Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes
$18.00 (CD) / $20.00 (2 LP) / $10.00 (MP3)
The standard route for popular music—songwriter to
publisher to label to artist—survived the 60s only to
be overrun by a generation of folkies agog at giants
strumming in the rearview. They were inspired by
iconoclasts from Charley Patton to Woody Guthrie,
artists entirely reliant on one guitar, one voice, and
one’s own words. But our heroes were not the agrarian
luddites of yesterfolk. They cheered when Dylan
plugged in and were rapt when Lennon and McCartney
modernized songcraft, making the studio process just as important to song creation as setting the chords and words down.
The resultant work wasn’t as readily reduced to words
on paper as the Broadside pages that preceded them–
success relied heavily on the way these songs were
captured and transmitted: the sound of the room, the
turn of a phrase, the odd way a piano got mic’ed, or the
way a guitar fell perfectly out of tune. As long as the
end result was somber, dark, and meditative, it didn’t
matter if it was a conscious choice or a happily unhappy
accident.
Each of our lonesome heroes began his journey from
a wildly divergent place. Some of the stops may been
similar, but each was made in different ways at different
times for different reasons. All these travelers somehow
found their ultimate destination on this disc.
From artists who never played one professional gig to those that never stopped playing professionally, whose only shared experience is a journey set upon with no known end, sharing their thoughts, emotions and dreams with
a lonely few along the way.
