SOUNDTRACK: NATHANIEL RATELIFF-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #190 (April 12, 2021).
Nathaniel Rateliff treads a fine line between country and rock. But between this album and his work with the Night sweats, I tend to prefer him to others like him.
The Mercury Café is one of the first places Nathaniel frequented when he moved to Denver in 1998, hearing jazz, dancing, and eventually playing many shows there. For his Tiny Desk (home) concert, he’s assembled a dozen players including a string section, backing singers, and some of his oldest friends: Joseph Pope III on bass, Mark Shusterman on keys, Luke Mossman on guitar and Patrick Meese on drums.
On the opening song and the title track to his 2020 album, And It’s Still Alright, they’re restrained as Nathaniel sings about loss, “I’ll be damned if this old man / Don’t start to counting his losses / But it’s still alright.”
This song is so darned catchy, despite how sad it is. Mossman plays lead guitar and Shusterman keeps the keys going throughout. The addition of strings (Chris Jusell: violin, Joy Adams: cello, Adrienne Short: violin and Rachel Sliker: viola) add a new component that sounds great.
“All Or Nothing” has an interestingly picked guitar with lots of bouncy bass from Joseph Pope III. Midway through, the song starts rocking out with two drummers.
But restraint lets loose on the chorus of “Redemption,” a song about breaking free of the past and written for Apple original film Palmer.
“Redemption” is a powerful song that has a simple but big chorus “Just set me free.” The backing vocals from Larea Edwards, Chrissy Grant and Kinnie Maveryck sound fantastic.
The ender, a tune called “Mavis,” truly is a grand finale, a song that conjures up images of The Band singing Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” — and what a fabulous release it is.
Half way through the song builds to a really full sound. Rateliff sounds great and so do his songs.
[READ: May 7, 2021] “The Shape of a Teardrop”
I really love the diversity of style and subject matter that T. Coraghessan Boyle brings to his stories.
This one is told from two different points of view.
We open on Justin, a belligerent person, angry that his parents have kicked him out of his room. It took three final straws–dropping him from the family cell phone plan; putting a lock on the fridge and the final final straw was the eviction notice on his door.
Alternating sections are are supplied by the first narrator’s mother. She says how much they loved their son and tried to give him everything they could. They had tried so hard to have children, including expensive in vitro. And then one day their miracle was born.
Their son doesn’t have a car (it’s on blocks in the driveway) and doesn’t have any motivation to get a job. But he does have very expensive salt water fish and a bar that he likes to go to (he enjoys the bartender whose name is apparently Ti-Gress.
He has a collage education (just shy of gradating) so he’s no dummy. He has a lot of sociological examples to draw from. In fact, it was in college that he got his girlfriends Lorena pregnant.
I eleven moved in with her in her apartment that was the size of the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai (movie version, I never read the book), and put up with that till she got so big I started calling her Godzilla, Jr., and things became toxic to the point where it made me physically ill to look at her.
His mom loves the grandchild, Alejandro–they accepted him even though they missed the birth, the although he makes it so very hard,
And so he sues them back. He wanted to sue them for giving birth to him. The lawyer said it would never fly (despite the guy in India who is suing for the exact same thing). Instead, he sued for six months notice rather than ten days–he had expensive fish to look after after all.
But the judge (this balding, meringue-faced automaton who could have been a clone of my father) had more questions than answers for him. And when the trial ended there was Lorena and Alejandro waiting for him in the courthouse (he had successfully avoided her each time she came by.)
The title comes from a drawing that Alejandro did for his father. Unsurprisingly, Justin’s not impressed at all by it.
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