Show Review: 2017-2025

 Show Reviews: 2017-2025

  These reviews reflect the fact that my girlfriend works in the music industry and most of the stuff I went to in this period was as her guest. Pre-pandemic, it was Margo Price- a wild ride to be sure. Well captured if I do say so, and I got some good writing in about Tyler Childers before he broke out nationally (Margo and Tyler have the same booking agent).   Theres a gap between November of 2018 and February of 2022.  The pandemic was, obviously, horrific for the live music industry- 2020, 2021 was mostly about reading as far as this blog was concerned.  In 2022, 2023, 2024 up to last year there are shows related to my most recent label, Dream Recordings.  It's been a low volume affair, with little or no momentum.  Mostly, the music business is existential dread. 

Published 4/10/17
Sleaford Mods
@ The Echoplex
April 9th, 2017

   England's reigning working class talk-rap duo delivered the goods last night to a crowd of predominantly older, male and English non working class fans, their first show in Los Angeles.  The easiest catch phrase to describe Sleaford Mods is "post-Brexit the Streets/Mike Skinner."  That capsule summary doesn't do justice to the magnetism and delivery of rapper/talker/singer Jason Williamson.  Sleaford Mods are a genuinely compelling live act perhaps because of their bare bones aesthetic.

 You can count me as convinced by their performance last night

Published 4/26/17

 The Stagecoach Discovery Tour
 w/ Jamey Johnson, Margo Price & Brent Cobb
@ North Park Observatory
San Diego, CA.

  Getting ready all this week for Stagecoach, particularly Saturday Night with a sequence of Margo Price, Willie Nelson and Shania Motherfucking Twain basically in a row.   The prep for that begins this week, with a couple of local dates on the Stagecoach Discovery Tour with Jamey "Kicked Out of Country" Johnson, Margo and Brent Cobb (He's Dave Cobb's cousin, not his brother, FYI).  Last night it was the first date on the tour, playing the North Park Observatory (f/k/a the North Park Theater).  I am a decided fan of the venue, if not the staff at the venue.

  Pre-gaming across the street at the Waypoint Tavern, I got a taste of the vibe for the night:  manly men wearing Johnson's trademark "Kicked Out of Country" t-shirt and some combination of work wear and/or cowboy books, with a much smaller number of cowgirls.   When the tour was announced, the question on my mind was who was Jamey Johnson- turns out he's a Chris Stapelton type with several great records and a spotty relationship with labels and publishers.  He's currently in the middle of a multi year dispute that has rendered him unwilling or unable to release a new record, but his passionate fan base provided a justification for his headliner status.  That and his enormous tour truck/bus combination.

  The shows at the North Park Observatory start impressively early, Brent Cobb's set started before 8, Margo played at 8:15 AM.  Amazingly, last night was her first date in San Diego since her last record came out, another testament to her competitiveness in so many mid size and small markets that she can afford to ignore San Diego completely. The crowd was assuredly there for the headliner, but they were very interested in both opening acts, far beyond what you'd expect from a similarly sized rock crowd.

  I would have liked to do more wandering through the crowd, but I'm planning to get my crowd work in tomorrow night at the Ace Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where the same tour takes the stage.  Good tickets still available!  Jamey Johnson has a two hour set!



  

Margo Price and band prepares to take the stage at Stagecoach 2017, photo credit me.

Published 5/2/17
Stagecoach 2017 w/ Willie Nelson, Jamey Johnson, Margo Price & Nikki Lane

  One of the major ironies of being a moderately successful pop artist is that your work day is everyone else's party.  Even for the biggest, most successful artists, touring is a grind.  The process of touring is a function of minimizing unnecessary costs over time, so if you are doing reasonably well as a touring musician, there are not a lot of days off- by design.  Every city you play is different, every lodging, every venue, you are playing in front of a live audience five out of every seven days, and then, to top it all off, every human you know in each city comes out and wants to hang.  Touring musicians, unless they are psychopathic-ally unable to be alone or chronic substance abusers or both, do not want to hang out with random people during their work day, they want to play their gig, maybe have a couple hours to relax, and then they want to go to the next city.  It's nothing personal, its basic humanity.

  No where is this dynamic more apparent than at a mid to large size festival, where you've got dozens of artists and camp followers, squeezed into unusual time slots, with a double or triple portion of friends and family from the surrounding area.  If you happen to be one of those camp followers, as I am, it should be more about the festival audience than whatever artist you may taking along behind.   I've long espoused the audience first perspective, and no where does that pay higher dividends than at the Stagecoach Festival, or "Cowboy Coachella" as members of Margo Price's band of trained killers were calling it over the weekend.

  Despite my love for the festival, I felt like it was over all a down year for the bill, particularly the headliners, with only the Saturday night Shania Twain post-Vegas headline slot feeling really festival worthy.  Dierks Bentley, and Kenny Chesney, headlining Friday and Sunday night respectively, were of no interest.  Friday had some "aww sorry I missed them moments":  Elle King, an ancient Jerry Lee Lewis, Maddie & Tae and John Moreland.   Sunday had Terry Allen, who I really did want to see.  But basically, Stagecoach 2017 was all about Saturday afternoon, with Margo Price, Tommy James, Nikki Lane, Jamey Johnson and Willie Nelson celebrating his 84th birthday, playing in that order between 4 PM and 8 PM.  

  In many ways, the 4 PM Margo Price set felt like the fulfillment of a promise made two years ago, when I came to Stagecoach for the first time.  It was in September of that year that Third Man announced the Margo Price record, that same week, my gf brought her into Monotone (who manage Jack White, who owns Third Man records) and then flash forward two years and here we are.  So it was satisfying to see it all go down, even if there was the normal frisson of anxiety that accompanies any live show by a band you care about.

  Obviously, the crowd at 4 PM was just filling in.  The Palomino tent for Stagecoach is the Sahara tent for Coachella, so it is a big space, and it can be half empty with a few thousand people watching.  The performance was workmanlike, not inspired.  I mean, how inspiring can you be at 430 PM on a Saturday afternoon?  I suppose it has happened, I can think of some memorable afternoon performance at Coachella- MIA's first performance was in the mid afternoon, but it's a tough sell.  The band was truly spectacular, a fact that everyone who watches picks up on, country fan or no.  I could just watch the band play for an hour without Margo at this point.

  The crowd was that amazing Stagecoach mix of races and classes, though mostly white with a sprinkling of darker skin tones and ethnic identifies subsumed by a unifying, American flag inspired visual aesthetic.   I'm hardly a member of that coterie of festival goers, but at least they aren't the annoying, drug-addled children who dominate the general population area of Coachella in 2017.  I would have liked to have seen more artists, period.  After Willie Nelson wrapped his set at 9 PM Saturday night, there was no one left to see except Shania Twain. It would be great if the second stage went a little deeper into the night.

East Nashville artist Nikki Lane also played Stagecoach 2017

  After Margo Price wrapped up, we ended up trouping over to the Mustang stage- to see Nikki Lane, who is something like an East Nashville rival- I'm using "rival" in a very casual sense not meant to fan the flames of gossip, but it would be ridiculous to not compare to East Nashville based artists who peddle similar varieties of vintage country.  For Lane, the emphasis is on the vintage. She sings with a twang that wouldn't be out of place on a Western Swing record from the 1940's.  She literally owns a vintage shop in  East Nashville.

  It's probably a leetle embarrassing that I've been following Margo Price and East Nashville so closely for the last year and a half and had yet to actually hear Nikki Lane sing.   And I was impressed by the voice, and the general look/style/aesthetic that she brings to the table.  But her band is not as good as the other East Nashville based bands I've heard.  Also, I think her twangy singing style is something that I personally enjoy but one that limits her upside.  The only place that twang has in contemporary Top 40 country is the accent of country artists who are belting out choruses or "rapping" in between verses.  I'm sure, though, that after Stagecoach I'll be paying closer attention, but my take is, based on the fact that she has three LPs out and the first one was in 2011, that it isn't going to happen for her in this iteration.   She needs a hit, and she didn't get one from the new record.  I'm saying this having heard the new Margo record and knowing that there is at least one, maybe two or three radio level hits on her next record.

  The Willie Nelson set was a total shit show, in the best possible sense of that term.  His set started out with 10 minutes of Bradley Cooper shooting for his Lady Gaga featuring Star is Born.  No sound, just Cooper "playing" on stage with a band.  The big story backstage was Neil Young literally driving up in his beater car.  He ended up hopping on stage for 45 seconds, alongside Margo, John Doe,  Jamey Johnson and others as Willie was serenaded with happy birthday.

  Afterwards, there wasn't much celebrating- we had gone early for the managers and bookers Stagecoach Brunch, so Shania's set would have required a full 12 hours at the festival.  The band did watch Shania Twain, then it was off to Tempe for the Sunday edition of the Stagecoach Spotlight tour with Jamey Johnson and Brent Cobb.  I would also like to again say that Brent Cobb is a very nice guy with an excellent attitude.

  A major difference between Stagecoach and Coachella is the artist village- for Coachella it's the beating heart of the industry scene, but for Stagecoach it is essentially deserted.  I sat in the artist area for hours, in the middle of dedicated trailers for Willie Nelson (he never even used it and eventually they turned it over to Steve Moakler), Maren Morris (she was there for about 15 seconds, sporting legit side boob), Margo, Nikki Lane and Brent Cobb and really it was only after the end of Nelson's set that anyone started hanging out.  Most of the main stage acts have their own tricked out tour buses and never leave, and the lesser artists were just stopping through Stagecoach on their own tours.

  Sunday I was disappointed that I didn't see Terry Allen.

Published 6/25/17
Arroyo Seco Weekend: Day 1
Gold Course next to the Rose Bowl, Pasadena, CA.


  Yesterday I went to Day 1 of the new Arroyo Seco Weekend, a new festival- pitched somewhere in the Venn Diagram between Desert Trip, Coachella, Stage Coach and a food and drink fair.  Arroyo Seco Weekend raises the question, "Have we reached the point of a post-music music festival?"  The answer I think, for now, is no, but Arroyo Seco Weekend has raised the issue for resolution at a later date.

    The first argument AGAINST Arroyo Seco Weekend being the first example of a post-music music festival was the obvious monster draw of the night one headliner: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  Like, I suppose, every human being living in the United States between the late 1970's and today, I like me some Tom Petty radio hits.  Not so much into the deep cuts, but man oh man his hits, and I've never been to one of his infrequent tour dates (Petty's Tour Archives on his website look like the IMDB page of Daniel Day Lewis:  2008. 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014...)  So while I wouldn't say I exactly jumped at the opportunity to attend, I wasn't hard to convince.   Mostly, my reluctance had to do with the location.  The only Rose Bowl area event I've been to was an exhibition match between Manchester United and the LA Galaxy. That event drew something like 80,000 people, whereas I was told that the capacity for Arroyo Seco Weekend was 25,000.

   As it turns out, logistical concerns were unwarranted.  I arrived late in the day, parked with ease, and walked 10 minutes down, essentially, the length of a golf course.  No line at the front entrance.  The interior layout was scaled down festival- closer to a Renaissance Fair size then Coachella.  Three stage- two major stages and one smaller tent. A huge difference maker between this and other Goldenvoice festivals was the amount and variety of food options.  It was entirely possible to just eat and drink something different every forty five minutes for the entire time you were there, albeit one had to be able to wait in lines between stops.

  The crowd was old to very old- the only demographic keeping the crowd from simply being "very old" was the number of young children- down to babies in strollers, there with parents. Long before Tom Petty took the stage, it was clear, to me, that Goldenvoice is on to something hugely lucrative, and it perhaps a formula that Live Nation, their major rival, simply will not be able to match.  It's hard to imagine the corporate, oxen-like Live Nation being nimble enough to pull off an analogous festival.

  Certianly, it would be fair to say that Arroyo Seco Weekend is pitched towards an older, "bougey" crowd, but it's not fair to say that it is anymore expensive than Coachella.  There was a clear absence of the elements that make Coachella today an exasperating experience for anyone above the age of 25: No EDM, no hip hop and no artist edgier than Broken Social Scene.   There was a heavy jazz/soul/funk vibe, with a noted New Orleans flavor (Preservation Hall Jazz Band and The Meters were two featured artists.

  If anything, I was surprised at just how democratic Arroyo Seco Weekend turned out to be- I was expecting tiers and tiers of access, exclusive seated dining experiences,etc.  Instead, VIP was just a roped off area at the side of the two main stages, a la Coachella in it's earliest days.  The Artist Access area was located on the Third Floor of the Donahue Pavilion in the Rose Bowl.   That was a needed oasis- as it moved toward Tom Petty's set time, the crowd around the main stage was close to unbearable.  A notable visual from this time period was people trying to fill up their inflatable sofa's by whipping them in crowded areas.

  Can I be the first to recommend Margo Price for Arroyo Seco Weekend next year?  I think she'd be a great fit!

Published 8/9/17

Chris Stapleton & Margo Price
 @ Amsoil Arena
 Duluth Minnesota

  I circled this show on the calendar when it came out for two reasons:  It was the first show on the run of dates Margo Price is doing with Chris Stapleton and second, Amy has a college friend who lives in the magical, little-known part of the world called Bayfield, Wisconsin, gateway to the Apostle Islands.   The show was in Duluth, and Bayfield is about two hours away.  Also, it was in the first week of August, which is pretty much the only time I can imagine taking a chance on the weather of upper Minnesota and upper Wisconsin.

    Chris Stapleton is a man at the top of his game- dominating country music while existing largely outside the grosser aspects of it's public "bro-country" persona.  This is not to say that Stapleton is an outsider- he made his Nashville industry bones the old fashioned way: He wrote hits for assholes who didn't deserve them (not Adele).   He spent 14 years in the trenches before he got his shot and then he took it like a guy sitting in a deer blind 100  yards away takes down a prize buck with his sited hunting rifle.

  Although Stapleton himself was not in evidence back stage, you could see that he is a class act- mainly from the craft service buffet, created by an east-Nashvillian with an excellent reputation as a chef.  I also heard that he personally reached out prior to the tour to make sure that any concerns on behalf of the support act were taken care of.  If you know ANYTHING about how opening bands are treated on tour by the headliner, you will realize how rare it is that a headliner would do something like that.

