#Will Kimbrough

[sinceileftyoublog]

Shemekia Copeland Interview: Break It Down to the Basics

Photo by Dave Specter

BY JORDAN MAINZER

A couple weeks ago, in speaking with Shemekia Copeland over the phone, I called her out. Though her new album Blame It On Eve, out Friday via Alligator Records, is her purported attempt to make an album that's a "break from the news" instead of "breaking news," she still sings about doomscroll-worthy topics. She admitted it right away. "I can't help myself," she said. "There was no way I couldn't talk about women's rights on this record." The album's very title refers to society's tendency to put the woman at fault, one that, of course, has biblical precedent. Copeland always has a way of selling you without hitting you over the head. "Hurricanes and tropical twisters / Always gettin' named after some sisters," she sings on the title track, "But the worst winds come from DC / Stealin' rights from you and me." Even alongside Jim Hoke's skronking saxophone and Luther Dickinson's screaming guitars, it's Copeland's wail that rises above.

Copeland calls herself "an idea person" who works with a stellar team of songwriters. Like most lyricists do, she jots down song ideas when they come into her head, and flushing the songs out with her team happens organically. "It's like getting a dress tailor made to fit you," she said. Blame It On Eve is her most balanced record yet. There are autobiographical songs (the blues stomp "Tough Mother"), paeans to interracial love ("Cadillac Blue"), gospel-rock jams ("Tell The Devil"), educational treatises ("Tee Tot Payne"), and even a couple covers, including her father Johnny's "Down on Bended Knee". Copeland turned to longtime collaborator Will Kimbrough to produce the record and play various instruments on it, and the core band of Kimbrough, bassist Lex Price, and drummer Pete Abbott treats Copeland's words with appropriate gravity. Kimbrough's mournful, echoing licks mirror Copeland's pained expressions on "Only Miss You All the Time". And the band's rock and roll strut gives levity to an otherwise serious song "Broken High Heels", where Copeland cleverly compares our collective attitude towards climate change to "Dancing in a graveyard in broken high heels."

Indeed, Copeland's songs that one might call "political" aren't really that--they're just about issues that affect everyday life. "Anything uncomfortable, people want to call it political," Copeland said. On "Is There Anybody Up There?" a duet with Alejandro Escovedo, the narrator starts to doubt that God is listening when looking at the ills of the world, like our broken immigration system, before realizing that his very doubts make him a sinner, too: "If they crucified poor Jesus, think what they'll do to me!" "Tee Tot Payne" is, of course, about the Black man who taught Hank Williams the blues. Copeland views the song as part of the larger conversation going on about Black influence on country music, and an important opportunity to engage with Black history. "Rhiannon Giddens wrote an amazing essay about the banjo and how it wasn't originally an instrument used amongst white bluegrass artists as much as it was used within Black culture," Copeland said. "They're trying to get rid of history, so for my last records, I try to put something educational in there."

As traditional as is the music Copeland makes, her view on making records and performing is pretty consistent with that of today's world. She's the first artist I've ever interviewed to admit that the sequencing of her albums isn't crucial. That is, she doesn't care whether listeners listen to the album's songs in order as much as they pay attention to what's in each song. "In all honesty, I don't believe sequencing is that important because people don't listen to records that way. I still do, but people don't listen to records in sequence. People pop it into their device and listen to it the way they want to," Copeland said. She then offered a caveat. "But it's important to me that they hear all the songs. They all fit on the record in some shape or form." That's Copeland, the idea person, thinking big picture, knowing that the collection of songs makes a whole, but each individual track tells a unique story. It's perhaps why her approach to playing live is so effective. Sequencing a set is important to Copeland, but it's less about planning and more about doing some of her own listening. "I don't really do setlists. I try to feel out the audience. I have some idea what we're gonna do, but I change it up," she said.

