12 Albums: Pieces of the Sky

Most formative records. I've got Glen Campbell, Elton John and John Prine on the list so far. The artist I want to feature next is the great EmmyLou Harris. Actually, I could name several of her records and they would all have the same standing for me, because I listened to them all frequently in about equal measure through the years. These records were her debut, Pieces of the Sky, and from the early 80s, Cimarron and then Evangeline.

I loved everything about EmmyLou, but mostly her articulate and sensitive delivery of really good songs. Not a prolific songwriter herself, she is one of those artists, like Bonnie Raitt, with a careful and canny knack for selecting great songs and then creating a sound to match. I think I also discovered a lot of songwriters through these albums. People like Townes van Zandt and Rodney Crowell--I first heard their songs on EmmyLou's records.

EmmyLou created a sound that was kind of plaintive honky tonk, based on the waltz tempo, like something the band might play after closing, when everyone is tired and ready to go home. One last slow waltz and blow out the lights. "Spanish is a Loving Tongue," "Last Cheater's Waltz," and "If I Could Only Win Your Love" come to mind.

But the song I want to feature I think is "Boulder to Birmingham," a song that was written by Harris about the death of Gram Parsons.

Bonus track: Cimarron is probably my favorite EmmyLou record, and the title song is one of my favorite songs by anyone, but the tune I want to feature from that record is Chip Taylor's "Son of a Rotten Gambler." Both of these songs are fine examples of Harris' knack for choosing wonderful songs. Taylor is best known for writing "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning."

12 Albums: John Prine

This is the third in a series of posts on"formative albums," records that shaped by musical taste and the direction of my listening. I've always admired the fine storytelling type of songwriting that has often come out of Nashville. Many of these songwriters have been featured in my Songs of Place series. Tom T. Hall, Guy Clark, Merle Haggard, Townes van Zandt, and Kris Kristofferson are all in that pantheon of personal favorites. But I sometimes think the best songwriter of our day has been John Prine.

Somewhere along the line as a kid I stumbled upon Prine's self-titled first album, picking it out of a discount bin as I recall. There is no one that can paint pictures in a song quite like Prine. He writes from a big but weather-beaten heart. No one tells stories with characters, living breathing characters, like Prine. In the tradition of much country music, he sings about the lonely, the broken, the old, and the drifting. This album's best examples are Donald and Lydia, Sam Stone, Hello in There, Illegal Smile, and of course Angel from Montgomery.

But the song I've chosen to feature here is yet another "song of place." It manages to be wistful and quietly angry at the same time, as if the voice you hear is that of an old man, remembering a long ago injustice. The version below comes from a live performance some ten years after the album's release.

12 Albums: Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection

In answer to a question from an old friend, I've been thinking about my "12 most influential albums." By that I suppose he means the 12 records that helped to form or direct my musical tastes and the direction I would go as a lover of music.

The first installment of this series featured Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman. The second is also a country record of sorts, but one that comes from a surprising source. I am speaking of Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection.

From the first listen I loved every song on this record and I listened to it incessantly. This was before the full-fledged Elton John persona had surfaced (the glittering jump suits and top hats, etc.), and Elton could convincingly sing of being a western gunslinger, a cowboy, a southern soldier in the American civil war, or of fixing grandma's barn. I once heard Elton say in an interview that his early style was highly influenced by Leon Russell, and you can definitely hear the influence in many of these songs. The funky piano and the honky tonk band. Bernie Taupin's lyrics conjure a sort of southern idyll and of course Elton's delivery is all-out as usual. He's like an actor inhabiting his role with total commitment.

Hard to pick the one representative song, because in fact there is a great deal of diversity on this record, but I'm going with "Southern Comfort."

Songs of Place: Wichita Lineman

A friend of mine suggested I make a list of my twelve most influential albums. These are albums that molded my taste and understanding of music, that moved me, that I listened to endlessly, and that still remain strong presences in the music-space in my mind.

So, okay. I'm up to that challenge. I was born in 1956, and a lot of the albums I first loved came out between 1968 and 1972 or so. One of the first albums I ever bought with my own money was Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman. This record featured a lot of really fine songwriting, which impressed me as a literary-minded boy. The fact that songs could tell stories, could even be at times high poetry, really meant something to me.

The Wichita Lineman album featured many fine songs, including "Reason to Believe,"  which would probably rank high on my best-songs-ever list. But the title track, written by the great Jimmy Webb, deserves to be featured here .I've chosen a  live version from a much older Glen Campbell.