  The Amsoil Arena is a college hockey arena for the local university, University of Minnesota, Duluth, who are a fixture at the NCAA "frozen four" college hockey tournament.  Like everything in built up parts of Minnesota, it was linked together by tunnels and sky-bridges to other buildings in the Duluth Cultural-Entertainment complex- we spent most of our night in the dressing room of another, smaller arena which must have preceded the current one.

   Margo Price's opening set was warmly received by the already full arena.  The show was not a sell out, but according to available information, an arena sell out at the Amsoil Arena in Duluth Minnesota is rare to non existent.   By comparison, the next show on the tour, at a casino complex outside of St. Louis, was a sell out at just under 20k.

  Margo had just released her new EP, Weakness, and I returned from the weekend to this article, castigating "all those responsible" for releasing the new EP.  (Saving Country Music: Quit Releasing Music Via the Short Form EP- with 49 comments)   So mis-guided, that particular take, which is critical of the "surprise EP"- and I just wanted to take the time to say that literally every argument in that post, while perhaps applicable to other artists, is not applicable to Margo Price.
  

Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson at the Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville. 

Published 5/24/18: 

Margo Price & Tyler Childers
@ The Ryman Auditorium in Nashville Tennessee
 w/ Jack White and Sturgill Simpson

  The decline of show review on this blog is directly attributable to the fact that I'm usually going to shows as a plus one of someone who either manages or works for or with the manager of the headlining artist.   I now know that rare is the artist who doesn't keep track of their mentions on the internet, particularly when it's a long form/think piece type, even the writer is far from being popular or affiliated with a prominent news source.  There has also been a recent decline in the number of such articles- music blogs have been dead for almost as long as they were alive, and those that survived have morphed into Tumblr style post and link style sites that rarely bother to include critical writing.

  For example, I went to the Jack White show at the Mayan earlier this year, but I wouldn't write about it for fear that he would read the review and not like something about it- even something that was not intentionally negative, and it would get back to my boo.  That's bad form.   Margo Price I consider a friend.  I loudly take credit for being the conduit being Price and her current management team at Monotone on the basis that I saw the first posting on Spin.com about her debut record on Third Man Recordings (Jack White, managed by Monotone) and told my girlfriend, fan of the Stagecoach Festival and the first five seasons of Nashville, the television show.   She drew the attention of her boss, the rest is history.

  It's flimsy, sure, but fortunes are made on less in this town(Los Angeles), where providing an introduction is a way-of-life as specific as court etiquette in 18th century France.   My original thought is that Margo Price had the potential to be a country artist with an audience beyond the traditional country music audience.  At the time I heard of Margo, I had already seen Sturgill Simpson in Los Angeles and so I was far from surprised when the success of Margo played  a role in the description of a new movement of Outlaw Country/Americana artists.  Margo herself hates the label, "Outlaw Country."  She uses "Modern Traditional County" on her Facebook profile, but there is no denying the wave, led by Chris Stapelton at the very pinnacle, and followed by Sturgill, Jason Isbell, Margo, Tyler Childers, Nikki Lane and a host of others, many of whom have lengthy ties to the East Nashville neighborhood.

   For those and many other reasons, Margo Price's three night stand at the Ryman Auditorium, the hallowed "Mother Church" of County Music, and long time home of the Grand Ole Opry, was a special show.  I can't think of any other musical event that I've observed that has been so triumphant.  It certainly dwarfs any of the achievements of my Zoo Music days- with the possible exception of the Dirty Beaches Best New Music designation on Pitchfork.  It also surpasses any of the achievements of the bands that I followed but wasn't involved with- the Best Coasts and Wavves of that time period.   Midwest Farmer's Daughter was released on March 16th, 2016- before that moment, barely more than two years later she was selling out a multiple night engagement at the most hallowed venue in county music- which itself was thought to be improbable down to the moment the second show sold out.

  Night one featured guest spots from Lukas Nelson and Sturgill Simpson, night two featured Jack White.  Both nights featured Tyler Childers, who himself was making his first appearance at the Ryman Auditorium. Childers an amazing story- according to Ben Swank, the head of Third Man Records, his opening night reception was as raucous as any at the Ryman  for anyone, opener or headliner.  Childers has a large and enthusiastic fan base, even though it would be hard to know it from reading the national media press.  His most recent record, Purgatory, produced by Sturgill Simpson, had at least one genuine hit (White House Road) and a half dozen gems.  His half million monthly Spotify plays surpasses that of Price herself.

  The only thing missing from Childers is any kind of acknowledgment of  modern music celebrity culture, where artists are supposed to dress up and prance around the stage in an attempt to engage the audience.   None of that bullshit from Childers.   The Sturgill Simpson guest spot on night one was good but not great- as supposed to the Lukas Nelson duet- which sent chills down my spine.

  Night two was a more relaxed affair-  the crowd was more sedate, and more attentive.  Jack White and Margo did an excellent duet, again, chills, and raucous audience response, and over all the night two vibe was preferable to night one, in my mind.   Hanging back stage at the Ryman was an absolute treat- the only other time I'd been backstage there was literally on the tour, two years ago.  As the kids would say, "Great vibes."

  Truly, a triumphant episode for Margo Price, and surely a rebuttal to any who would claim that Margo Price is anything BUT a mainline country music star in the making, outlaw and americana tags be damned.

Published 5/29/18
Lonely Island
@ The Rose Dinner Theater in Pasadena

    When I received word that the Lonely Island would be playing a warm up show at a Pasadena Dinner Theater (The Rose: Where Music Meets the Soul (TM)) over Memorial Day Weekend, I leapt at the opportunity to attend.   I've driven or walked past this venue, formerly a Gelson's Grocery Store stuck in the bottom corner of a movie theater/restaurant/shopping complex in Pasadena, across from the convention center, twenty times in the past several years, and always wondered what a venue located in a grocery store would be like to experience.

   The answer is, perhaps predictably, "Laughably terrible."  To accommodate the legions(!) of excited Lonely Island fans the normally present dinner tables had been removed from the floor, leaving the lines of sight of a space not made for standing crowd viewing, and a hugely over crowded, non ADA accessible "VIP Platform," featuring luminaries like JB Smoove and failed sitcom star John Mullaney.  Adding to the moderately oppressive atmosphere was the omnipresent security staff, behaving like the artist performing was Chief Keef or Takeshi69 and not a joke-rap trio featuring three adults from the San Francisco Bay Area.

  I don't have any prejudices against joke-rap or novelty music in general.  If you take a look at the history of the Billboard pop chart, novelty numbers were charting number ones before rock and roll existed as a chart phenomenon.  Acts like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Sheb Wooley (Purple People Eater) have just as much to tell us about the history of recorded music in America as Elvis Presley or The Beatles, maybe more, since the novelty numbers preceded rock and roll.

  The upcoming Lonely Island appearance at a comedy festival in San Francisco, billed as their first live performance, had puzzled me, since I distinctly remember seeing them perform at the Festival Supreme in 2013.  Here is a review of that show from Spin.com.  At the time, Spin said, "Lonely Island snuck a tight mini-set inside Tenacious D’s climactic performance, which included the duo’s giant robot, the Metal, and an oversized alien."   After reviewing the poster for that edition of Festival Supreme, I see that Lonely Island was not billed.  The 2013 appearance was a "surprise" and unbilled, and so, in conclusion, I see why they are billing this performance as their first ever.

   Fans of Lonely Island are sure to love the show, which features bespoke animations for almost every song.  They handle the absence of the numerous guest singers using a variety of techniques.  Sometimes the accompanying visual simply displayed the missing artist.  Other times, one of the Lonely Islanders would take the place of the missing performer. For the Justin Timberlake triptych performance, Asa Taccone used a Justin Timberlake puppet- acquitting himself quite well on the puppetry. As befits their origin as a viral video phenomenon, the bespoke visuals were themselves an attraction of the live performance.  Considering the awful sight lines of The Rose Dinner Theater in Pasadena, watching the screen was more rewarding then watching the stage itself.

  The group itself was, as the saying goes, "tan, rested and ready."  I'm not at all clear at what they've been doing besides Andy Samberg starring on Brooklyn 99.  My understanding is that they have "a deal" with Fox, of the sort where one can sit around and not do anything.  Clearly, some of that time was spent making the videos for this performance, and I suppose puppetry lessons for Taccone.   Only one of the songs came from their succesful(?) movie Pop Star, with Samberg as movie protagonist Conor 4 Real.

 Much of the material reprised their greatest SNL hits, Jizz in My Pants, Lazy Sunday.  Less of the material drew from their non-SNL albums, of which, amazingly, they have two, plus the Pop Star sound track.  A highlight was a new song, about the "Bash Brothers," Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, which has seemingly been written for the San Francisco audience of their upcoming comedy festival.  In Pasadena, in front of a sea of Los Angeles based comedy nerds, the song only got intermittent laughs, but I was hooting.

  The end of the set, about an hour long, had a surprise guest, but I won't ruin the surprise here. The Rose Dinner Theater in Pasadena is a crazy place to have a show.  Wild. 

Tyler Childers performs at legendary Los Angeles venue, the Troubadour.

Published 11/9/18
Tyler Childers
@ The Troubador

  It must be hard for middle aged major label record label executives these days, especially those from the rock era.  I'm not saying that I feel sorry for them, but you can't help but wince on their behalf when you look at the artists who have captured the pop star/rock star label in the internet era.  Take, for example, the micro genre turned chart topper world of internet rap:  drug addicted young adults, funded by gang money, topping the charts without a physical record, let alone an album or a major label backed album campaign.

   I'm pretty sure that there is no coming back from the precipice opened up by the streaming era.  Soundcloud rap provides strong evidence that if one is simply popular enough, you can leverage the rest of it. I'm not sure that really was the case before Soundcloud rap started storming up the actual charts, the model was more that one would bring oneself to the attention of the "real" music industry via promotional tools like Soundcloud, not that one would actually use those formats to become a top 200 most popular artist in the world type person.

  The thing is though, is that all those rock and roll guys are still around.  The way the cultural industrial complex works, if you make a lot of money for a large corporation over an extended period of time, you get to stick around.  If you don't make anyone money, you are out, but if you do, you get to become one of these guys (very few are women).  My point being that there were a LOT of these guys there.   

   Specifically, Ian Thornton, the Huntington West Virginia based manager of Tyler Childers.   When I walked in with Amy (Monotone) he was with Bill Bennett, former Warner Bros Nashville exec and current Hollywood/country fixer.  They were shortly joined by others from Monotone, and label executives from Interscope, RCA and Sony. zero mentions on Stereogum  Also present was Jeffrey Azoff, son of Irving Azoff.  So, to be clear, Ian Thornton manages Tyler Childers.  Tyler Childers does not have a record contract.  Many people are both interested in managing Childers and signing him to a record contract, and it is clear that he a) has a manager and b) perhaps isn't that interested in signing a record contract.

  All of this took place in the front bar of the Troubadour, during the set of opening act Blank Range.  There was also a description worthy mix of fans, guy in an NRA shirt under his denim vest, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, a guy wearing a "Make Nashville Rock Again" hat. And women! It was not the sausage fest of a Jamey Johnson or Sturgill Simpson concert.  I honestly don't know if Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend is a fan or if he just decided to hang out with his manager Ian (Montone, not Thornton).

  It was a lot of what might be called "feeling out," but there is no question that Thornton is running that ship. The show itself was a triumph.  Not the immortal triumph of his first appearance at the Ryman Auditorium, opening for Margo Price, earlier this year, but a triumph.   The buzz in the audience was palpable.  Childers opened with his hit, Whitehouse Road, which seems like something he didn't have to do.  I sensed that he was nervous, and a little bit unsure of the crowd.  It was different at the Ryman Auditorium, which he owned like he was born to play there.    If I had a chance to say something to him, I would have told him not to worry, that the crowd was with him and that he could do no wrong.

    I would say that his live show is not quite as developed as Stapleton or Margo Price, but that he is better life than Sturgill Simpson, who I've now seen in "jam mode" twice.   I think ultimately it is the quality of his voice, as supposed to his lyrics- which are really good- or the band- which is just ok, that has given him his viral quality.  He is an astonishing internet era story of an artist from the most outsidery of outsider places, who has developed outside any publicized "scene."

  Even more astonishing that he nets a total of zero mentions on Pitchfork, zero mentions on Stereogum, only Brooklyn Vegan has been tracking his unlikely rise.   It is both shameful and embarrassing that Pitchfork has slept so long on Childers.  Certainly, if you are going to cover artists like Willie Nelson, Chris Stapleton, Margo Price and Sturgill Simpson, you have to include Tyler Childers on that list.  He belongs there, unquestionably, beyond debate.

    How incredible, also, that, like Price and Simpson (but not Stapleton) he has come from wholly outside the formidable Nashville music industry.   This really is THE indie/local music scene story of this decade, in my mind.   It is something that is really happening, generating interest among audiences and professionals/corporations alike.  That is the succesful combination that you need. 

The Serfs debut in Los Angeles

Published 2/27/22

The Serfs in Los Angeles, CA.

February 26th, 2022

   Well, it's been a pretty grim past decade for my record business. Making a business out of releasing independent bands is difficult/impossible, so keeping things on a hobby level if necessary is required if you are looking for some kind of long term survival.  The grimness of my own experience releasing bombs for the past decade was tempered by the experience of my partner, who I started dating just in time to witness the rise of alt-country star Margo Price- it wasn't my business, but I was there to see it happen.   And the world she lives in- which is the Music Industry proper, just made me laugh at myself and pretensions.  It's really something to experience some kind of limited, local success in an area like independent music only to immediately be immersed in a world where people laugh at such experience and don't consider it success at all.