At the end of the day, Copeland has an innate sense for what makes songs tick. As she and her team write and practice, they start to think about who else could feature on the song, always without overloading it. It's how they ended up with Jerry Douglas contributing lap steel on "Cadillac Blue", Dashawn Hickman providing Sacred Steel guitar on "Tell the Devil", and Cara Fox playing cello on "Belle Sorciere", on whose chorus Copeland sings in French. Copeland's song-making prowess, though, is never more so evidenced by her version of Ron Miller's "Heaven Help Us All", recorded most famously by Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. The album closer, it features Kimbrough on organ and Lisa Oliver Gray and Odessa Settles providing impassioned backing vocals. Copeland had first heard the Charles version, which appeared on his 1972 album A Message from the People and featured Gladys Knight. "It [has] a lot of background vocals and horns. It was done in a very big, produced way," Copeland said. "I thought I wanted to break it down to the basics." She's not a minimalist, but when you listen to Copeland's albums or performances, or even talk to her on the phone, every word and moment is essential. She can't help it.

Tour dates:

8/30: Peoria Blues & Heritage Music Festival 2024, Peoria, IL 8/31: Fishers Blues Festival, Fishers, IN 9/1: Rhythm & Roots 2024, Charlestown, RI 9/5: Bell's Brewery, Kalamazoo, MI 9/6: The Ark, Ann Arbor, MI 9/7: Wheatland Music Festival, Remus, MI 9/17: Americanafest Showcase at 3rd & Lindsley, Nashville, TN 9/20: Fanatics Pub, Lima, NY, United States 9/21: Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, Pittsburgh, PA 9/22: Center for the Arts of Homer, Homer, NY 9/27: Rochester Opera House, Rochester, NH 9/28: Spire Center for Performing Arts, Plymouth, MA 10/10: One Longfellow Square, Portland, ME 10/12: StageOne at FTC, Fairfield, CT 10/13: Ardmore Music Hall, Ardmore, PA 10/17: Daryl's House, Pawling, NY 10/18: Elkton Music Hall, Elkton, MD 10/19: Rams Head On Stage, Annapolis, MD 10/20: The Tin Pan, Richmond, VA 11/14: Music Box Supper Club, Cleveland, OH 11/15: The Acorn, Three Oaks, MI 11/16: City Winery Chicago, Chicago, IL 11/17: City Winery St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 11/22: Lizzie Rose Music Room, Tuckerton, NJ 11/23: Barre Opera House, Barre, VT 11/24: City Winery Boston, Boston, MA 11/30: SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco, CA 12/6: Sam's Burger Joint, San Antonio, TX 12/7: The Kessler Theater, Dallas, TX 12/8: Houston Blues Society Holiday Bash at Rockefeller's, Houston, TX 1/19: One Longfellow Square, Portland, ME 2/7: Zellerbach Theatre at The Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, PA 2/16: Vero Beach Blues Festival, Vero Beach, FL 2/22: Soka Performing Arts Center, Aliso Viejo, CA 2/23: Poway Center for the Performing Arts, Poway, CA 4/4: Lied Center of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 4/7: McCain Auditorium, Manhattan, KS 4/12: Bitterroot Performing Arts Council, Hamilton, MT

[americanahighways]

Favorite Albums of May 2024

Favorite Albums of May 2024 @tylorandthetrainrobbers @Will_Kimbrough @b.h.t.m. @chrissmithermusic @AnnaTivel @JesseDayton @Abigail Lapell @KimRichey @AnyaHinkle @theswampdogg @Kaiakater @the_mavericks @americanahighways #americanahighways #favoritealbums #newmusic2024 #writtenbyahuman

Favorite Albums of May 2024 You voted!  And now the results from the readers’ vote for favorite albums of March 2024 releases are in! Congratulations top twelve!  What a great bunch of albums this month, and this month’s competition was fierce! We had almost 18,000 voters! Check out this list just to see what else was new, too. The top three will be featured in our new AH playlist “New Americana…

[musiconspotify]

Will Kimborough - For The Live Of Me (2024) … some of his best …

[krispyweiss]

Album Review: Todd Snider - Aimless Records Presents: Viva Satellite (Purple Version)

Iconoclastic from the jump to the present, Todd Snider added a couple of songs and subtracted another when performing Viva Satellite during his pandemic-era “First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder” livestream series.

Snider’s also a generous artist - the ’streams were gratis, as are the resulting live albums rolling out across 2024. For Viva, Snider opened with an unlisted bit of an unreleased instrumental called “Willie Nelson Mows His Yard Alone” and played an impromptu version of “Amazing Grace” on guitar after aborting his piano rendition of “Never Let Me Down.” He skipped the instrumental “I am Two” altogether, though one could argue it was part of the preceding “I am Too.”

