Check out Christopher Denny and the Old Soles. Seriously. You won't regret it.

I'm pretty sure Rob Crowell is playing keys with them at the moment (which is a helluva commute!!) I'm sure he's heartbroken about missing our latest snowstorm...

Okay, the previous song is my favourite, favourite. But this one is a favourite, too.

Also, I love this bit: the video begins with a lot of ambient crowd noise, but when he sings that first note there's a moment where everyone present just SHUTS UP. Awesome.

The sound quality is remarkable, considering the conditions.

My favourite, favourite of his songs.

The audience should shut the hell up and listen, but you can still hear him.

...I'm given to understand a bunch of them are coming up from Arkansas with someone who was just down there. I hope they're not all spoken for, because, well, see, I loaned my copy to my cousin, who had it in his car stereo.

And presumably it's still in the stereo, but since his car was broken into over the weekend the stereo is no longer in the car... and I'm out a CD.

Which I'm not even ticked about since, between the stereo and a few things belonging to my brother that were stolen from the trunk of the car, I'm out the least of anyone involved.

Bummer all around though.

Age Old Hunger / Austin City Limits (A two-CD post!)

I got stuck in traffic on the way home from work the other night, and one thing you have to love about public transit is the fact that when you get caught in a traffic jam on a bus, you can let someone else worry about navigation. So instead of worrying about driving I thought about the CD on my player, which of course was Age Old Hunger. I even made some notes, although I’ve pretty much abandoned them in writing this entry.

I’ve already been over the strangely anachronistic (in a good way) sound of the CD, and certainly said enough about Denny’s voice. What stands out to me on repeated listens is how well he understands his voice as an instrument. I was struck, on the bus that evening, how many long vowel sounds there are in his songs. My favourites on the CD are the songs that feature long held notes, and it’s obvious I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a strength of Denny’s because those long vowels are obviously there for a reason. Even the two covers (one by Kristofferson and one by Cash) include the same long sounds. It’s been pointed out to me by my cousin, who is a singer, that Kristofferson as a singer has an amazing ability to sing entire lines on a single breath. He’s less impressive as a singer of individual notes, but the songs are written with room for a singer with different strengths to play on them.

That’s a major difference between the originals on this record and the covers. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Denny singing his own songs, because really their impact is more about the arrangement of sounds than the content of the lyrics. I’ve said it before but it’s true, Denny would still be able to get the emotional content of his songs across if he wasn’t singing in English at all. His phrasings are idiosyncratic and the structure of his songs isn’t as mature as it will be—several of them just seem to end, rather than coming to an actual conclusion. You notice it more when you pay attention to the covers, particularly the Kristofferson one. Obviously you can’t really compare the work of a twenty-three-year-old to that of the master songwriter, but “Loving Her Was Easier” is much more complete, structurally, than pretty well anything else on the record. The difference here is that one writer is universal while the other is still strictly personal—not a problem or a complaint, as a matter of fact. It’s appropriate for a young songwriter to be internally focused. It’ll be interesting to see how he develops.

Musically, there’s a lot of organ and harmonica being used as a lead instrument, and that too is interesting because those two instruments have some of the same qualities as Denny’s voice. There’s no sense of musical confusion here anywhere, all the main sounds complement each other and, if you will, tell the same story. Again, this is a career that'll be interesting to watch.

I was at HMV the day after my traffic-jam listening party and picked up a Kristofferson CD recorded at Austin City Limits in the early 1980s. Listening to this one back-to-back with Denny’s is sort of going from the sublime to… well, the sublime, really. The arrangements of the songs are very early-eighties country, by which I mean they’re a little too bright and sparkly. Kristofferson sounds like he’s having a great time, though, and the overall effect is more exuberance than anything, sort of the sound of a man who’s beaten the devil and is celebrating it.

Sound-wise, though, I preferred the solo-with-guitar version of things I heard from Kristofferson last December in Halifax. It took me a little thinking to come up with the reason. I’ve said before, and said to death, that Kris isn’t a particularly gifted vocalist, and he’s not even such a great guitarist. And at that show he was beginning to show the vulnerability of advancing age.

The net effect, though, was this: there was absolutely nothing between the listener and the words. And Kristofferson’s gift is the universality of his words. They were right there in front of you to share.

Anyway, two very different singers and very different CDs, but they're both worthwhile for their own reasons.

New York City is not a place I generally think about much. I can't think of a single horse show I care about (read, "involving Appaloosas, quarter horses, or pestering cattle") that's held there, which really limits my interest.

However, in the middle part of August I really wish I'd been in town to see a series of shows by a trio of artists signed to the indie label 00:02:59.

Yes, of course one of them was Matt Mays. One of the others, as it happens, was Christopher Denny. Which obviously interests me a lot more now than it would have two weeks ago.

Anyway, life is full of these tiny disappointments, but presumably Matt will eventually come home and play some more shows (by "eventually," read "later this month," at least if you count all the Maritimes as "home." Nothing much for Nova Scotia yet but I've heard encouraging things about October.) And perhaps one day he'll bring Christopher with him.

