Link Salad

[clarentine]

I started to put this in my email archive, and decided I could also archive it here for later retrieval and to perhaps infect others with my amusements.

Calexico is a band I heard first on Radio Paradise (radioparadise.com) and liked very much - so much so that I've ordered one of their CDs (Feast of Wire). This link is to a live performance: http://www.archive.org/details/calexico2003-04-25.flac16

(I don't know if this interest of mine in things Western is due to recent movies (Brokeback Mountain) and books (Emma Bull's Territory) I've enjoyed, or whether those things brought back to the fore a longstanding preference. I suspect the latter. And I'm pleased that the rest of the world seems to be set to deliver more for me to enjoy. ::grin::)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You may already know this, but for Western tropes in music, I love Josh Ritter.

[clarentine]

Thank you! I grew up listening to my father's Johnny Cash and such, but I have been a long time away from Western things. (Is it my imagination, or has C&W taken a decided swing south, rather than west?) (Not that I have anything against things south, but what I liked about the music - the sheer desperation, the loneliness, the bleakness of a bare stage under that enormous sky - just don't work when the problems feel so very small.)

I will check into Josh Ritter. Any particular place to start? A favorite CD?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am fond of his most recent CD, "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter." It's got a line in "The Next to the Last True Romantic" that's just one of my favorite cowboy song lines ever: "He steals hearts like they're horses, and horses when hearts can't be found."

I think it's not verbal laziness that's caused Country-and-Western to be referred to as just "Country" over the last decade or two. I really think the Western component has been neglected.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Calexico is great. Totally unappreciated, I think.

[clarentine]

I'm definitely appreciating them today! I think I've played that live performance through four or five times already. :-)