Monday, January 08, 2007
The Best Albums You Never Heard
The Crime Dog has been remiss.....
Part of the focus of Parrothead Ramblings from the beginning, in addition to short stories and long laughs, was to profile music you may not know about but need to. I haven't been doing that lately......
So, today we get back on track. Now, as we all know, man does not live by Trop Rock alone. We can do OK on it, but we'd miss artists like Ellis Paul, perhaps America's very best songwriter. Yoy may never have heard of him, but he's huge in American folk music.
So here he is. Listen to him one time, and I gurantee you he will soon own a large part of your iPod's memory. My favorite is American Jukebox Fables, a 2005 release with some of the strongest, most emotionally powerful lyrics I've ever heard.
The haunting Clarity never fails to stir me, and you'd have be at room temperature to not be moved by Kiss The Sun (A Song For Pat Tillman). You want jaunty and fun Parrothead-friendly music? Just listen to Alice's Champagne Palace, and you'll be ready for a cold one. Hell, you'll also want to run away away to Alaska.
Ellis Paul seems ro prefer the intimacy of smaller audiences, and rarely performs uch further east than Illinois, so don't expect to catch him at Desert Sky Pavilion any time soon. But just throw on some headphones and spend an hour with him, and you'll be hooked. You can pick up his music at his website, which link his albums to cdfreedom.com. They allow you to dowload the cuts you want without buying a whole album, but do yourself a favor and get the whole thing. The Crime Dog would never lead you astray.
