Spins: Joan Osborne, Pretty Little Stranger

I perked up to find this advance CD in my mail (release date 11/14/06 on Vanguard). Osborne has such powerful pipes, but I'm sorry to report they're not put to good use here. There's something way too clean and clinical about the country-rock production, by Steve Buckingham. It's the sound of hired hands who are competently doing their jobs--no sweat or grit to bring out the bluesy edge in Osborne's voice.

The disc includes a cover of "Brokedown Palace"--one of my personal favorites from the Grateful Dead catalog (Osborne has been appearing with Phil Lesh et al. in recent years). But this version somehow lacks the feeling of wonder that makes the original so transporting...


A far more satisfying recent Dead cover, btw, is Catherine Russell's version of "New Speedway Boogie" on Cat. Sweet acoustic blues groove and in-the-pocket vocals, well worth checking out. Russell is a seasoned backup singer (Steely Dan, David Bowie), and Cat is her debut.

Peter Mulvey on the road, 2006

I had a great time a few months back hitching a ride for a day with rock troubadour Pete Mulvey while he was on tour in upstate New York. The resulting piece, a slice of life on the road, aired last night on NPR's All Things Considered. You can hear the piece at the NPR site. (Don't ask me what the headline "Indie Music Is Retail," as seen on the NPR site, is supposed to mean--those words definitely did not come from me.)

The song heard in the opening, called "Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz)," can also be heard in full on the Web broadcast All Songs Considered.

More on Peter Mulvey, one of the great voices of the singer-songwriter scene, at his site.

Free health insurance advice for musicians

Good news for musicians without day jobs and benefits packages: The Future of Music Coalition is offering a new, free service called HINT (Health Insurance Navigation Tool). Online articles give some general advice, and you can arrange to speak to an actual human being about your insurance situation. Learn more here.

Ani DiFranco on performing, 1997

"Kids come up to me, and they want advice about what’s the magic formula to get the national tours and the distribution. You can see they want, want, want all these things. And I think, Maybe you should just try to get a gig. Maybe you should just get a gig, and maybe you should do that every weekend for ten years, and then see if you’re not on a haphazard national tour that grew organically and if you don’t have some recordings that you made along the way that are distributed through the people you encountered along the way."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

For info on DiFranco's new CD Reprieve, click here.

In other DiFranco news, her against-all-odds project of rescuing a dilapidated church in Buffalo, and turning it into an arts center, is finally wrapping up a decade later; the Church, as it's now called, hosted its first events earlier this year. You can listen to my 2004 report on the in-progress renovation at the NPR site.

Chris Thile...and other instrumentalists without limits

Listening to Chris Thile's new bluegrass-rooted CD How to Grow a Woman from the Ground prompted me to think about musicians who seem to be able to play absolutely anything their imaginations can conjure...and who have extraordinary musical imaginations (the ability to play anything isn't worth much if you don't have anything to say). I'm not talking so much about the ability to play fast--lots of people can do that--but about musicians who have completely bridged the gap between brain and fingers.

Thile undoubtedly belongs on that list--he's one of the most explosive instrumentalists I've ever heard. Who else? Here's a small start.

Chris Thile
Pat Metheny
Kelly Joe Phelps
Zakir Hussain (tabla)
Jerry Douglas
Keith Jarrett