The New Basement Tapes - Lost on the River

My love of Blood on the Tracks is well documented at this point, but there are definitely days when I think that The Basement Tapes might be my favorite Bob Dylan project. Recorded in 1967, but not released officially until 1975, The Basement Tapes brought two of the brightest musical talents of the time—Dylan and The Band—together for an invigorating set of songs. Some of the tunes they recorded (most of the ones that made it onto the original record) were Bob Dylan compositions, now-classics like “Going to Acapulco” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” Some were traditional folk tunes. Others were covers of respected country artists like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. And all of them had an infectious looseness that was and is incredibly rare to find on a studio album.

It’s not difficult to see why the original Basement Tapes were so loose, creative, and dynamic. There was no expectation among any session members that the tapes in question would ever be released. And so they all played with reckless abandon—no pressure, no reservations—and made one of the most incendiary records in history as a result. None of those songs had the lyrical depth or eloquence of Dylan’s finest work, nor were they as emotionally resonant as what he came up with on Blood on the Tracks. But because of the fertile and collaborative environment in which they were recorded, the songs from The Basement Tapes became classics anyway.

And that brings me to Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, a project assembled by legendary Americana producer T Bone Burnett to see if that old Big Pink basement had any more magic left to offer. The project was born when Dylan’s publisher contacted Burnett and asked him if he wanted to do anything with a box of unused, handwritten Bob Dylan lyrics that had recently been found. Burnett, a producer always looking for unique projects in the roots music sphere (acclaimed soundtracks for a pair of Coen Brothers films, for instance, or a music supervisor post for the television program Nashville), jumped at the chance and quickly assembled what is arguably the ultimate modern day folk super group.

Elvis Costello, Jim James (of My Morning Jacket), Marcus Mumford (of Mumford & Sons), Rhiannon Giddens, and Taylor Goldsmith (of Dawes): these are the talented musicians, singers, and songwriters tasked with turning Dylan’s outtake lyrics into fully formed songs that honor the tradition of the original Basement Tapes. Each member chose different texts and set them to music individually, choosing the words that moved them, and bringing the contributions to the recording process. Because of this process—of starting separate and then coming together—each song on this record has the distinct flavor of the person who sings lead. However, because the lyrics were all penned by Dylan, and because the songs were all arranged, fleshed out, and recorded by the full group, Lost on the River ends up feeling a good deal more cohesive than you might expect an album with five lead vocalists to sound.

Probably the most refreshing aspect of this record is that no one ever shoots for straight imitation. The New Basement Tapes may be writing songs based around Dylan’s words, and they may be paying tribute to the freewheeling nature of the original Basement Tapes, but it is testament to the talent of these five individuals that Lost on the River never sounds like an attempt to approximate Dylan’s sound. Jim James gets the closest, with numbers like “Down at the Bottom,” “Nothing to It,” and “Hidee Hidee Ho #11,” hitting upon a vintage sound not far off what Dylan and the Band cultivated all those years ago. James even sounds like he’s doing a bit of a Dylan vocal impression during the latter of those three tunes, but he’s a talented enough musician and songwriter to make his songs sound fresh. “Down at the Bottom” is particularly splendid, alternating between moody atmosphere and rousing momentum for the perfect album starter.

If James gets the closest to Dylan’s sound, Goldsmith probably strays the furthest away. A sweet-voiced folkie who has always been compared to Jackson Browne, Goldsmith is tasked here with writing the collection’s most luxuriant songs. His contributions—“Liberty Street,” “Florida Key,” “Card Shark,” and “Diamond Ring”—rely heavily on piano and acoustic guitar, with Goldsmith’s voice providing a lullaby-soft wistfulness to the dusky arrangements. The songs are pretty, particularly “Florida Key” and “Diamond Ring,” and they allow Dylan’s lyrics to breathe in a way they don’t always do on James' or Costello’s more raucous numbers, or Mumford’s more pop-centric ones. When Goldsmith sings “If I ever get back to St. Louis again, there’s gonna be some changes made” at the beginning of “Ring,” it’s the perfect delivery, landing somewhere between the scathing, whip-smart fashion in which Dylan would have sung it, and the more measured insights that Goldsmith imparts on his own records with Dawes.

The problem is, the Goldsmith songs that made the record don’t take advantage of the frontman’s true talents. The best Dawes songs are big, almost church-bound slowburns like “Something in Common” and “A Little Bit of Everything,” songs that build from slow, modest beginnings into cathartic climaxes. Here, Goldsmith’s songs are pleasant little ditties, but they are admittedly lightweight compared to what everyone else is doing. (As stupid as the descriptor is, it’s telling that Pitchfork called his contributions “adult contemporary.”) Whether Goldsmith got pushed to the side because of the presence of bigger names, or simply didn’t bring his best material to these sessions, the fact is that he’s ultimately the only one of the five songwriters who doesn’t deliver an essential highlight.

