire best.
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