   One of the cardinal live music experiences is seeing an artist for the first time before they have large audience for their music.  I can remember a handful of such experiences- seeing Grimes open up for Prince Rama in the basement of Buddhist Temple in Toronto during North by Northeast before Visions came out.  The first Best Coast show in San Diego at the Whistlestop- Bobb and Bethany were selling tapes out of a cardboard box in front and that tape stayed in my car for the best part of a decade.   The first Dum Dum Girls show at the UCSD Che Center in San Diego.  The Dirty Beaches show at the Whistle-stop before Badlands was released.   

   Anyway The Serfs- from Cincinnati- just put out their new record on Dream Recordings, and let me tell you, the sales are amazing. They are a genuine sales phenomenon. And I'm asking myself, leading up to this show, "But are they good live?"  Because even though I've been working on putting this record out for over a year and a half, I've never seen them live.  So I was nervous, but most of the nerves dissapated when I saw the crowd- which I believe was in excess of 150.... which- I mean- this band hasn't had NO press, but it's been close to no press.  Like, there are no reviews posted for this record that they just out out.   And they sold 150 tickets. 

   Part of that is the bill-mate, Aurat, who are local to Los Angeles and have their own vocal fans who turned out and stuck around after.   But there is no denying that people showed up to see The Serfs, and boy did they deliver.   I mean look, yeah, I'm biased, but I also don't through around compliments lightly- I haven't even written about music on a regular basis for the past decade.   But here is my elevator pitch for The Serfs, "It will make you feel like you are watching Joy Division at the Factory on  July 13th, 1979."

   Now, let me answer some questions a bold statement like that will raise:

1. Are you saying The Serfs are as good as Joy Division: Possibly so.

2.  Are you saying The Serfs sound like Joy Division: Obviously they are an influence but I would describe it as a pan-Factory Records sound, the musical DNA is exquisite and varied. 

     So if you are reading this and trying to decide whether you need to learn more about The Serfs, possibly listen to their music, possibly see a live show, the answer is yes, all of them- if you are reading this- in other words- if you find yourself here because you were LOOKING for information about this band, you need to pursue it yes you do because the live show is incredible.

   Here are the upcoming live shows, all opening for VR SEX:

4/11 Austin - Hotel Vegas

4/12  Dallas - Cheap Steaks

4/13  Houston - Secret Group

4/14 New Orleans - Santos

4/15  Atlanta- The Earl

4/16  Nashville - The End

   Published 3/7/22

 Mvtant

 in Los Angeles, CA.

   It is crazy how much Spotify monthly listeners serve as a proxy for audience size for artists trying to make a living publishing and performing live music.   When one consider to what extent guess work was involved BEFORE Spotify certified as a handy proxy for world wide audience size, the ability of Spotify to now directly quantify every artist in the world on the same scale is quite breathtaking. And, I might, add leveling, in that now any human can just open up Spotify and see how many monthly listeners every artist earth has updated on a daily basis.

   And of course it isn't perfect and it's not like, a good thing, but is it accurate?  Yes.   This requires, again, taking Spotify monthly listeners as a PROXY for TOTAL audience size, not saying that artists make a living from Spotify streams because it doesn't seem like they do.  But it does mean that if you have a certain number of monthly listeners, you should be able to make a living from royalties, touring etc.  Here is how it works:

0-10 monthly listeners: Artist has no audience.

10-100:  Artist has an audience of friends and acquaintances. 

100-1000:  This is the most second most frequent level for artists who have released songs on Spotify but who do not have a large audience. 

1000-10000:  This is a really big move up- and the start of what I would call a viable artist in the Spotify/streaming era.  At the start of this range, 1000, you have Artists who have gone from 100 to 1000, meaning that there are likely total strangers and/or people who have paid to see or listen to their music.   Or they've managed to generate some interest on the internet without releasing records or playing shows, which is fine.  Artists who make it to 10,000 monthly listeners are at the threshold of viability.

10000-100000:  This is the range where the biggest shift takes place.  Artists at 10,000 monthly listeners might be touring regionally or playing lower capacity rooms on tour.   They may be selling physical copies of their recordings at a steady clip.  Artists at this stage may enter without some of the professional accruements of a professional music career: Label, booking agent, manager, business manager, etc, but by the time they reach 100,000 monthly listeners they probably have all of them or have made a conscious decision to NOT have some or all of those folks around.

100000-1000000:  This is upper indie or major label level. Any artist with over a hundred thousand monthly listeners is going to draw intense interest from labels, managers, booking agents, etc.  Because of the vagaries of audience composition in the internet era, they may not be able to succeed as touring artists and they may not sell any physical copies of their music.    Bands that do tour and sell actual record/copies of their music can be at the lower levels of this tour and do quite nicely. 

1000000-10000000:    Almost inevitably going to be major label, internationally known artists, particularly once you get above 1 or 2 million monthly listeners.

10,000,000-100,000,000:  I'm not exactly sure what the 100th biggest artist in the world has in terms of monthly streams but The Weekend, number one, has eighty million monthly streams.

    So, like, my basic idea for a record label is, first of all, any independent label has to expect to start with artists that either have nothing on Spotify or have something but less than 1000 listeners.   Any artist with more than that is spoken for or they don't want a label.  The idea is just put something out, anything, a tape is great, a 7" is great.  A 12" is not as great but doable, a CD even- just something.  You don't have to make that many, because, if a band can sell 100 of ANYTHING it's worth pursuing.  And then you put that on Spotify and just watch it.   If it just sits there for years and the artist never climbs above 100 monthly listeners, that's bad.  That means no one cares and probably that the artist hasn't been active by playing local shows let alone touring.   If the Artist gets into the mid hundreds from zero then that is good but not great, worth putting out another physical product if the artist is enthusiastic about it but no loss if they aren't.   If, after one release an Artist makes into the thousands of monthly listeners, even if it's just a thousand, that's a great sign.  I'm pretty convinced that the majority of independent artists, maybe upwards of 60 to 70 percent, never do this. 

   Once an Artist breaches that barrier of a thousand monthly listeners, touring becomes increasingly important.   I think if a band wants to go from one thousand to ten thousand monthly listeners, playing live shows is the most familiar and familiar route.  Going from ten thousand to a hundred thousand monthly listeners begins to involve bigger tours, record labels spending tens of thousands of dollars, a booking agent who can get the Artist onto festival bills and of course releasing additional music.  From a hundred thousand to a million it's most likely to be the lower levels of the music industry proper or the higher levels of the indie world. 

   Which is all a way to say that I was excited to see Mvtant live last night, like, two years after the record came out.   Obviously, he hasn't been able to tour, but now he is opening all the dates on this massive Author & Punisher tour so I was excited to see him at Resident in downtown LA.  I was just anxious to know how good his live show was, because while his sales have been pretty good, his streaming numbers haven't been great- which like- if a band can't tour- it's not fair to judge their streaming numbers.  But man- the Mvtant live show is incredible- great energy, bouncing around on stage, and the songs are really good.  Like early Nine Inch Nails before Trent had a band around him.   If you have a chance to see Mvtant life you should take  it you won't be disappointed!!!

Published 1/16/23

Secret Attraction, CD Ghost, Soft Vein

@ Rubycon Records & Tapes in Los Angeles CA.

When it comes to my current record label project, Dream Recordings, I take a decidedly and avowedly hands off approach to the creative side of the project- picking the artists, interacting with the artists, etc.  That is because if you look at the unmitigated  economic disaster that is the history of independent record labels it is quite clear the faculty for selecting artists and that for running a record label as a business only rarely reside in the same person.  It was clear to me- long before this project- that my main faculty would be running an independent record label as a succesful and ethical business, which meant that either I was that one in a million person who could do both OR I would have to rely on partners for the creative side.  That doesn't mean that I'm culturally unsophisticated or some kind of barbarian, only that I choose not to make MY taste the criterion for whether an artist is worth releasing or not.

I went to Rubycon Records and Tapes in Los Angeles, CA. on Saturday night to see the latest signee to Dream Recordings, Secret Attraction, from Phoenix.  I try not to listen to bands before I see them- it's been next to impossible over the past three years of course- and also, if a band is part of my label, I try not to listen to much to their prior recordings, first, because it's not really my business if my partner think's the artist is a good bet, and second, you can't really judge the value of a particular artist on your label until you actually hear the recordings that you yourself will be releasing. 

My initial impression of the venue- Rubycon Records and Tapes was very positive.  I've been following the owner's content on social media (mostly instagram) and I identified with his quest to force-feed the music of his taste the greater Los Angeles record and tape shopping community since we have similar tastes- his being finely tuned and exquisite, mine mostly limited to the music of the bands I put out, their influences and whatever pops up on my post-punk spotify genre mix.   The venue had light drinks available- beer and coffee.  Tickets were 20 dollars and the show was sold out.  

The sound and lights were both the best for any record store show I've ever attended. I was expecting some variation on the standard record store show vibe- awkward standing around etc, but instead this was a show-show DJ Malvada was Djing when I arrived- her pre-band set was itself revelatory, particularly with the sound system.  I'm actually planning to just go see her DJ around town because she seems really active (she had 3 shows that night) because she was that good- it was all EBM/Industrial dance type stuff, which I like but am utterly unfamiliar with because, well, I know nothing about it.

The opening band was Soft Vein- from Sacramento. Two guys with one singing/playing guitar/synths and a guy in the back doing more synths and what I presume are triggers.   The crowd was completely into it for an opening act, which, in all my days of going to indie/diy shows, is practically unheard of.  Back when I went to shows more frequently, I always believed that you could just the strength of a specific scene by the intensity of response to an opening act in front of the first 50 crowd members, and by that standard, this particular scene (LA dance goth let's call it) is ready to blow.  I hope so anyway, because that is what Dream Recordings is betting on heavy.  I texted my partner during the set and it turns out this band had already enquired about working with Dream last year, so I was like, "Yeah!"  Bought his t-shirt- anyway, they were great and readers should def. check out his next LA area show in March where he's opening for some weirdo who never plays or does social media- more on that show next month.

The second band- CD Ghost- came highly recommended by my partner, Mario- they have a record label so there was no professional interest there but I wanted to see them- really to see any live show of a band these days is interesting to me after the past three years.  CD Ghost had a heavy synth vibe and none of the harder EBM sounds of Soft Vein.  Layers of synths and a distinctive vocal. Crowd response was again fantastic.  The live show didn't seem as developed as that of Soft Vein and Secret Attraction but you can hardly blame an indie band for that these days.  Would again recommend seeing this band the next time they make it through LA.

Last band, Secret Attraction- signed them to Dream Recordings late last year.  The way it works is that Mario describes the attributes of the band- so it goes with out saying that he thinks the music is outstanding and then we talk about the overall profile of the artist and various risks involved.  I had remembered that Secret Attraction sounded like a slam dunk to me so I was looking forward to the live show.   The perform as a two piece, with Derek singing playing up front and then a woman in back playing synths and hitting triggers etc.  The live show was great- crowd loved it. heavy synth vibes and actual song structures etc.   Very very much looking forward to hearing the completed record after this show and highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of synth forward music- starting from Manchester/New Order up through Phoenix and whatever "vapor-wave" was or was not- but his strengths are the songwriting, the song structure and the charisma of the live performance itself, so I'm thinking that Secret Attraction has all the tools to go far, especially now that live shows are back.

Great show! Great scene! Really vibrant and I feel like it will be breaking out for more mainstream attention (yikes I'm sure) once people get going this spring and paying attention again to subcultural rumblings from the underground.  Secret Attraction and CD Ghost are playing New York... next month?  That is a must for NYCers.  Don't sleep on either band. 

Published 2/4/23

Trit95 & Shanghai Beach

@ Rubycon Records

Los Angeles, CA.

  I wanted to see Trit95 (from San Diego) last night because I'm hoping to put out their record.  Negotiations have been slow.  Despite interest on both sides, Trit95 have done pretty well distributing their own music digitally-  47k monthly listeners- which is pretty incredible for a fully self-distributed act, and not bad for a fully established indie artists with national and international tours as well as several albums under their belt.  As I've told Mario, my partner, many times, maybe Trit95 don't want or need a record label.   I run into those sort of folks all the time in my job as a criminal defense attorney.  People will call about hiring me for a case and ask me whether I will promise to get the case dropped or whether I can guarantee a win after a jury trial.  Frequently people will ask me, a criminal defense attorney, whether it is "worth it" to hire a criminal defense attorney. 

  Something I've noticed about artists and bands is that they ALWAYS know better than the labels etc they are talking to.  Not just unsigned artists, all artists, all bands, all musicians.  I have observed that essentially all artists/bands/performers believe that they are entitled to be succesful, so any help in that direction is simply taken as something that is due them, and any potential impediments are the fault of others.    How can a label/manager/booking agent respond?  Three ways:  First, you buy compliance.  This is the major label route.  Second, you lie.  This is the traditional route for indie labels, who seek to obscure their lack of resources by offering fulsome promises.  Third, you offer a partnership with transparency- this is the typical "DIY" approach- which obviously works better in theory than in practice.   The essential problem is that 90% of records that get released by record labels lose money, and the 10% that do make money invariably subsidize the 90% that do not, and the 90% also do not make any money.  That is not a recipe for a happy business relationship and it never will be.

     Last night I didn't get to Rubycon till 10 PM, missing the opening act- also a touring artist- sorry.  I saw Shanghai Beach- from Brooklyn.  It was one guy with a sequencer/keyboard/drum machine type set up.  The vocals were strong, he reminded me of John Maus but the backing music was more upbeat. It was crowded but not sold out and people were definitely into it.

    The crowd thinned a bit for headliner Trit95.  They were playing as a three piece with live guitar and bass (I think?) and a drum machine.   The mix was off- I'm pretty sure the Rubycon sound system has trouble with live instruments.  About four songs in an announcement was made that the wife had broken and the show was over.   I didn't stick around to see what happened after that.  Trit95 was good- the first real "band" I've seen since The Serfs show last fall.  I'm surprised that they haven't already been snapped up by a record label, but everyone has been pretty dormant for the past couple years, so I probably shouldn't be surprised by anything as it relates to bands getting signed to record labels.

   

  It would be great to see these acts at more established venues in town- clearly they meet all the criterion for opening for larger, touring acts in that they are good and have their own local fans who might buy tickets.  I'm talking about Trit95 and Secret Attraction here. 

