I’ve taken a lot of shit over the years, a good amount of it deserved, for my tolerance for sappy folk music. I tend to fall for what I conceive to be the non-sappier variety of contemporary folk, but it’s hard to find one entirely free of the other. And everyone’s got slightly different definitions of sappy.
I like Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry a good deal and Dave Alvin more than a little and I tolerate Townes Van Zandt‘s sometimes deeply sappy indulgences the way I’d tolerate the occasionally embarrassing farts of a great and wondrous god, if I particularly believed in one, which I don’t, but still, and I think a lot of people can comfortably keep up with me this far.
Alejandro Escovedo‘s most cringingly adult-contemporary moments are earned in context. Even Rodney Crowell’s.
I start to really lose the more punk-inclined of my friends at, say, Greg Brown, to whom I once spent at least six months straight listening, possibly not to my ultimate benefit. I mean it was Dream Cafe. That record aged me 10 sap years the second time I heard it. Slant 6 Mind is a far less sappy record, but even so, it’s got “Spring and All.” And “Vivid”, for fuckssake. See what I mean?
I don’t care. I like a lot of that shit. I like old folkies from Houston you’ve never heard of, like Eric Taylor and David Rodriguez. I mean, I can’t listen to Nanci Griffith, or Shake Russell OR Dana Cooper—who could?—so it’s not like I’m indiscriminate, but I do possess what I understand to be an unusual tolerance for Houston-pedigreed singer-songwriters of a certain vintage that was several Houston-scene evolutions prior to my brief time being a young adult and paying attention.
Oh well. I do like Vince Bell. Check this out.
Long time ago.
That’s his new book above with the cheesy cover, which you forgive, because it’s not about the book cover. He’s got a new record and a new one-man show, too. Here’s a clip from that. It’s a long one.
He’s kind of a ham. I dig him.
I wrote about him when he released Phoenix in 1994. That’s a pretty seriously great record. Listen to “Frankenstein.” Hell if I can figure how to make it play here.