Changes notwithstanding, Aimless Records Presents: Viva Satellite (Purple Version) finds Snider brilliantly recreating the full-band album on which he tried to be Neil Young (“Out all Night”) and Tom Petty (much of the balance of the original LP) as the smart-alecky, solo-acoustic Todd Snider of live performance as after he grudgingly played his version of Steve Miller’s “The Joker.”

“I’ll say this in front of god and everybody - give me classic rock over punk rock any day of the fucking week,” Snider says while demonstrating how the pinkie finger makes the difference between the guitar styles of the two. He added: “I thought the Sex Pistols looked boss as all fuck.”

Funnier than at least half of all working comedians, comfortable in who he is, magnanimous in his praise for friends and colleagues like Will Kimbrough and willing to play songs he doesn’t much like (“Positively Negative”) to get to those - “Can’t Complain,” “Doublewide Blues” and Kimbrough’s “Godsend” - he loves, Snider comes off as a mensch across the entire performance. That he is clear-headed and playing and singing in top form adds to the delight and reveals that the original Viva - which Snider said tanked - was a victim of production rather than composition.

Viva Purple follows Step Right Up (Purple Version) and will be followed by Happy to be Here (Purple Version).

Grade card: Todd Snider - Aimless Records Presents: Viva Satellite (Purple Version) - A

5/20/24

[concerthopperblog]

Review: Will Kimbrough- For the Life of Me

We live in a time of near unprecedented division; political, racial, social, and economic. Many of us even spent a year physically divided from many of our loved ones due to a global pandemic. Division of all kinds is a theme on Will Kimbrough's new album For the Life of Me.

The album's highlight is the mid-tempo ramble “I Don't Want to Start a War.” It's the tale of an '80s Deadhead who fast-forwards to 2021 and finds himself a part of the insurrectionist mob at the Capitol. That may seem like a far jump for one man, but Kimbrough deftly connects the two extremes via a feeling of community. The same feel of community the song's '80s teen felt down on Shakedown Street is the one a more cynical and jaded 50-year-old gets in a MAGA crowd. “Tie-dyed peace sign / flying by a pillared mansion white /Then you swapped that rag / for a MAGA flag in the thick-aired Selma night,” Kimbrough recites as his song's subject falls deeper into his new community. “He says love fell out of style,” Kimbrough laments.

“The Other Side” is another song about political divisions. A jangle-pop guitar anthem that reminds me a bit of Kimbrough's '80s band Will and the Bushmen, it's a call for peace in a time when no one seems much interested in it. “Everything ain't black and white / There's a hundred million shades of grey,” Kimbrough notes, before ripping into a guitar solo that will remind you why he's been one of Nashville's most in-demand session guitarists for decades and has been one of Emmylou Harris' Red Dirt Boys for years.

The album's most searing track is “Clotilda's on Fire.” Originally written for Shemekia Copeland (whose own version is excellent) for the Kimbrough-produced Uncivil War. It's the story of The Clotilda, widely considered to be the last slave ship to land on American shores, in Kimbrough's home of Mobile, AL. The burned wreckage of The Clotilda was recently found and sparked much discussion in and about the community of Africatown that rose from the survivors of The Clotilda. It's a tale of the ultimate division and resilience in the face of that division.

If you're willing to step back from the divide and engage in discourse with someone on the opposite side of the political/social/wealth/racial aisle than you, you're Will Kimbrough's kind of person. Throughout For the Life of Me (especially the album's title track), he pleas for understanding, civility, and a place at the table for everyone. As he says in his John Lewis ode “Rivers of Roses,” “we've got a long way to go / but we've come a long way too.”

[querelleofbros]

[dabiconcordia]

"Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand." ― Emily Kimbrough

[littlenightma]

Things l Love About The Joy Ride Movies

• First up, the most obvious — Rusty’s voice. All three movies chose three great actors that are delicious to listen to on and off a CB radio.

• Ken Kirzinger who played Rusty in 3 was Mark Gibbon’s stunt double in 2.

• “How’s my little hussy?” #2 — Had me giggling and kicking my feet.

• “Hey, little girl.” #2 — Rusty makes all the boys his bitches (I may or may not have a fic in mind with Rusty fucking Bobby and a virgin!female!reader together in his barn and then kind of adopts them as his new pets).