Published 2/8/23

Marog Price & Lola Kirke 

@ The Observatory North Park

San Diego, CA.

   I remember the initial renovation/re-opening  of the North Park Theater.  After that, I remember it was sold to the people who own the Observatory in Orange County- that happened at the beginning of 2015.   Since then I've been to a couple shows in my +1 capacity- I saw Autolux play there and saw Christine and the Queens and Marina and the Diamonds and then the first/last time Margo Price played in San Diego she opened here for Jamey Johnson.- that was in April of 2017.  

   So it's kind of crazy that 'pon her return to San Diego she was headlining the Observatory- exactly the kind of progression I was talking about in my event preview for this show.  She opened for Jamey Johnson here in 2017, in 2023 she headlines, with zero plays in San Diego between the two dates.  I think, in 2018, when she played the Arroyo Seco Festival and maybe San Diego was within the radius clause.  In 2019 she just didn't get out to the west coast.  I think the idea that 2019 was supposed to be a quiet year and then there was going to be a big tour in 2020.   Of course, things did not pan out that way.

  Besides being my home market for over a decade, the San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad is the 17th largest MSA with just under 3.3 million people.   Usually, touring acts hit San Diego, Los Angeles-Anaheim-Long Beach- #2 market and San Francisco-Oakland-Berkely #13.   The problem with San Diego is that the only other MSA within easy driving distance is LA.  Besides Los Angeles you are looking at a day to the next show, usually a day to the next show after that and then a day plus to get somewhere like Denver or Albuquerque before you can get to a really good market like Austin or Chicago, which are themselves close to a half dozen other places within a couple hours. 

   Touring bands frequently end up playing San Diego on a Tuesday because of the vagaries of touring schedules.  I always used to joke, in my local music days that Tuesday night was "death night" because nobody wants to casually go out on a Tuesday night and stay up till 1 in the morning listening to three bands play in a bar or what have you.  Margo sales in San Diego reflected this reality, and I think, the fact that this was literally her first headlining show in San Diego ever.  Certainly, San Diego came in a distant third to the ticket sales in Los Angeles and San Francisco.   Still, it was a respectable turn out all things considered and the crowd was enthusiastic.  

    Her live show was outstanding- it always is. She is a remarkable live performer- I think other artists like Willie Nelson, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, etc. recognize it which is why they want her around.   I think the Belly Up (capacity 600) would have obviously been a safer booking than the Observatory (capacity 1100) but the venue in Phoenix, The Crescent Ballroom (capacity 500) was also a smaller venue and like I said, I think the goal is to prove that she can sell 1000 tickets in 10/15/20 markets.  But like, the Belly Up show would have been legendary. I don't blame Margo and her team for going big in San Diego and it was fine. 

   The Observatory staff had quite improved since my last, pre-pandemic visit.  They used to be just the worst- I remember them confiscating a ball point pen from my girlfriend the last time we were there. Ridiculous assholes.  This time everything was more laid back, perhaps due to the fact that Tim Mays was co-promoting this show alongside Live Nation.  How does that work?

   Tomorrow is Los Angeles and Sharon Van Etten and Mike Campbell are guesting. It should be a good show!  Tickets are still available but San Francisco is sold out!

  

Published 2/13/23

Margo Price & Lola Kirke

@ The Fonda Theater, Los Angeles, CA.

Margo Price & Lola Kirke

@ The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA.

February 2023

    As I told Margo's manager ] I have no doubt that when Margo is looking back in the process of writing her second book, she will the show she played at the Fillmore in San Francisco this past weekend as a turning point SPECIFICALLY as the turning point where it became clear that Margo Price, can, in fact, play for an audience that numbers in the tens of thousands (vs. the single thousands) and pull it off, in other words that she, is, in fact, a festival headliner in waiting.

  What is the difference between an artist who can sell out the Fillmore (listed 1300 capacity) and one who can headline a festival with an audience of 10,000 plus?  Here are some of the qualities:

1.  Native fan-base or potential for such in festival market of over 10,000.  This is the easiest qualifying criterion, though  there is always the issue of why a band in this category would need to play a festival vs. just playing their own show.

2.  Ability to Play a Headlining Set of 2 hours.  This is a big one- many bands/acts just don't have it in them for play for two hours straight let alone the ability to hold an audience for that long.

3.  Ability to Generate "Wow" Moments.  Usually for a festival headliners there are guests and other kinds of stunts and tricks that elevate the performance beyond that of a regular show, to make the festival more of a special occasion.

   I have come to the conclusion after watching the shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco this past week that Margo Price does meet the necessary qualifications;  that she does have what it takes to headline a rock festival, whether people know it yet or not.

Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda Theater

   Ticket sales were weak in Los Angeles.  I would attribute that to the lengthy gap between headlining events, Margo was essentially starting over in terms of her live audience in Los Angeles.  Also, the set started late- 10:15 PM- which has nothing to do with ticket sales, but certainly impacted the vibe.  San Francisco made clear that the proper starting time for a Margo Price headlining set is 9 PM in our post-pandemic world.  Despite the absence of a sell-out it was an excited crowd.  I thought the significance of this show was the ability of the band to generate at least two and maybe as many as four "wow"/festival type moments.  First, there was the performance with Sharon Van Etten, who sings on Margo's song Radio.  They did that song together as well as a smoking hot version of Van Etten's own hit, Seventeen.  I've included an uploaded video where the chemistry comes across:

  Another strong candidate for Wow moments involved one of the other guests, Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.   First, their was their performance of the Strays album track, Light Me Up, shown below:

    The second was their performance of the Tom Petty song- which Margo actually recorded for a Big Machine Tom Petty tribute compilation that is yet unreleased:

    At the same time, Margo's own songs show a growth in her sound that position her to be a force in mainstream, festival level rock and roll.  Even as a huge fan and fringe watcher of her career, I found her live performances of her new material, particularly the Strays album tracks Hell in the Heartland and County Road to be nothing short of revelatory. 

  Despite the absence of  a packed house, the Los Angeles show gave me an inkling that this was Margo in her final form- this inkling would develop into a full-blown revelation the next night in San Francisco.

  As supposed to the non-sold out Fonda, The Fillmore sold out weeks in advance of the actual date. When I arrived towards the end of opener Lola Kirke's set, the house was already packed and there was an almost electric sense of anticipation from the audience which was filled with adults.  For me, San Francisco will always be the show were it all came together for Margo Price and her band.  In addition to new wow moments her own songs from the new record were performed with an energetic commitment to getting the point across to the audience, and the results were manifest in the rapt attention paid by the audience and the thunderous applause which greeted each break in the action.  In particular the renditions of Hell in the Heartland and County Road really brought both tracks home to me- since this show I've listened to both on repeat and eventually created this playlist.

   As far as "wow" moments go- her rendition of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane qualified for sure:

  I left convinced that Margo Price, does, indeed, have what it takes to make it to the next level- which in her case would be performing in front of a live audience of greater than ten thousand people.  She can do it, for sure.  Don't miss her remaining tour dates if you are contemplating attending- they will be worth the price of admission.  Those remaining dates are below:

2/13 - Portland, OR - Crystal Ballroom $
2/14 - Vancouver, BC - Commodore Ballroom $
2/15 - Seattle, WA - The Showbox $
2/17 - Bozeman, MT - The Elm $
2/19 - Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue $
2/20 - Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre $
2/21 - Chicago, IL - Vic Theatre $
2/22 - Indianapolis, IN - The Vogue $
2/24 - Toronto, ON - The Phoenix Concert Theatre #
2/25 - Detroit, MI - Majestic Theatre #
2/27 - Burlington, VT - Higher Ground Ballroom #
2/28 - Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club #
3/2 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club #
3/3 - Philadelphia, PA - Theatre of Living Arts #
3/4 - New York, NY - Webster Hall #
3/9 - Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium !

$ w/ Lola Kirke
# w/ Tre Burt
! w/ Jessi Colter

Published 6/17/23

Madeline Goldstein

Secret Attraction

@ Zebulon in Los Angeles

   It has been a weird couple of years for local indie music scenes.  How are you supposed to develop as an artist if you can't play live shows?  It's essentially impossible.  Live shows are so important in the digital era because literally anyone can be a streaming artist with a billion streams but very few have what it takes to tour, sell tickets and create a real world fan base that the music industry actually respects.  

   For me, every band that started in 2019 or after (or was brand new in 2019) gets a pass, all of them, starting THIS year, 2023, can act like they are a "new band" for local music purposes.  In other words, there can be no demerits for failing to advance ones career in the years between 2019 and 2023.   Fortunately, the fog has begun to lift and I can see the return of lives music at the local level here in Los Angeles.  Take last night, a free record release party for Madeline Goldstein and More Ephemerol at Zebulon, which is one of the coolest venues in Los Angeles right now.  Maybe the coolest.  I'm biased, of course, because I live about 10 minutes away but I really do think they have got it going on at the Zeb- located on the edge of Frogtown near Silverlake and Atwater Village.

  I've been going to Zebulon for years for special events- world soccer matches actually have been the occasion the last couple of years.  I talk a lot about going to shows there but rarely do because they are typically booking either super-legacy type acts or niche stuff that isn't my niche.  I'd like to see them booking more bills like the Echo used to before it started sucking after Live Nation bought it- more local scene bands and middle-of-the-road indie rock type stuff. Yes, I get it, they are too sophisticated for that stuff, but there is a need and I'm sure it would make money for them.

    Secret Attraction opened- they are on my label Dream Recordings and Mario wanted to sign them (Derek, writer, Rachel, band member) because the songs are great.  I agree.   The live show is also very good- I saw him at Rubycon Records a couple months back but this was the first viewing in a club with a real sound system.  They sounded great and it was a big crowd for a Friday night in LA at 8:30 PM- an almost unconscionably early time for an opening act to play but the crowd was very much up for it.

   It was a free show so the large turnout isn't entirely surprising- I'm guessing that any random Friday night at Zebulon would be moderately busy these days.  The crowd was very goth-scene heavy- though not quite as young as the kids who were coming out to the Rubycon shows.  Plenty of black leather and severe make-up on the ladies, black for the men.  Goth crowds always make me giggle, but there is no denying their dedication to the scene. 

   It's funny, because Secret Attraction doesn't actually have a goth sound but I guess close enough.  The sound at Zebulon was really good- I think this was the first time I'd heard it full blast since before the pandemic.    I missed More Ephemeral because I was hanging out on the patio- sorry, if the band or fans is reading this, I apologize for missing the set. 

   I was intrigued to watch a few songs from Madeline Goldstein, I'd seen her name here and there, and she played a show down in San Diego that Mario, my partner in Dream, booked at the Whistle Stop. 

  The live show was very engaged- she is an eminently watchable performer.  I didn't love any of the songs I heard- and I'm listening to her new EP right now to confirm that.  Again, there is nothing wrong with not having amazing songs- I'm sure Madeline herself would disdain the idea of writing a "hit song," that she views herself as a member of an artistic avant garde, etc.   Which is great!  She had plenty of fans there last night- I don't think the phrase "sold out" really applies because it was a free show but the place was packed with fans- fans of all three acts- I might add.

  Also worth noting that she couldn't find the right label to put out this record- I know she talked to Mario about it but were committed through the end of the before she reached out.  But, the local record industry is in shambles.  Like, who is even putting out records right now in LA.  It's a wasteland out there BUT at least the local show scene is coming back.

   The next local event I've got on my calendar is this Rubycon Records 2 year anniversary show on July 15th at the Lodgeroom (Los Angeles).  Dream Recordings own Mvtant is second on the bill behind Plack Blague, who are a band from Lincoln, Nebraska (!).  Tickets to that show are twenty two dollars and it should be a real blast!  Viva Local Music!

   

Published 7/15/23

Panda Bear x Sonic Boom

@ The Bellwhether

Los Angeles, CA.

   I was excited to visit The Bellwhether "Los Angeles' Newest Mid-Size Venue"(1600 capacity) to see the poorly named project Panda Bear x Sonic Boom plays the hits from their extremely poorly promoted 2022 record Reset, which has to be one of my favorite albums of 2022 even though I didn't listen to it for the first time until this year.  I've never had the energy to get deep into Spaceman 3 and its progeny.  Yes, I've seen Spiritualized several times.  I listen to Spectrum on Spotify frequently.  I hate Animal Collective and I've never listened to a Panda Bear solo record, even one produced by Sonic Boom, because I hate Animal Collective so much.   I didn't listen to the MGMT record Sonic Boom produced.  Generally speaking, I highly approve of the "pro-drugs" philosophy expressed in the music and the music itself but I didn't listen to them during the period I was involved in that kind of scene with the exception of Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space (1997), which came out when I was in college.

   But the fact is, I did start listening to Reset earlier this year and I do believe it is an amazing record, and that it would be great to see live, and it was, indeed, all that.   Lennox and Kember performed silhouetted on the stage against a highly psychedelic, constantly changing video back drop that was more video art than concert backdrop.   They both had an array in front of them- a keyboard, triggers and probably some stuff Kember uses to obtain his patented circuit-bending sounds.  Kember also had various flute and whistle type devices that were deployed at various times for maximum impact.  In between songs from the Reset records they had distinct drones that sounded like Animal Collective/Panda Bear type improv- with Lennox sometimes wordlessly emoting over the sound of birdsong or ambient style drone.   

   Even for the most sober viewer, as indeed I was last night, coming in at the tail end of day that saw me wake up at 4 AM, drive to San Diego, back and then go out in Echo Park beforehand,  Panda Bear x Sonic Boom will provoke feelings similar to what you get during a mild psychedelic trip:  the visuals, the lighting, the songs.  It was a total blast. 

   The venue was very nice as well.  It seems like all shows are done and dusted by 10:30 PM, so make sure you get there early.   The available public parking lots within a block are 10 dollars and they both filled up slightly before showtime, so keep that in mind.  It's an easy location (just east of the freeway cutting through DTLA) to get to and from with rideshare so that is an option worth considering.  The surrounding neighborhood is unhoused heavy so take that into account particularly if you are parking outside the two lots within a block of the venue.

