A very fine piece of vintage rockabilly. Definitely one of my favourite dancing songs!

“I took me a fifth and poured me a shot/and thought about all the things I haven’t got” opens this, the first non-album release from Uncle Tupelo. Recorded in 1990, right after the release of No Depression, this is Farrar, Tweedy, and Heidorn at their most defeated, smoldering, and uncompromising. In “I Got Drunk,” drinking hasn’t yet acquired the pathos and sense of alienation that it would on Still Feel Gone, and there’s still something redemptive, adolescent, and political about the pleasures of self-destructive consumption. But the lyrics, the opening one especially, have a descriptive poignancy that escapes listeners now. Finding the world wanting and drinking to forget described a state of feeling and a response to a set of conditions, neither of which exist any longer. In 1990, white youth were growing up in a post-Marxian cultural and economic malaise that emerged out of the new century’s consumer society where politics and art live on in suspended animation, where the world is never found wanting because it no longer makes sense to ask it for anything, and “all the things I haven’t got” is a turn of phrase that lilts strangely on the ear — almost foreign, most archaic. Backing up “I Got Drunk” is an excellent down-tempo version of the Gram Parson’s classic “Sin City.”
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Willie Hugh Nelson (pronounced /wɪli nɛlsən/; born April 30, 1933)[1] is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie (1973), combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger (1975) and Stardust (1978), made Nelson one of the most recognized artists in country music. He was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a subgenre of country music that developed at the end of the 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions of the Nashville sound. Nelson has acted in over 30 films, co-authored several books, and has been involved in activism for the use of biofuels and the legalization of marijuana.
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Gorman Bechard’s Color Me Obsessed is the rare music documentary that lavishes admiration not only onto its subject, rowdy Minneapolis cult rock band The Replacements, but on the band’s fans as well. The doc doesn’t feature a single song by The Replacements, nor does it feature interviews with any of the three surviving members. Instead, Bechard lets the fans tell the story. Over the course of the film, he interviews dozens of subjects: the musicians, misfits, and devotees whose formative years were sound-tracked by The Replacements. We hear conflicting opinions about nearly everything – favorite songs, band dynamics, the point at which things turned sour. And we hear story after story about how the band changed (and in some cases saved) people’s lives.
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Here’s one of my personal Replacements fav’s

Advance Base is the new musical project by Chicago, Illinois singer/songwriter Owen Ashworth (formerly of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone). A Shut-In’s Prayer is Ashworth’s first full-length release in over three years, & the first by Advance Base. Recorded at home & in piano practice rooms at the Chicago Public Library, A Shut-In’s Prayer is an intimate collection of deliberately crafted blues, waltzes & ballads. Ashworth sings nostalgic stories about lost loves, childhood friends, estranged siblings, & other hard feelings over simple drum machine rhythms & sparse hand percussion. Warm & twinkling piano lines fill the spaces between harmony vocals & strummed autoharp chords, with the occasional creaking floorboard or snapping reverb spring to remind you where you are. It’s a different atmosphere than one might expect from the dude from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, but clear that Ashworth’s keen ear for melody & idiosyncratic lyrical abilities have only expanded in recent years. At age 35, Ashworth has a lot of music left in him, & he’s just getting started again. The album will be released on CD, vinyl and digitally. More information soon at http://www.caldoverderecords.com and http://www.advancebasemusic.com.
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Everything on Feeling Mortal is original. The songs themselves are mostly spare, embellished by stray squeals of harmonica, picked guitar, a little pedal steel and an extraordinarily weathered voice that seems freighted with so much hard wisdom.
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Named “Best Country-Western Artist in L.A.” by Los Angeles magazine and called “the uncrowned king of the L.A. neo-honky tonkers” by Billboard, Mike Stinson is in a class by himself among Southern California country performers.
The universally respected singer-songwriter has issued two widely admired independent albums, Jack of All Heartache and Last Fool at the Bar, and 2009 will see the release of his third CD, The Jukebox In Your Heart, produced by the noted Austin, Texas musician Jesse Dayton and recorded at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios.
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Kacey Musgraves looks like a perfect country music ingenue – until you notice her nose-ring and the punky peroxide streak in her chestnut hair. The 24-year-old Texan’s debut single is similar. It comes on gently – a banjo and a fingerpicked acoustic nudging a lovely singsong tune – but the story it tells is fierce and unblinking: a tale of small town America, where bleak prospects, bad marriages, and boredom are a young woman’s birthright. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary/We’re so bored until we’re buried,” Musgrave sings. It’s as poetic and potent as any song released in 2012 – an instant classic, a “My Hometown” for millennials.
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From http://www.americansongwriter.com:
Shel Silverstein did a little bit of everything in his amazing career. A cartoonist, author, screenwriter, and much more, Silverstein will always be beloved among music fans for his songwriting output. Many of his songs were quasi-novelty numbers like “A Boy Named Sue,” recorded by Johnny Cash, and “The Cover Of The Rolling Stone,” which turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy for Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show.

