SOUNDTRACK: JOHN MORELAND-Tiny Desk Concert #733 (April 20, 2018).
I don’t know John Moreland, but the blurb says he was in a metal-core band. That band was Thirty Called Arson. The blurb also says it’s hard to believe that he was in such a band, but I can hear the gravel in his voice, as sweet as it may seem.
Moreland falls into that Steve Earle kind of alternative country that I begrudgingly like. I especially liked the first song.
Moreland and his musical partner John Calvin Abney kick off the Tiny Desk Concert with “Sallisaw Blue,” a song originally recorded in a bar in Moreland’s hometown of Tulsa.
“Down for the count, along for the ride
Sipping cold medicine, ruining our lives
Slumming I-40 with American songs
They can bury our bodies in American wrongs”
This is one of those funny situations where the main guy’s sidekick is the far more musically talented fellow. John Calvin Abney plays a wild harmonica and some cool solos as well as adding all kinds of grace notes to the song. Of course, it is Moreland’s voice that is the centerpiece. And really, I love the chorus of this song. I love the chord progression and how unexpected it is coming from those verses.
“Old Wounds,” is a slower song. It’s got the disturbing lyric, “if we don’t bleed, it don’t feel like a song.”
It’s a style of storytelling and image-painting that John Moreland has been making with his guitar for at least the past ten years, over seven albums. His songs are filled with characters and tales of broken love and broken people.
“Cherokee” continues with those broken people: “I guess I’ve got a taste for poison / I’ve given up on ever being well. / I keep mining the horizon / digging for lies I’ve yet to tell.” The melody is pretty and the accompanying guitar is quite lovely.
Moreland would be a treat if he opened for someone I wanted to see. I would enjoy a 30 minute set from him.
Especially if he plays a Thirty Called Arson song
[READ: April 12, 2016]: “Vast Hell”
This was a short story (just a couple of pages) but it was packed with so much. And I loved how by the time it was over I had more questions than answers. I also loved the very strange way it was constructed.
With such a great opening sentence
Often when the grocery store is empty and all you can hear is the buzzing of flies, I think of that young man whose name we never knew and whom no one in town ever mentioned again.
I Just Read About That... 