Frank Morey (official AMG FB MyS profile) is a Massachusetts blues-folk type of guy, with a perfect gravelly voice. Like Waits and Wolf before him, he uses his voice to express not just beauty but pain and anger and wrecked ennui and all sorts of other things, and even occasionally that beauty but through a cracked window.
This version of Stag has a slow, tuning-up kind of start, but soon begins swinging hard and loose. Then it turns into a medley, with quotes from "Delia" (the two songs share a few lines in the folk canon), and in between there and the end there's also a rambling a capella break and a big finish, and a little coda at the end.
There are no screaming guitars, or drum solos, but this is rock and roll at its finest: take traditional American music from a couple of different sources, get a few talented people in a room and have them run through it, with the freedom to do what they want and follow their own musical ideas.
It's too bad I "discovered" Frank Morey right this second -- as of this writing I don't have the money or the time to invest in five new albums from a completely new-to-me artist, but I really really really want to. (His MySpace and Facebook pages also include a mindblowing cover of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song" I might be sharing sometime soon, but you shouldn't wait. Click and listen.)
Saturday, June 12, 2010
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