• “No rush, no rush.” — #2 I can see him saying this in bed when you get all worked up and need a minute to calm down.

• This interview with Rusty — #2 I turned the brightness up and at some parts you can tell Rusty is smiling and he looks so precious even though he’s talking about killing people.

• The way Rusty’s hands shake when giving Bobby the dice — #2 I imagine that they shake when he gets really excited so it also happens when he’s getting ready to fuck you and he has to grip/hold something to get them to stop.

• “Get wet for me.” — #2 You don’t have to tell me twice, Rusty.

• “Where you at, baby?” #3 — *wheezes* I’M RIGHT HERE

• “I don’t party, little girl.” #3 — Because you’re old and miserable?

• When Rusty moves the hair out of Jewel’s eyes when he’s demanding her to plead on video. #3 — He should have kept her alive so he could have her all to himself. Imagine Rusty stealing not just your car (ironic in itself) but also your girl too.

• “Anyone out there know a Candy Cane?” — #1 This man spent all day looking for someone who stood him up and I can’t be certain if he was mad or not when he was asking for her the second time, but I am pretty sure he fell in love over the radio and my heart can’t take it because it was all a prank. He just wanted to find his Candy Cane :(

• “I’m not sure I’d be what you’d expect.” — #1 He’s so shy and awkward and probably has a praise kink. BUT when he starts getting comfortable enough, he’ll take control and have you coming undone.

• “What room?” #1 — I don’t know if Ted meant to do this or if I am hearing things but it really does sound like Rusty’s voice gets huskier when saying this because he can’t fucking wait to meet Candy Cane alone in a motel room and you damn well know he stood there fiddling with the bag carrying the champagne because he was so nervous.

• Rusty’s hand veins.

• His character as a whole makes the brat in me want to come out. Totally have not pictured myself getting punished by all three Rustys at the same time because Matthew, Mark, and Ken can GET IT.

• All three versions of Rusty are big boys and if you’re into big boys then you would love Rusty Nail. He’d keep you so warm and safe and would kill anyone who looked at you wrong. Literal poster boy for ‘hates everyone except you’.

[hoopster321]

IKTR 😤 In under 18 minutes of play btw!!! Let our girl COOK 🔥 Awesome win for the ‘Stics, Slim & Shatori also came up huge, great team dub :D

[thebirdandhersong]

Also: I would LOVE to know what songs you associate with longing for heaven hours!

[musickickztoo]

Junior Kimbrough *July 28, 1930

[janedoecreations]

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "hey, you! You are beautiful!!"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "I'm beautiful?"

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "very beautiful"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "this doesn't save you from taking my last cigarette.... but thank you"

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "... motherfucker!"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "I beg your pardon?"

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "... Not... Motherfucker! as in... you're a motherfucker for not letting me get away with this --- "

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "..." 𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚜 𝚊 𝚋𝚛𝚘𝚠

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "--- but... motherfucker! as in I got caught if that makes sense?"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "I get ADHD every time you talk nothing about this makes sense!"

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "... wait you have ADHD?"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "... If I didn't like you so much I'd kill you and me I'd drive us right off this goddamn road and off that cliff"

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦: "... you like me?"

𝐑𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐚𝐢𝐥: "fuck off"

[musiconspotify]

Dean Owens Pictures (2023) … with Kimbrough & Hubbard …

[duranduratulsa]

Up next on my 90's Fest Movie 🎬 🎞 🎥 🎦 📽 marathon...The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1996) on glorious vintage VHS 📼! #Movie #movies #animation #musical #thehunchbackofnotredame #tomhulce #tonyjay #demimoore #KevinKline #jasonalexander #MaryWickes #BillFagerbakke #DavidOgdenStiers #RIPDavidOgdenStiers #charleskimbrough #ripcharleskimbrough #DanaHill #billfarmer #KathSoucie #vintage #VHS #90s #90sfest #durandurantulsas4thannual90sfest

[radiophd]

junior kimbrough and the soul blues boys -- come on and go with me

[skullislandproductions]

“Little Go Beep” audition tape from December of 1998, for the role of “Papa Coyote.” So many wonderful submissions from great actors. The part “Cage E. Coyote” ultimately went to the legendary Stan Freberg.