SOUNDTRACK: RYLEY WALKER-“Love is Everywhere (Beware)” (from WILCOvered, UNCUT Magazine November 2019).
The November 2019 issue of UNCUT magazine had a cover story about Wilco. It included a 17 track CD of bands covering Wilco (called WILcovered or WILCOvered). I really enjoyed this collection and knew most of the artists on it already, so I’m going through the songs one at a time.
It’s interesting that Walker chose the band’s brand new (at the time) single to cover. I don’t think the album was even out yet when they released this issue.
I saw Walker live last month and his set was a forty-five minute wild improv guitar session. So I’m even more surprised at how beautiful and tender this cover is.
There are some great percussive effects from Ryan Jewell which I wouldn’t have really noticed if I hadn’t seen him do similar things live. Walker didn’t sing at all when I saw him, and his voice here is soft and whispery. It works perfectly with the muted tone of the song–guitar harmonics, a shuffling beat and gentle bass from Calexico’s Scott Colberg.
The song grows gradually louder, mostly from Jewell’s drums until with about a minute left, Walker goes absolutely berserk with a wild electric guitar solo–largely noise and chaos, while the rest of the song continues as before. Very Wilco.
[READ: February 15, 2020] Snippets of Serbia
This book came across my desk at work. The book is entirely in English and yet the cataloging information (the CIP page) is in Russian, primarily. It was published in Beograd by Komshe Publishing.
That’s all fascinating because Emma Fick is an American artist. She is of Serbian descent and went there to teach English. She brought her sketch book because she always does. While there she drew pictures and then earned a grant to travel to Serbia to draw more.
The introduction to the book gives a good summary of Serbia and its inability to be pigeonholed.
Serbia is fascinating and baffling, captivating and frustrating, vibrant and confounding. There is no singularity to Serbian culture, and its historical, religious, cultural, culinary, and philosophical narratives are knots that must be carefully detangled.
Illustration was her way of absorbing Serbia.
She knows the book is flawed and incomplete. She knows there are mistakes in it and she knows that her experience of Serbia is not what Serbia is, But boy did it ever make me want to go there–a country I have never given a second thought to.
The book is roughly 200 pages of watercolor sketches of people, places, customs, and especially the food of Serbia: Belgrade, North, South, East and West. (more…)
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