Costello is probably the group’s key member, providing two of the three best songs here. His “Lost on the River #12” is particularly stunning, playing like something that could have come off this year’s fantastic War on Drugs album, Lost in the Dream. “Six Months in Kansas City,” meanwhile, is the perfect penultimate moment for this record, a wild runaway train of a track that gets each member of the band bellowing at the top of their lungs during the chorus. It’s the most spontaneous moment on the album, and one of the few spots where this album absolutely taps into the unpredictable atmosphere of the original Basement Tapes.

Marcus Mumford also earns his paycheck, penning the record’s most instantly infectious numbers. The complaint most often tossed off about Mumford & Sons is that they write songs that all sound similar, and that their lyrics are poor. Both problems are solved here, where Mumford either writes typical Mumford & Sons melodies, but gets to use them on top of great lyrics (“Kansas City,” featuring an electric guitar shredding cameo from actor Johnny Depp) or co-writes with other members to come up with songs that sound different than anything he’s ever done (the Goldsmith co-written “When I Get My Hands on You”). In both cases, his songs are terrific.

As for Giddens, she’s fairly easily the weakest link, delivering boilerplate Americana that you could hear at virtually any folk festival (“Duncan and Jimmy”) or slowing the first side of the record to a crawl with “Spanish Mary,” a song which wouldn’t have been too out of place amidst a few of the overlong clunkers on Dylan’s own Tempest. She also contributes the worst song on the album, a second version of “Hidee Hidee Ho” that boasts an awkward rhythmic setting of Dylan’s words, not to mention some remarkably flat vocals from Giddens herself. It’s the only number on the record that sounds amateurish, and it should have been cut. Still, even if Giddens is a weak link, she justifies her presence with “Lost on the River #20,” a haunting Appalachian folk arrangement of the same text that Elvis Costello already turned into a winner. In fact, her take on the text might be the best song on the record.

Some will undoubtedly trivialize the New Basement Tapes as a novelty project. Indeed, the whole idea behind the project is high-concept, to the point where many listeners and critics probably won’t be able to get past the Dylan thing to appreciate these songs as standalones. The thing is, though, these songs are great. While the record’s bloat does kind of compromise its overall consistency and cohesion, Lost on the River probably still has more of the year’s best songs in one place than almost any other album. It doesn’t quite match the fun or looseness of the original Basement Tapes, but it’s still both a worthwhile tribute to that album, and an impressive showcase of everyone involved.

Night Beds - Country Sleep

Night Beds - Country Sleep

Dead Oceans, 2013

8.0/10

That’s certainly the case with Night Beds, the musical project of Nashville singer/songwriter Winston Yellen and the name behind Country Sleep, my personal favorite album of the year so far. Yellen and I must come from similar schools on the notion of musical familiarity, as nearly every moment of Country Sleep echoes with some glimmer of sonic nostalgia, some shred of homage to the vast collective of influences he gathers throughout. But unlike another early 2013, homage-fueled record (the Rolling Stones/Beatles/Elvis/Velvet Underground collision that is Foxygen’s We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic) , Country Sleep never crosses the line into obvious reference. Ultimately, listeners will hear what they want to in these songs, whether it’s hushed atmospherics in the vein of Cold Roses-era Ryan Adams (see “22”), or earnest, sentimental bombast, a la Sleeping At Last (the sweeping romance of “Even If We Try”).

Still though, Night Beds does a terrific job of weaving borrowed sounds and textures into a vision that is thoroughly his own. Few will miss the way Yellen’s reverb-drenched vocals recall older My Morning Jacket records, or how the echoing a cappella of “Faithful Heights” and the dizzying vocal harmony of “Even If We Try” feel appropriated directly from the Fleet Foxes playbook, but those familiar pieces are merely threads in a much larger tapestry. Country Sleep, as a whole, is a condensation of Nashville sounds, from the stark singer/songwriter confessional that is “Was I For You?” to the propulsive indie-folk-pop of “Ramona” (and if The Lumineers can latch onto the mainstream, the latter can certainly follow suit). “Borrowed Time,” meanwhile, balances the longing of Appalachian folk with the rollicking, boozy drive of something you might hear at Nashville’s famed Bluebird Cafe. And album closer, “TENN,” is a timelessly nostalgic lullaby, a softly-strummed ‘song for the road’ whose wandering troubadour aesthetic gives the record its perfect coda.

All of Yellen’s best qualities coalesce on “Cherry Blossoms,” a trancelike piece of midnight balladry that at once feels both heartbreaking and euphoric. The song, like much of Country Sleep, is a sonic feast, Yellen’s gorgeous vocals padded and buffeted by a cloud of harmonies, a subtle electric guitar arrangement and the moan of a memory-laden pedal steel rounding out the symphony. The song crescendos as it goes, filling out in sound with each passing second until the whole thing boils over. Yellen’s voice leaps an octave, his repeated cries of the words “take me home” rising emotionally over the feast of sounds. And then, far too soon, it’s over.