Those songs relied on Silverstein’s inventive, subversive sense of humor. For “Sylvia’s Mother,” also given to Dr. Hook for what was their very first single, it sounded on paper like another comical set-up: A would-be suitor’s desperate pay-phone call to his ex-girlfriend is intercepted by her protective mother. Yet the song, which hit the Top 5 in both the US and UK, turned out to be surprisingly moving, thanks in large part to the tender performance of Dennis Locorriere, who sang lead on the track for Dr. Hook.

As for Siverstein, he didn’t have to use much imagination for the tale, since it actually happened to him. He told Rolling Stone about it in 1972: “I just changed the last name, not to protect the innocent, but because it didn’t fit. It happened about eight years ago and was pretty much the way it was in the song. I called Sylvia and her mother said, ‘She can’t talk to you.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ Her mother said she was packing and she was leaving to get married, which was a big surprise to me. The guy was in Mexico and he was a bullfighter and a painter. At the time I thought that was like being a combination brain surgeon and encyclopedia salesman. Her mother finally let me talk to her, but her last words were, ‘Shel, don’t spoil it.’ For about ten seconds I had this ego charge, as if I could have spoiled it. I couldn’t have spoiled it with a sledge hammer.”

The trick for Silverstein was converting that story efficiently into a song. He managed this in ingenious fashion by telling the story almost completely through the mother’s phone patter. Mrs. Avery alternates between polite small talk and stern warnings against the narrator’s attempts to reconcile with Sylvia, who’s preparing to marry a man “down Galveston way.”

The only words that the narrator can get in are his desperate pleas to at least say goodbye, but Mrs. Avery realizes that he likely wouldn’t stop there. That’s where Silverstein’s structure gets it right. It’s fitting that the guy’s feelings and thoughts on the matter should go unheard, since he’s the odd man out in this situation. The anguish in Locorriere’s delivery says it all anyway.

The early 70’s were a great time for sappy heartbreakers to break through on the AM dial, but “Sylvia’s Mother” is one that still holds up without any lingering aftertaste. Silverstein’s quirky talent, filtered through Dr. Hook’s earnest rendering, gets the credit for that. Anyway, the royalties probably more than compensated Shel for all that change he owed the operator.

“Sylvia’s Mother”

Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s busy
Too busy to come to the phone
Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s tryin’
To start a new life of her own
Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s happy
So why don’t you leave her alone

And the operator says, 40 cents more
For the next 3 minutes
Ple-ease Mrs Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please Mrs Avery, I just wanna tell ‘er goodbye

Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s packin’
She’s gonna be leavin’ today
Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s marryin’
A fella down Galveston way
Sylvia’s mother says, please don’t say nothin’
To make her start cryin’ and stay

And the operator says, 40 cents more
For the next 3 minutes
Ple-ease Mrs Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please Mrs Avery, I just wanna tell ‘er goodbye

Sylvia’s mother says, Sylvia’s hurryin’
She’s catchin’ the nine o’clock train
Sylvia’s mother says, take your umbrella
‘Cause Sylvia, it’s startin’ to rain
And Sylvia’s mother says, thank you for callin’
And, sir, won’t you call back again

And the operator says, 40 cents more
For the next 3 minutes
Ple-ease Mrs Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I’ll only keep her a while
Please Mrs Avery, I just wanna tell ‘er goodbye

Tell her goodbye
Please
Tell her goodbye

– Written by Shel Silverstein
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Her music, the equivalent of a smoke-filled whiskey-soaked back street bar when compared to the ultra slick, over-styled and over-produced country superstars that clog up the Nashville airwaves and give country music – as a whole – a bad (or at least misunderstood) reputation.
The epitome of modern day Americana, Rose’s music is all aching telecaster twangs and weeping pedal steel – shot through with unapologetic hooks and melodies sweet like honey nectar.
‘No One To Call’ is the lead track from The Stand-In, Rose’s second album and the follow up to the universally acclaimed Own Side Now from 2010. Immediately punchier than previous work, Rose says of the new material “I have a tendency to work small so this album is like my first attempt at a high kick”.
Flanked by band mates Jeremy Fetzer and Spencer Cullum, alongside a whole host of key Nashville players – ‘No One To Call’ sounds instantly timeless. Bursting out of the gates with a bar room honky-tonk swagger, Roses’ undeniable croon instantly disarming. Like all truly great country songs, it’s simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting – life affirming even.
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