  I did park in the lot around the corner from the entrance and on the way back I had to walk out into the street because an unhoused fellow living in a tent on the sidewalk arrived home and started unloading his possessions into his tent, his bicycle and person fully occupying the sidewalk.  It doesn't bother me, but I know plenty of Angelenos who would not fully appreciate such an experience.

Published 12/17/23

Secret Attraction (not seen)

Deceits (not seen)

Past Self

Trit95

@  CLUB FLESH in Catch One

Los Angeles, CA.

   I was excited to see Dream Recordings signee Trit95 for the first time in a few months- when last I saw him he was performing solo at the Permanent Records Roadhouse.  This time he was in town for CLUB FLESH which is hosted inside Catch One down there in the heart of Los Angeles.   Headliner Secret Attraction was going to be on Dream Recordings but the relationship did not work out and we gave them their record back.

   Catch One has a spotty reputation as a venue for live music, but as I said before and I will say again now, it's a good place to see a show.  There are multiple events at Catch One every/most nights- from the Courtyard I could see the entrance for BRATZ PARTY (2000s) and as I left the front/main venue had a line down the block for a 100% gay(cis gay men) dance party.  That's the kind of cross pollination that I associate with creative fecundity, though of course it would be too much to ask to be able to go from show to show within Catch One, which I would desperately like to do.  

  Another observation worth mentioning is that a show like this could have very easily, once upon a time, been hosted at the Echo, but the Echo has fallen so far since its purchase by Live Nation that it is almost impossible to contemplate- like the vastness and depth of the fall.   The fact that it was being held at a Club Flesh which is technically a BDSM club is a testament to the acuity of the promoter ("Electric Eye Presents"- and if you have a search set up for your name, greetings).   There are multiple promoting entities working out of this space- Das Bunker is another one that is here on the regs with different kinds of live music.

   Even though I'm not a goth I do love a good goth club, it's always a vibrant sub-culture with a firm commitment to live music- going back half a century now in places like London, NYC, SF and LA.  You couldn't ask for a more polite, attentive audience.  And clearly they aren't overly fussy about genre since neither headliner Secret Attraction now Trit95 are what I call "goth". 

   After a brisk conversation between by friend Rabbi Dave and I about the roots of gothic as an idea in western culture- from Ruskin and the Stones of Venice, to the architectural qualities that gave rise to the term, to the rise of Goth novels in the late 18th century- ghosts with clanking chains in remote castles in southern France, the wilds of Italy and Spain, to the Gothic revival of the 19th century- with writers like Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe drawing on a shared culture of gothic culture but adding their own themes, to the emergence of the contemporary sub-culture out of the stew of English post-punk in the late 1970's and early 1980's-  Trit95 took the stage.

   They performed as a three person band- it was a tight 20 minute set- crowd response was outstanding, this is the outfit that Trit95 could tour- they could play SXSW tomorrow and turn heads.  I personally told five people in the Audience the name of the artist.  The crowd was not that of an opening act at a rock club- everyone was there, and interested in the show.  Trit95 was just great last night- this was my third time seeing him/them play live but the first time I'd really witnessed the magic- the potential star quality, if you will. Mario has been Trit95's biggest booster and I trust his aesthetic choices- that's his job- I don't have anything to do with picking the bands that Mario selects- but our conversations over the years have fed into his decision making process and it was cool seeing what he had seen.

    Stuck around for a couple songs of Past Self- a more avowedly goth act complete with matching white and red face paint.  They had two synth players and a guitarist and boy/girl vocals- I surmise they are on tour from their base in Washington states. 

   Something that came up with Secret Attraction is an inability of label and artist to understand the point of the relationship.  Most of the issues arose from questions of timing- which is the same for every artist and label, in my experience- going up to and including the major labels.  It's easy for DIY artists to wonder what the point of a label is in an era where you can get your own music online, sell your own music digitally etc.

  And the answer to that question is that is an issue of Audiences.  Subjecting ones artistic career to the timeline of the post-TikTok internet is a recipe for burnout and failure.  On the other hand, if a DIY artist just takes the time to work with a label that has SOME kind of a track record, that serves as a notice to EVERYONE in the music business: other labels, managers, booking agents, publishers, that this is an act perhaps worth looking into.  

   Whereas if these same people are looking into an entirely self promoted/DIY artist, the ONLY question is "how many likes," "how many streams," "what is the artist produced content."  Artists with a label don't have to always be doing that- they can focus their energy into building up the release of a full album physically and digitally and then touring that record- this is what serves as a sign to the music professional class that this particular artist is different from the dozens and hundred and thousands doing the DIY thing. 

  Secret Attraction didn't want that- something I recognized pretty early on- they want to be on the Tik Tok self-released content rich timeline, which- more power to them, but if I was an artist, or advising an artist in 2023 I would say look, you want a label to make and distribute a physical record, and you want to focus all your energy on first promoting and touring the record, because that is what professionals care about, that is what they think about. 

  In my experience, most DIY musicians have little or no idea about how the actual music industry works.  They may BELIEVE that they know how it works, but they do not.  Ask a DIY artist you know about music publishing and the ways one is compensated from a license of a song on a network television show, see what they have to say. 

    

Zzzahara

Published 1/15/24

Zzzahara &

Cold Gawd

@ El Cid

Goldenvoice promoting

  I know this sounds totally nuts for a blog that averages under 100 page views a post, but sometimes I feel like promoters book shows specifically for me to go, and if I don't go, and if I don't write up a little review, someone, somewhere will be disappointed.  I'm not saying that's true, in fact, I'm sure it's not, but it just feels that way, which is how I found myself at an early show (Doors 7! Headliner at 8!) at El Cid featuring Zzzahara and Cold Gawd.

  I simply had to see Zzzahara (Pronouns: They/Them)- Mario, my partner in Dream Recordings, has been booking her for a while now down in San Diego and her manager, Gary Walker, works with Amy (my girlfriend) at Monotone.  I genuinely like Gary and his wife Chantal- who is a force in her own right, and Gary has genuine deep roots in the DIY scene in London.  This show was, I found later, sold out- it felt sold out during Zzzahara's set.  So anyway I've been hearing about Zzzahara for months and I was anxious to see the live show.  I was also interested in seeing Cold Gawd (Dais Records), they of the "ABOLISH WHITE SHOEGAZE" t-shirt.

   Both bands were fun to watch- Cold Gawd put out quite a vibe and I was impressed at their professionalism, cranking out a hot set at 730 PM on a Friday.   They are obviously part of the Shoegaze revival that Pitchfork saw fit to comment upon last month.  Cold Gawd also has a dude who does nothing by plays tambourine (the meanest tambourine I ever did hear- clearly audible in an already noisy mix) and scream which made the overall sound more of a shoegazemo (copyright me 2024)- and I was struck, more than once, that this band is one gig away from getting signed to a major label- that's not a good or bad thing, I'm just saying, based on my prior experience, that this is the kind of band that gets signed to a major label when a trend resurfaces (shoegaze) because they have a good vibe, an interesting look and a definite sound.   I'm interested to now go back and listen to their records. 

   Zzzahara is a genuine phenomenon-  an artist Pitchfork has managed to ignore while she is signed to a cool label (Lex Records UK), has close to a million monthly listeners.  She's Eyedress adjacent- another international phenomenon that Pitchfork ignores- with 16 million monthly listeners- I surmise that they may have grown up together. Anyway- she put on a great set- her fans love her- she plays the kind of goth inflected bedroom pop that is super scalable- an artist like her could go from 800k monthly listeners to 8 million overnight if I understand the dynamic properly, because she sings about topics that young people can easily relate to.    And let me tell you, Lex Records knows exactly what they are doing.   As a 45 year old dude I don't exactly relate to the life is tough here in my bedroom lyrics like I used to when I was a kid, but the appeal is easy to understand, and I saw plenty of their fans and I can see them having tons more fans.  They both sound like winners to me, well poised to take off in the revival of the indie scene post-covid.

   I'd never been to El Cid before in 20 years of going to shows in LA and close to a decade of living less than 20 minutes from the venue.  I was intrigued that Goldenvoice was promoting this show, and that was part of the reason I came- to see the venue.  I loved the early start time though I understand it's not typical- El Cid has early and late shows, I was told.  I though the sound was great but the vibe was a little strange- the preshow music was a 2019 dubstep compilation which is fine but not in keeping with the sounds of the artists.  The staff was just the regular El Cid staff- they obviously were flummoxed by these sort of bands and it showed on their sour faces.  Which, you know, is fine- it didn't bother me or anyone else, but I noticed.  I would come back- though dress warm- this is basically an outdoor venue.

Published 2/6/24

Gamma World &
Total Pleasure

(Wisteria Residency 1)

@ Zebulon LA

   Man, I would go to Zebulon more if they booked more shows that weren't the indie/underground equivalent of legacy acts.  I mean, I get it, they are going for diversity in their programming, not trying to replace the Echo.  But the regular shows are so good at Zebulon!  So I found myself at night one of the Wisteria Residency in February- every Monday night!  

    The bill started with Gamma World- they were cool- a two piece with a drum machine- that's all you need! They had some anthemic song writing, some political lyrics.  It was fun- I can see a path to a real career for those two, but they've only got one release on Spotify and its "Demo" from 2019 on "Unsigned" so there is work to do there.  Every act needs to make a physical product, tape, cd, vinyl, whatever and then sell it at live shows.   When I looked up their socials I saw my like minded contacts in the world of music were already following these guys, so I would say, worth checking out, hope they do more shows.  Didn't love their look!  I bet they don't care!

    The second band was Total Pleasure.  This is a trad post punk outfit, with a rhythm section that sounded like the Cure, a pair of guitarists that sounded like the Smiths and a normcore singer who looked like one of the neo-shoegaze front men you see out there in recent times.   It didn't quite hang together- the rhythm section sounds like it needs to play more shows together and the songwriting was uneven- some of the cuts really jammed, others felt awkward and flat.   But you know, ever since the pandemic, I've really begun to appreciate EVERY local band- god bless them all, each and every one.  Just the fact that they are playing shows on a Monday night- god bless them.

       Didn't stay for Wisteria- I was curious to see whether Zebulon was mighty enough to keep a three band Monday night bill on schedule and the answer, sadly, no.   Gamma World didn't play till after 9 PM, and I left at 10:30 with Wisteria's set no where in site (they were supposed to take the stage at 10:20 PM).  Here's a tip for Zebulon, or Wisteria- don't book a three band bill on a Monday night if the first band isn't willing to take the stage at 8:30, as was the case last night.  Still was a good time and looking forward to next week.

Published 2/14/24

Wisteria Monday February Residency Night 2

w/ CD Ghost &

Active Decay

@ Zebulon Los Angeles, CA.

   Back for night two of the Wisteria residency- since it wasn't in the middle of the biggest rain storm in a generation, this night drew a bigger crowd- maybe also down to the fact that this line up could have just as easily drawn a paid crowd with the same bill (maybe not on a Monday night, but on a Friday for sure).   After 15 years of going out in San Diego, where Monday night bills are a mark of death unless you are a legit touring act (and even then they are rough), I've been astonished at the size of the Monday night crowds in Los Angeles.   Los Angeles is, by every indication, a much more fertile ground for local bands trying to put together a following.

   

  Openers Active Decay put out a record on local indie Lollipop Records- who got Crocodiles an NFL wear sync that made it all the way to the Super Bowl broadcast- opened.  I would say they are a work in progress.  They performed as a three piece with a dude in a tank top playing bass, a lady singer and a guy who sang and played guitar.  There was a drum machine, and a pretty big sax element that was done with backing tracks.  The guy and the girl both performed songs, sometimes backing one another, sometimes not.  I think the crowd reacted more positively to the songs sung by the dude, but the set was politely received by the already voluminous crowd.  The sound was gothy/romantic/new wavey with definite songs and lyrics, though said song writing and lyrics varied in quality from song to song.  I can certainly see where they are headed, and I'd wager it comes off smoother on record.  Anyway, all local bands are blessings, and all local bands deserve fervent support for the very fact of their existence and artistic will.

    Thankfully Wisteria played second tonight, sparing me the conflict of wrestling with the prospect of Tuesday's 4 AM alarm.  Finally! Wisteria.  I feel like I've been trying to see them for years.  They had a really striking visual set up- performing with no lighting in front of a bright white screen, which gave them the appearance of silhouettes.   A neat way to play off the fact that neither one of them are going to win any beauty contests. I thought the singer had a really interesting voice, like I'm going to go and listen to their records on Spotify now because I was so intrigued.  I thought having the other guy play drum pads on his synth set up was a good move- that should be a requirement for synthy two pieces- either you are singing or playing a guitar/bass or doing a drumming thing to break up the visual monotony of two guys behind matching synth arrays. 

   But my thought is that there is songwriting talent worth developing and that the live show backs it up- nothing stopping Wisteria from being a full-on national indie touring band if that's the direction they want to go. 

   It was my second time playing CD Ghost- they were outfitted more formally from the last show at Rubycon, where they looked like they had fallen out of a van fifteen minutes before show time.  The crowd was packed.  I respect the fact that they are self-released but I think a label with a good vinyl reputation could really help them get national level attention.  Looks like they have a national tour lined up and booking here and in the EU, so, if you are thinking about going to catch a show of theirs you should.

Published 2/19/24

Topographies,

Secret Attraction &

Trit95

@ Genghis Cohen (Los Angeles, CA)

     Another night where I just felt fortunate there was a show- any show- to go to in Los Angeles.  Recent months have had me nostalgic for pre-pandemic local music, even though back in 2019 I was totally over local music and couldn't be bothered to go to a single show that could be described as "local music show."   Technically, last night was a bill with three non-local bands, though I would count Secret Attraction (PHX) and Trit95 (SD) as "local" based on my theory that Southern California:  Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Imperial and Ventura all represent one market, in that you can get to any point to any other point in the are within a couple hours if you time your drive right.  Topographies was down from San Francisco for their album release party.   Dream put out an ep by Topographies and we have some kind of limited tape coming out.  Secret Attraction had a deal with Dream but it was cancelled by mutual consent over timing issues (Derek was impatient AF to put the record out).  Trit95 has two records- a compilation of his prior releases that we mixed and mastered that is at the test pressing stage and a record of new material that hasn't been recorded (or written? I don't know.)