In the meantime, this lucky bastard went to all the shows, and this link should take you to his posts on the subject.

Damn. I'm torn between stark jealousy, and deep gratitude that he elected to share.

At some point I have to write up a review of Age Old Hunger. And at some point, dammit, I hope Matt gets to recording a new record. But, you know, one thing at a time.

So my parents came up over the weekend, which was fun. I didn't know they were thinking about coming until Tuesday, but that gave me time to get the place cleaned up a little. I now have a ginormous television and cabinet sitting in my living room, since it doesn't fit into their new place and I have a little more room. I'm thinking I may actually have to move furniture around to accomodate it.

We went to the barbecue at the barn on Saturday afternoon, which was nice--we arrived over an hour later than I planned on but luckily it was slow to get started. The card for the mare's owner was really nice--everyone was signing it. I don't know if we'll see much of her now, which is really too bad.

We didn't make it to the do on the Bedford Waterfront--we stopped to tell my brother and his friend where we were going and the folks got chatting and we just never did leave. I was disappointed because once we'd made the plan I sort of started to look forward to it, but stuff happens. I also didn't go out to the Seahorse to check out Faded Blue--I'd slept really badly on Friday for some reason and I was just played out. No way I wanted to go back downtown to check out a band I wasn't sure I'd like. I'm sure I'll have another chance to hear them.

I did most of the driving over the weekend, though we were in my folks' CR-V (and may I add, I am embarrassed how hard I find it to drive an automatic) so I stuck the Christopher Denny CD in the player. I may have to get my parents a copy. They really liked him.

Anyway, nice weekend overall. And now, back to work!

He's got some shows planned in Arkansas this weekend, and here's the article promoting them.

I like his point about how some of his favourite musicians were people he didn't like on first listen. I've heard a few people say that, how they had a strong reaction against an artist and then it turned around. (This is often expressed as, "I used to think Neil Young sang like someone torturing a cat," but I digress.)

Mind you, if I am mad keen on an artist from the get-go, I usually stay that way. In my experience, the deadliest reaction is "meh."

I just found a review of Christopher Denny's Age Old Hunger (scroll down.) The reviewer's description of the strangely old-timey vibe on the record is spot-on and exactly what I was trying to get at last night. It's not that he sounds like he listens to a lot of old-time music. It's that he has that Patrick O'Brian quality of the being of the older time. Listening to the CD, I feel strange that it's not coming out of an ancient radio, or at the very least mono instead of stereo, on vinyl.

The point about the music and the quality of the vocal being more eloquent than the actual lyrics is also a point I'd endorse. He's one of those singers who could be singing in any language and I think I'd get it. And this excerpt says everything about his voice that you need to know:

[Denny's voice] sounds like it belongs to a sun-dried sharecropper in a WPA photograph, it is anachronistically vital, as though that sharecropper were young and hale and retouched in Technicolor. It has something of Jimmie Dale Gilmore's high-wire whine and Roy Orbison's throaty moan, but it is not exactly like either of those. It is sometimes like being licked and sometimes like being strangled. It is both smooth and peppery, wave and particle. It is impossible not to orient yourself to it, like a pole. He exerts over it a preternatural control: Here it is clenched and mournful, holed up in the center of his skull, here it is lean and elastic, here so thin the light shines through it. He makes it sound effortless, but there is heat coming off of it; his high notes are cauterizing.

I should probably not even try to add anything to that.

I will remark, though, that halfway through the album I began to fantasize about covers I'd like to hear him sing. "You Don't Know Me" is high on my list. Not that I plan to pester him on MySpace to do so.

It's probably lucky for Chris that he lives in Arkansas and not Halifax. Because I would surely come to all his shows until he was sick to death of the sight of me.

Believe it or not, in this entry I plan to pimp a musician I like!

I know, it's not like me.

Okay, it's not like me because said musician does not come from Halifax. His name is Christopher Denny, his CD is Age Old Hunger, and I mentioned him a few weeks back. In the meantime, I think you can listen to chunks of his CD on the linked Web site. Or on MySpace.

There is a Halifax connection: Rob from El Torpedo played on the CD, which is how I got onto it. If you like lonesome old-fashioned folk music (he even covers Johnny Cash and--wait for it--Kris Kristofferson) that's stark but warm and it's not a contradiction in terms when you hear it, with a vocal that the aforementioned Rob calls "a cross between Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison"--well, you could do worse.

Okay, I'm off to the barn to check a microscopic cut on Mitzi's coronet band and see if anyone has heard an update on our sick friend. I'll be listening to this all the way.

I don't know if this'll get me off the Kristofferson bender I've been on lately, but might set off another one entirely.

I've just been sent a couple of tracks from the upcoming album by Christopher Denny. Which obviously sent me scampering to MySpace to see what else I could find. (I basically keep my MySpace account these days because it's such a great place for bands to post songs. That's a good enough reason.)

Rob from El Torpedo describes this guy as sounding like a cross between Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline, and you know, I hear it. Especially the second part.

Just in case I didn't have enough stuff to look forward to.