Something 4 The Weekend # 120

Palace Music: Lost Blues & Other Songs: "Horses" [mp3]

I watched about an hour of that George Strait: ACM Artist of the Decade All Star Concert on CBS this Wednesday night, and it was about as Nashville as you'd expect - Brooks & Dunn, Faith Hill, Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, LeAnn Rimes, Sugarland, Taylor Swift and many others (including Jamie Foxx!?!?!?) singing all of George Strait's biggest hits for a couple of hours.

Now, I'm getting too old and too wise to complain about the kind of Country music that comes outta Nashville these days, and whether or not it's "real Country", except to say that those smooth Countrypolitan sounds have been coming outta Nashville since the 1950's, including amazing stuff by the likes of Patsy Cline, Ray Price and George Jones, so time will tell where Martina McBride fits into the pantheon, you know?

All I can say is that a pedal steel guitar and a violin don't necessarily make any of it sound exactly like the kind of country music I prefer, and it never helps when all the singers pretty much sound the same...

So here we have Palace Music, led by one Will Oldham, who is better known at this point as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, singing and playing country music the way I tend to like it these days, which is a bit rough around the edges, a bit shambolic, and maybe even a bit lo-fi...There's an authenticity to a song like "Horses", and a well-worn fragility, that evokes campfires and starry skies, smokey whiskey and cheroots laced with some serious green-green...

And then the electric guitar kicks in, and this is still more Country than Nashville.

Hotcha! Hank