    I'd never been to Genghis Cohen- which is both a fully functional "East Coast Chinese" food restaurant AND a venue that hosts both live music and stand-up comedy.  I still haven't been to the restaurant and this was my first time at the venue.  I was excited that the show was a sell-out, though I simply can't imagine that the capacity is over 50- it felt like maybe 35-40.  Also the show didn't sell out far enough in advance, which is something I now know "real" music industry people take into account.  You want a show to sell out quickly, not the night before the concert.  But at the local music level, a sell out is a sell out, because there are plenty of local music shows that don't even come close to selling out, or are free.  So the show sold out, which was great.

  Trit95 took the stage at 8:30 PM.  I may (and in fact am) biased, but Trit95 has the biggest Spotify listener ship of the three acts, and I felt like the room was the most crowded for his set.  This was the second or third time I've seen his 20 minute opener set with the three piece arrangement.  I thought it was, again, great, even though the lighting arrangement was inferior compared to the two bands after.  The three piece/no drummer look is a good vibe and I actually told the band after the show they really do NOT need a drummer.  Maybe the keyboard guy can hit a drum pad in his set up- because that it was a good look- but a live drummer is 100% superfluous in 2024.  This is a battle I've been fighting since 2008, but I think in 2024 there is no argument at any level of the music industry that you only need a live drummer if you are a full on professional touring band.

   Personally, I'm anxious to see a full headlining set, how many tickets he could sell etc.  We had a conversation after the show which indicated he needs to get signed up with a PRO- ASCAP, BMI, SESAC right away.  He mentioned he has a song coming out with EYEDRESS (16 million monthly listeners) and of course, the compilation LP I'm putting out. 

    Secret Attraction was next up.  Derek had the lighting situation figured out- they played with a blue wash that gave the velvet curtain in back a literal David Lynch vibe.   It was another solid set from Secret Attraction.  I saw on their social media that they were recording new material the other week- Derek is obssessed with being productive as possible, so I'm ready to start hearing new material.  Also interested to hear about their next LA area show- I know there will be one soon, knowing Derek, and having established a sell-out at any level means there will be interest from other venues.  I would love to see a similar bill at Zebulon or El Cid, to see how many tickets would sell etc.  Any of these bands by themselves would be worth booking just to get a read on the interest level.

    Topographies headlined- they have a new record out as of Interior Spring- although I haven't seen a single mention of it anywhere.  Like all bands who have put something out on Dream and then moved on, I'm always puzzled that they just didn't see how great Dream is, but understanding that for an individual artist, all they see is what Dream has done for THEM and they certainly don't have any interest or knowledge of the pre-Dream history.   So, I get it, but I can't help but be a little critical.   Mostly what I observe is that these acts have an opportunity to work with a label that has been there for close to a dozen artists making it to the pros over a fifteen year window, for some label that has been there for exactly zero artists making to the pros.  I know Mario doesn't talk to the bands like that, but that is what I'm thinking.

   Anyway, Topographies was good- they've got a UK/EU tour coming up which should be fun and the new record is out and available for sale in bandcamp.  Like I said, I think Dream is making a tape but don't have any details beyond the back and forth emails about production and the invoices.   If you have  a chance, go see Topographies on tour and buy the vinyl of the new record.

       

Published 3/13/24

Angie McMahon

@ The Crocodile 
Seattle, WA

3/11/24

  It used to be there was lots of mystery about the path from local band obscurity to stadium headliner.  Most artists started by playing local shows in local venues, then you would record a "demo," then you would look for a label or manager or both, then hopefully a booking agent, put out an album, do a van tour of the US, maybe a van tour of UK/Europe, then another record, professionally done, with a record label that has pr and def a booking agent, a second van tour as a headliner, hopefully a festival or two, then by the third record hopefully you were on a bus and playing theater size venues (1000+) and selling them out.  You would be judged by actual record sales of physical cds or records, the crowds you drew at your shows, and the press you got.  Obviously, the vast majority of bands/acts never made it past the first or second step, but plenty of artists fall off at each point, and the most succesful acts skipped one or many steps.

  Now, that has all changed.  Artists are essentially measured by two numbers: 1) their monthly Spotify streaming number, which updates daily 2) tickets they can sell to their concerts.   If you are low by the measurement of (1) you have to show that you have the power to sell concert tickets.  If you have great streaming numbers but can't sell tickets you can play festivals, but ultimately it is the live show on a big stage that is the only check on streaming era artists who have demonstrated their worth by (1).  These days, few if any artists start by playing live, rather they will record music and publish it themselves, either on bandcamp or, straight to Spotify and the other big DSP's.  I couldn't even tell you the last time I went to a local level show and saw an artist who didn't have a Spotify monthly streaming number already.

   This shift has certainly taken much of the mystery out of the lengthy process I described in the first paragraph at this post.  Now, every label, from the lowliest indie to the biggest major knows how many monthly streams you get and most of them know how many tickets you have sold (or whether you have sold any).  The biggest loser in this shift has been the press/music critics.  They used to play an important/critical role in helping artists get from the bottom to the top.  Today, literally no one gives a shit and if you have good streaming numbers and sell tickets to your shows, you don't need critics to pay attention.

  Take Angie McMahon.  I just got back from the first show of her sold-out US tour- in Seattle.  Angie put out her record last fall.  People said nice things about the record but she isn't a Pitchfork artist, and generally speaking, not much was said about her or the record, even though it was amazing.   Her streaming numbers are fine but essentially flat.   BUT- there I am watching her sell out a Monday night show at an 800 cap venue in Seattle, watching her evoke the kind of Audience response that most artists never obtain and hearing second hand about her being seriously considered for arena/stadium/big theater tours on three continents.  

  It was an astonishing performance and the crowd was incredibly diverse and enthusiastic. Truly a dream start to a US tour that promises to be the first step on a path that promises to follow that older path in an era of an obsession with streaming figures.  I think this summer is going to be interesting for many acts who built up their streaming figures over the past four years of pandemic-time with no pressure or opportunity to build up their live show.  I'm fully expecting some festival level disasters as these artists take the stage in front of big audiences for the first time, but that won't be Angie McMahon- she is going to be out there on the road slitting throats. Watch out!

Published 11/21/25

 Chappell Roan & Angie McMahon

 @ Corona Capital CDMX

  I knew, after Chappell Roan drew 80,000 people to Pasadena and I didn't read a single complaint, that she was for real.  I'm not a Chappell Roan fan in the way I'm a Charli XCX fan- a topic which has gone unaddressed on this blog, but I, like everyone even tangentially aware of the market for popular music in America/UK/EU, have witnessed her rise in awe.  It's helped that Chappell shares a booking agent with Margo Price, so I've seen the Instagram stories and had conversations about it as it's been happening.  Surely, I would have gone to the Pasadena shows but my partner was travelling.  

  This was my first time in CDMX, and I'll spare readers the details.  Angie McMahon, who my partner manages, was on the bill and it was my partner's birthday week, so I was there.  The festival was top to bottom impressive, just as well run as anything in the United States.  The obvious comparison is with Coachella, if Coachella was the ONLY festival of its kind in the entire country.  The crowd was incredible- something I'd heard many times in the past but was witnessing for the first time.  Specifically, Angie McMahon, playing an early time slot that would have been a classic Coachella death trap, drew a respectably sized, rapturous crowd that left everyone feeling great. 

  After her set I caught some of Mogwai and half of the Alabama Shakes- a rare instance where insight gained from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project gave me a real-time boost of appreciation for a different artist.   We watched the Chappell Roan set from her "family" box- I had a view of her very appreciative Dad for most of the set.  I am here to say that the Chappell Roan live show is flat-out incredible, and watching it being well received by a Mexican audience that shares few, if any of the same cultural influences was nothing short of astonishing.   The two major comparison I heard first timers making afterwards were to Queen and Lady Gaga....which seems like solid company.   All my questions were answered by this performance.  All Hail Chappell Roan!

1,001 Novels A Library of America Collected: Louisiana

 1,001 Novels A Library of America

 Collected: Louisiana

     Louisiana is a formidable literary topic, mostly but not entirely because of New Orleans, an inquisitive reader also has to take into account the Delta- both cotton and sugar plantations, as well as the Bayou and the Cajuns.  Within New Orleans you've got historical fiction- the only place in this entire chapter (Apologies to Gone With the Wind in Georgia) where historical fiction makes sense.   Then you've got a body of post-Katrina lit and everything that came before it in that department and an element of noir/police fiction as well. It's a satisfying mix, such that editor Susan Straight wasn't able to include a YA title in Louisiana's 30 titles.  It's funny when a specific state has ONE writer that represents them on the national literary map.  Starting with Stephen King in Maine, then you come all the way down here and get John Grisham in Mississippi followed by Anne Rice (and her son, even) in Louisiana. 

Published 2/16/24

The Moviegoer (1961)

by Walker Percy

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 1/30

 I'm not sure where I read about The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's 1962 National Book Award Winner, but I found an Audiobook copy in the Libby Library act and I couldn't resist:  A National Book Award Winning author I've never heard of is irresistible.   I've noticed that Major Literary Prizes don't do a great job of picking titles that endure- most (all?) major literary prizes are decided by a committee so you are talking about horse-trading and compromise in the quest to pick a winner for any particular year.  Back in 1962, the National Book Award named nine finalists and one winner.  The Moviegoer beat Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was eligible to be nominated but did not make the list of finalists.  We Have Always Lived in the Castle was published in the eligibility period but didn't make the list of finalists.

   Is The Moviegoer better than any of those other books?  No.  But here you have it, the 1962 National Book Award.   An additional grounds to doubt the worthiness of this book as a prize winner is the fact that Percy never got close again, even though he continued to publish.   There is nothing wrong with winning a major literary prize with your first novel, but if you don't come close to doing it again it calls into question your literary legacy.   This leaves a contemporary reader asking the question, "Why?"

 I think, in this case, the answer is that was doing a regional variation on a theme that was still in vogue in 1961-62:  The existentialist anti-hero.  Percy's Moviegoer is a classic existentialist hero, like someone you might find in an early Jean Luc Godard film.  He is a college graduate, a returned Vietnam Vet and a stock broker in New Orleans.  It's worth observing that while Percy didn't make the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die List, this book is on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, representing New Orleans.

  New Orleans is in Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts, which includes all the states from Florida to Louisiana.  Louisiana has 30 titles on the list, 13 of those are from the city of New Orleans.  

My sense is that while the existential hero AND southern literature were in style when he won, both trends have dropped in prominence over the past half century.   Percy also wrote The Moviegoer right before the 1960's revolution in culture, which means that it is going to get crowded out by books written after and books written before it was published.

  Is there any question that of the books mentioned in this post, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the most canonical title and that Catch-22, Revolutionary Road and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are better picks than this one.

Published: 5/16/25

The Long-Legged Fly (1992)

by James Sallis

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana 2/30

   I have adjusted my approach to completing the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to reflect the fact that I am now driving less than I have been over the past decade.  I have less time to listen to Audiobooks in the car, and that makes me more selective about the titles I choose.  No more YA fiction or struggle narratives in Audiobook format, it's quicker and easier to just glide through the print copy since that category of book rarely takes more than an hour to read, but multiple hours to listen.  SO, while I read at one end of this chapter, Georgia, I'm listening at the other end: Louisiana.  And by Louisiana I'm mostly talking about New Orleans, which boasts 13 of the 28 titles in this subchapter.  Also I'd be willing to wager that many of the other Louisiana books set somewhere else on the map have significant action inside New Orleans.

   New Orleans is not a first-tier American literary city but it is certainly in the group after the first tier- I'd put in the same group as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle.  It's an interesting place, and it has historically drawn writing talent attracted to the anarchy of New Orleans.  The Long-Legged Fly, by underrated author James Sallis, is a great way to kick off the festivities.  Sallis is best known today as the author of Drive-which was made into the Ryan Gosling movie.  The Long-Legged Fly was his first novel, about African-American detective Lew Griffin.  Fly is anything but a conventional detective novel, taking place across the decades to give a fuller portrait of the detective.  This is a great example of how good the 1,001 Novels project can get- because I'd never heard of Sallis before reading this book, and now I think I'll go on and check out his other books. 

Published: 5/21/25

Orleans (2013)

by Sherri L. Smith

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 3/30

   This is a YA post-apocalyptic title, set in a New Orleans which has been disenfranchised from the rest of the country after a series of horrific hurricanes and the consequent emergence of a fever which infected all the remaining residents.  I could not believe that this book- which is almost entirely about tribes divided by blood types and the raids that go back and forth as people try to steal blood from one another.  The narration is split between a local teen and an outsider, Daniel a scientist with the military who is researching a cure for the fever.

   Again, I was startled that a book marketed to teens would contain so many scenes of cringe-inducing blood theft and minors being raped as a matter of course, but what do I know.

Published: 5/23/25

Purple Cane Road (2000)

by James Lee Burke

New Iberia Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 4/30

    Purple Cane Road is one of 24 volumes in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series- about a Louisiana sheriff's deputy who isn't afraid to use investigatory techniques that should probably get him fired.  This being Louisiana, he does, not, apparently get fired in this or any other book.  He is also obsessed with the solving the mystery of who murdered his Mom (aren't we all?)  This book weaves what can only be described as a familiar mix of police procedural and criminal deviousness, with a well-mannered hit man and a loose-cannon sidekick filling in the cast.  I listened to the Audiobook- which- like some other parts of the country, I like because the narrators do accents that I could not do in my head.