“Cherry Blossoms,” and indeed, the entirety of Country Sleep, plays out like a musical vortex, a song and album so beautifully written, so meticulously recorded and produced, and so passionately performed by its creator, that it’s impossible not to be swept away by it. Undoubtedly, there will be listeners who write Yellen off as no more than the sum of his influences. But while Ryan Adams, Jim James, Robin Pecknold, Justin Vernon, Gram Parsons, Conor Oberst and so many more are probably at least partially responsible for making Yellen the songwriter he is today, the guy has a gift that can’t be learned through simple imitation. It’s something that can’t be faked by ProTools or brought in with session musicians, something that can’t be paid for in promotion or acquired through positive critical reception. And I’m not even entirely sure what that is. Maybe it’s the intimacy on display here, the emotional honesty of it all; perhaps it’s the confident variations in sound inherent throughout, or the sonic splendor of the finished product. Or maybe, it all comes down to Yellen’s warm and welcoming embrace of familiar territory. Regardless of the reason, Country Sleep is more immediately accessible and rewarding than most of the records from the artists listed above, a stunning surprise debut that will be sitting somewhere in my annual top ten come December. Until then, though, I’ll just flip the record over and play it again.

On a lot of occasions, music lovers get to a point in their listening evolution where they start to rebel against the familiar. I’ve always found that interesting, since when we first start falling in love with music, it’s the songs and albums that we can relate to things we already love that click with us most easily. And I’ve always remained like that to a certain extent, something that will never make me the “hippest” music writer in town, but also something I’m really not at all ashamed of. I still have an emotional allegiance to the genres that made me fall in love with music in the first place, and frankly, I probably always will. Alt-country, folk, roots rock: these sounds were my entry point, the hallmarks of bands like Counting Crows or The Wallflowers that transfixed me as a child, and they remain the sounds that can hook me faster than just about anything else in music today. Because sometimes, familiarity doesn’t have to be derivative or uninspired or forgettable; sometimes, it just feels like home.

Sleepy Turtles - Summer, Hither

Sleepy Turtles - Summer, Hither

Autumn + Colour Records, 2012

3.5 Stars

Fans of modern folk acts like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and My Morning Jacket, take note. Summer, Hither, a new EP from the Atlanta-based (and amusingly named) Sleepy Turtles. Right from the first song, the harmony-drenched title track, it's clear that these guys owe a lot to similar bands who have blazed a similar trail in recent years. But while their sound may not be terribly distinctive, it's still as appealing as ever, and Summer, Hither, standing at a short-but-sweet five tracks and twenty minutes, is a more than promising career-starter. The harmonies prove to be the norm throughout the EP, surrounding frontman Dylan Higgins' soft and welcoming croon with a sweet swell of sonic bliss. The instrumentation adds another dimension, with softly strummed acoustics, nostalgic banjo plucking, and occasional flourishes of electric and steel guitar. Mostly though, Summer, Hither plays things straight, offering up five quick (and stupendously enjoyable) tracks of traditional folk that straddles the line between Americana and Appalachian heritage.

But that's not to call the Sleepy Turtles limited. Where the first three tracks dwell in a similar sunsoaked, acoustic vein (befitting the album's title), "Reason to Hope" throws a wrench into the machine, twisting in a haunting and apocalyptic web that is certain to enrapture many a listener. Higgins sounds like a cross between Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and modern folk hero Sam Beam here, and the song's evocative and elegiac plucking wouldn't have been out of place on an early Iron & Wine album: it's an instant highlight, but then, with five tracks this good, nothing falls out of context. Closer "Being Small" kicks off in a decidedly simpler and gentler vein, just a single guitar and Higgins' voice, before the song begins to build. Mandolin strokes add subtly to the texture as an ensemble of singers begins to gather around the song's melody. Drums and handclaps enter only seconds later, with competing vocal lines combining for a communal and classic folk sound that ends only just as the song is nearing sublime territory. It's a jarring finale to a musical project that, from the first song, feels like it should be a piece of something larger. And perhaps it will be: with the massive popularity that their influences have gained in recent years, perhaps the Sleepy Turtles will be able to make an impression: they certainly have the talent.

There's not a lot else to say here: these guys do what they do and they do it very well. There's not a weak song in the bunch, and, despite the fact that the collection never adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts (I find that EPs rarely do, for me), that's hardly a mark against its pleasant, dusky lilt. Higgins is a collection of his idols, sounding like a clone of Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold at the start, and hitting upon shades of guys like Dallas Greene (City & Colour) and William Fitzsimmons before ultimately settling on Iron & Wine for the final two tracks. But while Sleepy Turtles don't really make an attempt to strike out on their own or reinvent the wheel like Bon Iver did last summer, the songs are good enough for it not to matter, and any folk fan should be more than willing to spend the twenty minutes it will take to check these guys out. Sleepy Turtles are a band to watch for on the folk horizon, and I am excited to see where they go from here. If the near-epic ambition that "Reason to Hope" hints at is anything to go by, this is a band who would be far more at home in a full album setting, with room for their arrangements to expand and their songs to breathe. If given that opportunity (preferably sooner rather than later), I think they could have something really breathtaking to offer; I'll be keeping close tabs on them to see if they can make good on that promise.