Vol. 1 (Day Trips) 01. “La Ragazza Con La Pistola” (Peppino De Luca) Peppino De Luca was born on January 5, 1936 in Rome. In the 1950s, he played in the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band. In the 1960s, he turned his skills to Italian motion pictures and television. This is the title track from …
Arcadia was an idyllic paradise, a rural sanctuary, that was longed for even in the days of ancient Greece and Rome as urban life dominated and pastoral life disappeared. Arcadia was a mystical, mythical realm for medieval Europeans. During the Baroque era, the Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (known as Guercino) created a painting named …
The Verve were a British band that were at the outset lumped into the shoegaze circle. They had all of the trappings of shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine – a strong reliance on guitar effects and other electronic devices that could alter the sound of the traditional rock instruments. The Verve, however, had something which …
“Devil Got My Woman” (Skip James)What better way to kick off Record Store Day than with this blues classic of heartbreak and isolation recorded by Mississippi musician Skip James in 1931? Skip James was rediscovered during the 1960s. Thora Birch’s misfit outcast Enid buys a blues compilation from the hermit obsessive collector Seymour (Steve Buscemi’s …
Shuggie Otis is a guitar genius whose talents were not fully recognized until decades after his seminal work was created. Freedom Flight is a gritty, visceral, and organic entity – a collaborative live-in-the-studio experience. Recorded when he was only 17 years old (!), Freedom Flight seems like the craftsmanship of a veteran because his father, …
March 24 is the birthday of two of the most legendary bassists in music history: Carol Kaye and Holger Czukay. Carol Kaye was a rarity in the male-dominated Hollywood industry of the 1960s- a female musician who could outperform most of her male counterparts. She was the go-to bassist for Los Angeles studio sessions and …
Tangerine Dream (an avant-garde German band founded by Edgar Froese during the pivotal era of the late 1960s) started out primarily influenced by what could be considered the first space rock tracks (such as “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” & “A Saucerful of Secrets” from Pink Floyd) yet improvised and experimented …
Townes Van Zandt has been nicknamed the “Texas troubadour” and this is an apt description of the tragic singer-songwriter. Similar to John Keats and Dylan Thomas, Townes Van Zandt experienced a creative explosion between the ages of 24 – 25. His lyrics are inspired by the extremes in the landscapes of his home state of …
by Mark Lager
We are listening to the city at night, but we hear only the nothingness of silence. We are back inside the church as the humming of the organ and the tentative, two-note guitar strum return us to the revival.
What was this truth so deep and profound that it could not be spoken in words but only carried on the night wind through the streets in acts of silence?
It was revolution.
It was that which is called peaceful.
by Mark Lager
Cotton Jones create music that sounds old and lived in: times spent wandering the backroads, the highways and byways, of America; times spent alone in the wilderness; times that seem out of our time and summoned from the past. Yet even though they are extraordinarily underrated and at the outset placed in the genre categories of “lo-fi”, “indie folk”, and “alternative country”, they transcend these boundaries and are a rarity for our generation: a band which wears its heart honestly on its sleeve and stands on the shoulders of giants but does not steal from them like the majority of contemporary groups.