Published: 7/28/25

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) 

by Ernest J. Gaines 

Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 5/30

  It's true my progress on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has stalled out on two fronts- Pennsylvania, where Philly and the suburbs broke my heart with banality, and the deep south, where a lack of Audiobook options has sent me clambering back and forth between Georgia and Louisiana.  Compounding the situation is a general lack of interest in some of editor Susan Straight's favorite genres: sad coming-of-age stories and domestic fiction, generally.  Both genre's make a good fit for the criteria of the project, which seemingly dictates that a specific work be tied to a specific place- neither neglected/abused children in poverty nor housewives facing the same challenges go many places.   By the standards of the 1,001 Novels:  A Library of America, Miss Jane Pittman, the subject and narrator of her Autobiography, is well travelled.  Originally published in 1971, the Audiobook wasn't created for 25 years.  It was also hard not to think about the success of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, which was published in 1989.  Surely Allan Gurganus, the author of The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All was aware of this book when he wrote his book.

  The idea here is that Miss Jane Pittman lives a life that spans slavery to Civil War, born a slave, ending by marching for her rights in rural Louisiana.  In between, she lives a relatively privileged life, emerging out of the chaos of the Civil War to marry, survive her husband and settle down as a domestic servant who lives in the big house.  Along the way she sees plenty- mostly cruelty with some kindness sprinkled in.  Autobiography takes a hard right turn in the last third of the book to detail a doomed relationship between the white scion of the plantation and an "octoroon" schoolteacher from New Orleans before concluding during the Civil Rights era. 

  It makes for a great Audiobook because of the oral history format- Pittman recounting to an unseen scribe.

Published 11/21/25

Louisiana Lucky (2020)

by Julie Pennell

445 East Main Street, New Iberia, Louisiana

Louisiana: 6/30

  A definite low point in my recent 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, I checked out the E-book from the library on vacation because it seemed like an easy job and indeed, I finished Louisiana Lucky in about an hour, mostly because I didn't read it very closely.  I try not to be a snob about my reading habits- this entire project is testament to my good intentions, but there is no denying that the three lottery winning sisters from this novel are some of the least interesting American's I've come across, and Julie Pennell is writing for an audience of suburban housewives- and not the interesting kind.

 The three sisters win a substantial lottery jackpot, rescuing them from lives among the lower bourgeois of this part of the world.  One sister spends the entire book upgrading her wedding from a ramshackle DIY affair to something worthy of a bridezilla episode.  Another sends her two kids to a snooty private school and suffers from a cold welcome.  The third- a respected local print (lol) journalist, takes advantage of her found fame to move to television journalism, which is a hard transition.   Louisiana Lucky is certain to be a bottom three title in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.

Published: 12/30/25

Cane River (2001)

by Lalita Tademy

Cane River, Louisiana

Louisiana: 7/30

  Cane River is, geographically speaking, the westernmost title in this entire Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Louisiana is culturally distinct from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi because of greater diversity among the population, notably an enfranchised, property owning and even slave holding elite that co-existed with whites throughout the 18th and 19th century.  "Elite" of course, is a relative term.  At one end of the spectrum there were the cosmopolitans of New Orleans. At the other end there are the families of Cane River, mixed race families with some limited advantages over the local white settlers, but without the protections of big city life.  Tademy lovingly depicts this precarious existence over several generations.

 I checked out this Audiobook because this book actually sounded interesting and it was, but it was still hard to take at times because of the wanton sexual violence that every African American seemingly experience in antebellum America and finds its way into any serious literary account of the time and place.

Published 1/15/26

The Next Step in the Dance (1998)

by Tim Gautreaux

Morgan City, Louisiana

Louisiana: 8/30

    It is rare that I actually really enjoy reading a book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Part of that derives from the fact that I've read, essentially, all of the "classics" that Susan Straight has included in the project- we are talking about canon level titles from 19th, 20th and 21st century American literature here, and let's face it, the list isn't that long.  Part of it comes from the fact that Straight needs to rely heavily on chick-lit and genre fiction to actually populate large swathes of the American literary map.  And I guess the last part of it is the lack of thematic variety within each particular state- I really should be going through and doing one book at a time from each state instead of staying within a single region/chapter of the project to avoid that particular phenomenon. 

  Which is all a preamble for saying that I actually enjoyed reading The Next Step in the Dance on its own merit, and Tim Gautreaux is an author who I would be interested in reading outside of a project-based title.  I know for sure the reason I liked this book is that the main character was blue collar (a Cajun machinist) and part of the book actually deals with his work life and the things he has to do as part of that life.  It's an issue that extends well beyond the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to all precincts of American literature and most of American fiction- which is that books are written by authors, and most authors- particularly writers of literary fiction- haven't done shit in their lives except write fiction.  This means they can't believably write about work, let alone make a whole novel about it, which means that all fiction is inevitably domestic fiction, family fiction, and that world gets boring as hell year after year.

  I would love to read a work of fiction about a farmer where the author actually knew something about the business and practice of farming, and writes about that,  instead of one of fifty novels in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where the events take PLACE on a farm but are ABOUT the abuse a young girl suffers at the hands of her father or family trauma generally. 

  

Published 2/10/26

A Hall of Mirrors (1967)

by Robert Stone

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 9/30

  I decided I can't handle Mississippi straight up so I'm going to alternate with Louisiana and Florida. I'm also done with all the Mississippi/Louisiana Audiobooks I can handle, so it's hard copy library books from here on out.  A Hall of Mirrors was Stone's first novel- he won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers in 1974.  Stone was a finalist for the National Book Award three more times, but I would put him the "mostly forgotten" category- writers like Pynchon and Delillo took similar themes of paranoia and corruption at the heart of the American Dream and came up with something that appealed to critics and professors, Stone reads more like a linear descendant of Hemingway.  I did enjoy A Hall of Mirrors, about an alcoholic radioman who stumbles into a nefarious ultra-right-wing conspiracy to... do what I don't know exactly.  Some kind of a Civil War 2 plot I suppose, though the scheme remains hazy. 

  No question that A Hall of Mirrors stands out against the field of YA lit, chick lit and trauma-porn favored by editor Susan Straight. I enjoyed the depiction of down-n-out New Orleans circa the 1960s.  Cool.

Published: 2/25/26

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights (2020)

by Stephanie Soileau

Bayou d’Inde Drive, Sulphur, Louisiana

Louisiana: 10/30

   The Gulf coastline between New Orleans and Houston is a bit of a petro-chemical nightmare, filled with petroleum processing plants and related businesses and supervised by state governments that are hostile to business regulations.  It's also a region that is very exposed to the consequences of climate change, particularly the increased number and intensity of hurricane's making landfall from the Gulf.  This double whammy of environmental degradation makes it entirely possible that whole communities will simply cease to exist, and soon.

  This, I presume is what the title of this book references. Another layer is the weakening of the traditional Cajun community- French speaking Acadians who came down from Newfoundland after the French lost control and the English took over.  From the perspective of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, Soileau rates as a minor find.  Certainly, a book of interconnected short-stories about folks on the margins of life in such an interesting area rate higher than YA titles and chick-lit.   Beyond that, however, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, continues to explore the lives of the losers in American society, by far the most frequent subject of titles that aren't YA or chick-lit.   Where are the folks in this book going? Nowhere.  What are they doing? Nothing.

  The first story, about a teen mom who is bummed about the consequences of her actions and not that into being a Mom, really sets the tone.

Published 2/27/26

Band of Angels (1955)

by Robert Penn Warren

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/30

   Robert Penn Warren is an American author who is perpetually present on my "soft" list- like, I definitely know who he is and would say I "want to" read All the Kings Men, his big hit, but I haven't actually read it, or anything else by him.  I think Warren and other prize-winning authors from the 1950's and 60's in the South have suffered because the wave of African American authors, especially women authors, that emerged in the 1970's and 80's, culminating with Toni Morrison getting the Nobel Prize in 1993.  I'd wager that every time Morrison got added to a 20th century literature syllabus Warren or his ilk got dropped. 

  Reading Band of Angeles- about an Oberlin educated woman who is surprised when her father dies, and she is sold into slavery to settle his debts- I was struck by the stylistic similarities between Warren and Cormac McCarthy- and learned they shared a publisher!

  In many ways Band of Angeles is as daring as anything written about this subject from this time period- in that he deals frankly with the sexual aspects of slavery in a way that authors shied from prior to the aforementioned African American authorial revolution in the 1970's.  But it also pulls its literary punch by having the protagonist's purchaser be a total gentleman... at least to her.

  Band of Angels also goes on for far too long- carrying the protagonist into reconstruction and emancipation and pairing her off with a well-meaning white husband who turns out to be a total dud.  After the fall of the Confederacy, my interest level took a precipitous dip, but this is still a top five title from Louisiana.

Published 3/2/26

Louisiana Power & Light (1994)

 by John Dufresne

Monroe, Louisiana

Louisiana: 12/30

   One fact I've learned about the geography of the South from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The top of Louisiana is not in line with the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  That particular line runs through the middle of Arkansas and Louisiana doesn't start until about the middle of Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi.  Likewise, the vast major of the population of Louisiana lives south of the southern borders of those states- some of it lines up with the Florida panhandle, but most of the important part of Louisiana (New Orleans and environs) lines up with north-central Florida. 

   I mention this because the northern half of Louisiana only has three titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project and Louisiana Power & Light are one of those books.  That makes Northern Louisiana one of the great underrepresented regions of America in this project, alongside Northern Alabama and Northern New York/Vermont/New Hampshire.  This novel is about the last of a line of inbred swamp dwellers who is orphaned by his criminally insane father and half-wit thirteen-year-old mother and raised to become a priest, only to abandon that goal when he meets the first in a series of women.

 I had low expectations for Louisiana Power & Light, but I was pleasantly surprised by the story.

Published 3/5/26

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 13/30

  I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested.  That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau.  I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990.  Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest.  I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel.  Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that. 

 I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits.  She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003.   The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter. 

  It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries.  Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's.   The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country:  No one gets rapes.  No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason.  No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan. 

Published 3/9/26

Yellow Jack (1999)

by Josh Russell

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 14/30

    Josh Russell is the first 1,001 Novels: A Library of American writer I can remember who does not have  a Wikipedia page.  He is gainfully employed, as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Georgia State University.   I did take a creative writing class in college- it struck me as a borderline insane way to spend one's time and energy.  I don't have a ton of respect for the teachers or students of creative writing, beyond recognizing that teaching creative writing is by the far the best way for authors of literary fiction to support themselves and their families- you gotta do what you gotta do.

   Yellow Jack is set in dirty old New Orleans, about a protagonist who learns the tricks and methods of the earliest kind of photography in the studio of originator Louis Daugerre, and then flees to New Orleans, where he sets up the very first photography studio.  Russell does an excellent job of conjuring early to middle 19th century New Orleans- a place where summer inevitably bought death in the form of Yellow Fever.   Claude Marchand lives a life of passion and intrigue, juggling a mixed-race girlfriend and the sexually precocious (and way underage) daughter of a local bigwig.  Meanwhile, the mercury that was key to developing early photographs is causing his teeth to fall out and driving him not-so-slowly insane.  I wouldn't say Yellow Jack was a fun read, but it was interesting. 

Published 3/11/26

Set in Motion (1978)

by Valerie Martin

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 15/30

  Set in Motion is a debut novel by Valerie Martin, an author who has published steadily if intermittently over the decades (two novels in the 70s, one in the 80s, three in the 90s, three in the oughts, one in the '10s and two this decade.  Her career highlights in terms of sales are Mary Reilly, her rework of Frankenstein, which landed a movie version and Property- which won the Orange Prize (Women's Prize for Fiction) in 2004.  I think I actually saw the Mary Reilly movie when it was released.   

 Set in Motion felt like a predecessor of sad girl lit, or rather an originator of the genre.  Sad Girl lit (of which I am a fan) features protagonists who are young-ish, though always grappling with issues surrounding mortality, they are not married, they do not have children, they may or may not have a job, they are prone to fits of emotion triggered by unusual and/or disturbing events.  The protagonist of Set in Motion fits all these descriptors.   She works for the County Welfare office vetting applicants for food-stampes.  She has a bartender boyfriend who casually shoots drugs into his veins (Pre Aids!!!!).  She has sex with the fiancé of her friend in a manner that borders on a contemporary description of sexual assault.

What is not to love?  I also enjoyed the descriptions of New Orleans in the mid 1970's, which were a nadir for urban areas all over the United States.  The sense of urban despair was palpable in this era. Love it.

Published 3/13/26

Glass House (1994)

by Christine Wiltz

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 16/30

  HALF WAY THROUGH LOUISIANA. Chug-chug that train be moving. I am deep into New Orleans.  New Orleans and environs makes up more than half of the Louisiana chapter, which sounds right to me.  Interesting literary subjects of Louisiana being 1) New Orleans: It's places and peoples and 2) Cajun/Bayou country.  The rest is just plantation country with more mixed-race people in positions of power.   Wiltz is another one of these roughly contemporary women writers that editor Susan Straight favors in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Wiltz has one best-seller, about the "last madam" of New Orleans.  She's also got a handful of genre titles (The Neal Rafferty New Orleans Mystery Series, 1-III).  Finally, there is Glass House, a conventional 1990's era "city novel" centered around the experience of urban living during the fraught decades between the 1970's and 2000's. Inevitably, these books are written from a white perspective, with African American's showing up in sympathetic supporting roles that are often fraught with ambiguity. 

  Here, the protagonist is a newly single woman moving back to New Orleans to inherit her spinster Aunt's rickety old mansion.  She is still coping with the experience of having her parents murdered by an African American teen inside their Mom n Pop grocery store- classic 80's/90's issue book murder right there.  She reconnects with an old flame struggling with his own set of issues, and the darkly charismatic contractor/local drug kingpin who is also the son of her deceased Aunt's housekeeper-for-life. Wiltz casts a sympathetic eye on her literary version of an inner-city drug kingpin, mostly we hear about his attempts to clean up the projects he calls home and he and his henchman do not engage in any criminal activity in the pages of this book.

   Published 3/18/26

Things We Lost to the Water (2021)

by Eric Nguyen

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 17/30

   This is the first Vietnamese American author to make it into 1,001 Novels: A Library of American since Ocean Vuong represented Hartford, Connecticut in the New England chapter.  It's hard for me to read ANY book written by a Vietnamese American author without thinking about the work- fictional and non-fictional by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Ocean Vuong though, is the more obvious comparison- so obvious that I wonder if comparing the two writers constitutes a microaggression.   As writers they have very different styles- Vuong being a poet-at-heart who deigns to write fiction and Nguyen being a more conventional type of author.

  Things We Lost to the Water is a very conventional coming-of-age story, sub-category immigrant experience, sub-category New Orleans, sub-category LGBT.  In that sense, I enjoyed the author-protagonist stand-in since he was a rare character from this part of the country that actually cares about books, literature, the life of the mind- something sorely, sorely lacking in the literature of the deep south thus far.   Unlike Nguyen, who has concentrated his gaze at the heart of the South Vietnamese government and military milleu of Southern California, both Nguyen and Vuong write from the edges- Vuong in New England and now Nguyen in the South. Unlike Vuong, who has a rock-solid working-class/underclass background, Nguyen's fictional situation is more complicated- his Dad, who stays in Vietnam is a college professor who falls afoul of the new regime and his Mom is a teacher.  In America, Mom becomes a nail tech, and her children struggle with fitting in.

  Like other Vietnamese American authors, Nguyen captures the feelings of loss, abandonment and anger that track American feelings about the Vietnamese war itself- it is an ambiguous situation, to say the least. 

Published 4/1/26

Ten Seconds (1991)

by Louis Edwards

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 18/30

   Ten Seconds is another familiar tale from the American South, albeit told with some literary ambition. Louis Edwards frames the flashback intensive format through the ten seconds it takes to run a forty-yard sprint, with the narrator reflecting on the poor choices he has made regarding his family, particularly in regard to his wife and young children.   It is well trodden territory for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I did enjoy the depiction of the narrator's commute the petro-chemical plant where he works- here in Southern California "the commute" is a huge part of everyday life, but I can't think of a single book so far- at least since the chapter on New Jersey, where commuting is even something a character does. 

Published 4/2/26

The Awakening (1899)

by Kate Chopin

Grand Isle, Louisiana

Louisiana: 19/30

  No re-reads!  Man, that is a sassy-ass write up below- written during my year of divorce, clearly.  I stand by the analysis, though. 

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (10/17/13)

1,001 Books to Read Before You Die
The Awakening (1899)
by Kate Chopin

  The Awakening by Kate Chopin is often called the American Madame Bovary.  That makes her the fourth and last of the national Bovaries.  Let's see- you've got the original by Flaubert, the Russian Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and the German Effi Briest.  Although The Awakening is the only book of the four to be written by an actual woman there is nothing about it that marks off the presence of a female authorial voice.  The Madame Bovary of the awakening is Edna Pontellier, a bored New Orleans house wife of a wealthy Creole stock market guy.  Edna is unhappy, but she doesn't know why, oh, it must be her husband whom she decides that she no longer loves.

 It is impossible to read any of the quartet of national Bovary novels without reflecting on my own experience.  I have heard the words of Bovary/Karenina/Briest/Pontellier from the mouth of my own wife, and I've been through the marriage therapy sessions that these women lacked, so I am intimately familiar with the thought process that leads a woman from a "happy" marriage to an "unhappy" marriage without any assistance from a disrespectful or malevolent husband.  That is something that all of these protagonist's share in common:  A husband who doesn't "do" anything to merit abandonment.

After reading all four novels I am left with the abiding conviction that all four husbands make the same mistake of treating their wives with respect.  It seems like if all four of these characters had been treated with a bit less respect, they might have stayed married.  Perhaps they would have been unhappy, but they all seem to be pretty unhappy post separation as well, so it hardly seems like an unfair swap.

Published 4/6/26

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)

 by George Washington Cable 

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 20/30

  I thought there would be more 19th century American literature in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America but thus far it hasn't been the case.  The Grandissimes is the only 19th century title in this entire Chapter and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single 19th century book in the prior chapter.   The preface to this edition calls The Grandissimes "the first modern southern novel," thought they can only mean that it is the first modern by novel BY rather than ABOUT the south, since Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and is certainly "about" the south.   The Grandissimes, set in the beginning of the 19th century (before New Orleans was an American city) is named after a local family with a white part and a "F.M.O.C" or "free man of color" part. Cable uses the conventions of 18th century gothic fiction- masked balls, confusing correspondence to heighten the drama of conflict between the white Grandissime and the colored one through the deployment of various proxies- a newly arrived white pharmacist, a creole voodoo priestess.  It is, to be honest, confusing and reminded me again about how fiction influenced by 18th century fiction and early 19th century fiction can feel "post-modern" when it is actually "pre-modern." 

   This is the first 19th century American novel I've read in some time, and I suppose the knock on second-tier semi-classics like this one is that they are too derivative of their inspirations.  Here, it's hard to find anything that doesn't seem directly lifted from Sir Walter Scott.

Published: 4/9/26

The Feast of All Saints (1979)

by Anne Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana:21/30

  Like Stephen King, Anne Rice hit career gold with her first published novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976) but there was an eight year gap between it and The Vampire Lestat, the first of 12(!) sequels that I didn't realize were published as late as 2018.   I imagine in the period between 1976 and 1985 Rice was trying to not be pigeonholed as a one trick pony, failed, and then spent the rest of her light pooping out crap to pay for her San Francisco mansion.  The Feast of All Saints reads like Interview but with the free people of color at the center instead of Vampires.  Like the Grandissimes, Rice is writing this book from the perspective of someone who is not herself related to any free people of color.  Her plot is confusing and hard to follow, with at least a half dozen major characters and dozens of minor characters spread out over several interrelated clans. 

  Marcel, the child of a French trader and rescued Haitian woman, yearns to leave New Orleans for the fairer environs of Paris, which lacks the entrenched racism of the nascent American order.  He falls under the spell of Christophe, a writer who has returned to New Orleans after finding literary success abroad. Each male protagonist is surrounded by a suite of females: mothers and sisters, while a ring of predatory white men rings each female character. African American men appear only as slaves.   Like all of the novels set in early 19th century New Orleans, it is impossible to ignore how deadly a place it was before medicine got a grip on yellow fever and malaria.  People died every year in the hundreds.  It was brutal.

Published 4/15/26

Little Altars Everywhere (1992)

by Rebecca Wells

Thornton, Louisiana

Louisiana: 22/30

   Wells is best known for her viral phenomenon, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which is the publishing industry equivalent of the late-blooming chart success of Appetite for Destruction by Guns n' Roses.  Both rose to number one on their respective industry charts over a year after publication.  This success drew the attention of Malcolm Gladwell in HIS best-seller, Tipping Point, where he explored the word of mouth that made Ya Ya such a hit.   The website for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America mistakenly lists the publication date as 2009, no idea where they got 2009 from, and not the first or second time they've listed the wrong publishing year for a mapped title.

   I'm not sure it was because of my utter disinterest in the book or actual issues with the writing, but Little Altars Everywhere felt more like a knitted together cluster of short stories.  It's a fine, well-travelled literary tradition though I don't think Wells was getting stuff published in the New Yorker before Little Altars Everywhere was released.  I would place Wells' bibliography squarely within the "chick-lit" genre- 1992 was the year the phrase was coined, in reference to Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale.  Altars fits into that broad category although it's also obvious to an almost painful degree the literary debt Altars owes to its southern literary forebears.    Maybe it's just the early Eudora Welty stories I started reading after this book that put me in mind of this, but it always seems like there is pressure on writers from the deep south to add some element of freakishness, either race based or otherwise, that sets the action apart from what you commonly see in other parts of the country.

  Here, there is a plot line- in a light comic novel mind you- about mother son incest that would be eyebrow raising even a much more seriously regarded work of fiction.

Published 4/22/26

A Density of Souls (2000)

by Christopher Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 23/30

   This is an utterly ridiculous novel by the son of author Anne Rice.  Three boys and one girl are friends as children.  Upon entering high school, two of the boys become "jocks," the girl becomes the girlfriend of one of the jocks and the fourth, who is clearly the main protagonist, is gay.   The other three all turn on the gay friend for reasons that are entirely unexplained.  Although there are no year specific tells, it seems clear that A Density of Souls, is set in the 90's, in a period where anti-gay bullying was still OK, but the bullied had an idea that their situation was temporary and would improve outside of high school.  The story just gets more ridiculous by the page, with plot points involving incest, insanity, forced institutionalization and lots and lots of gay stuff.   By the end, the mysteries are resolved, but it left this reader scratching his head.  What the hell did I just read, was my thought at the end.  Published by Harvey Weinstein, as well.

Published 4/29/26

Queen Sugar (2014)

by Natalie Baszile

St. James Parish, Louisiana

Louisiana: 24/30

  Cotton gets most of the press when you consider deep south agriculture, but sugar is part of the story as well.  If you don't know the story of sugar and the role it played in advancing the slavery-industrial complex in the 18th and 19th century, you can't grasp the significance of a novel about a young African American woman who suprise-inherits a sugar plantation in Louisiana, but to be fair, neither does the protagonist- a native Californian who uproots her daughter in the aftermath of the untimely death of her husband and decides to make a go of it in the deep south.

 Queen Sugar is pitched somewhere between "issue novel" and "chick lit" with elements that hint at something deeper with plot points that sound like they were written for television (Queen Sugar was adapted into a movie for Oprah's OWN network).  Charley, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with survival and to a lesser degree with the issues faced by her own family, specifically those of Ralph, her ne'er-do-well younger brother, the product of a childhood fling between her father and a local, mentally unstable girl during high school.  Ralph has led a life filled with issues- taken from his mother in Louisiana to live with Charley and their father in California, being returned to Louisiana for being to difficult, dropping out of college a couple semesters short of his college degree (in Civil Engineering?!?!), succumbing to drug addiction in Phoenix of all places, losing his wife to an overdose, abandoning her body and taking his son back to Louisiana.  It wasn't hard to tell where Ralph was headed.

  I enjoyed Queen Chapters for the portions that actually dealt with the process of farming sugar cane- after reading endless books about cotton farming, it was a welcome shift.  I also thought the plot was more interesting than the book Baszile wrote, but I can see where she was aiming.

Published 5/6/26

A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain (1992)

by Robert Olen Butler

Lake Charles, Louisiana

Louisiana: 25/30

    I'm not sure when exactly it became a problem for an author of one race to write an entire book in the voice of a second race of which he or she is a member, but clearly it was a not problem in 1992, when A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain, which is a collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in Louisiana as told by a white guy whose qualification is (checks notes) being an American soldier in Vietnam during the war.  Aside from that small issue this is an enjoyable collection of short stories about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in and around New Orleans.   I did frequently wince when it came to Butler writing about these characters IN Vietnam or when it came to the characters talking about non-Christian Vietnamese spiritual identity. 

Published 5/7/26

City of Refuge (2008)

by Tom Pizzota

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 26/30

  Cit of Refuge is a Hurricane Katrina novel, specifically focusing on the aftermath and how it impacts two families, one white with one of those "only in the past" situations where an entire family of four is supported by a male breadwinner who works for an alt-weekly, and the Mom's only job is to take care of the children and complain about everything.  The African American family is more interesting- a brother/sister pair with the sister's adult child.   The actual description of Katrina and its aftermath as experienced by the African American protagonist (the white couple have decamped to Oxford before relocating to Chicago), is the real-life equivalent of the opening of a work of dystopian fiction, but the aftermath is not- the worst of it being a few rough days at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans followed by bus relocations to anywhere- in the case of the sister of the brother/sister duo, a Christian camp in Arkansas surrounded by cotton fields. 

  The worst of it for the white family is listening to unsympathetic voices on early oughts' talk radio.  I thought it was clear that the agenda of the writer was not to create some kind of gothic freakshow of Fema trailers and the survival of the most destitute, but rather to show a more "average" experience of having your whole life ruined overnight.  All in all, it hardly seems dystopian- after the storm itself and the aftermath, pretty much everything works like it should in this book, and by the end all the characters are resuming "normal" lives, either inside New Orleans or in their new homes.

Published 5/13/26

Delicious Foods (2015)

by James Hannaham

Ovis, Louisiana

Louisiana: 27/30

  I read this whole novel thinking it was set in Mississippi, not Louisiana.  It very much reminded me of Paul Beatty, and I was more than a little surprised it took the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America to bring Delicious Foods to my attention.  Significantly, Delicious Foods contains an element of transgression in its plot, about a modern-day farm where drug-addicted African Americans are held in sort of debt peonage to a white owned corporation.  Crack itself is a character here, who goes by Scotty, if I'm not mistaken, and the protagonist is Delores, a mother-of-one whose life takes a crack induced downward spiral after her do-gooder husband is murdered in vile fashion by contemporary analogues of the KKK for his organizing work in rural Louisiana. 

 After a trick goes bad and Delores gets a couple of her teeth knocked out, she is easily recruited to the farm, where she is provided with necessities (including crack) and a dormitory type living environment, and compelled to work on harvesting and maintaining a variety of crops, notably watermelon.  Despite the marketing materials using the term "slavery" to describe the environment Delores finds herself in, the truth is more complicated, and Hannaham seems to also being working on a critique of the underlying capitalist system as much as he is making any race specific statement.  On the other hand, the environment and characters are very specific to the plantation south and "second slavery" system, so there is a complexity of theme that is often absent in the works in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  

  There is also nothing specifically Louisiana about Delicious Foods, rather it is a work from a third area, the delta, which crosses state lines in the north of Louisiana and the center of Mississippi. 

Published 5/20/26

Meely LaBauve (2000)

by Ken Wells

Cathoula Bayou, Louisiana

Louisiana: 28/30

  My ability to handle the 1,001 Novels project is solely due to the fact that I live in Los Angeles and have a Los Angeles Public Library card.  As any diehard library user knows, the strength of a library is not a single branch but the ability to request books from all the different branches, or, in the case of the interlibrary loan used by the American University system, any book in any university library.  The Los Angeles Public Library request feature, which you can use in the app or online, is amazing, and typically the book arrives at my local branch within a week.  I mention that here because I actually had to buy a copy of Meely LaBauve off of Amazon, making it one of the few novels the Los Angeles Public Library doesn't have available.  

   This book is a coming-of-age novel about a child of mixed-race heritage- probably Native American and African American, though given the location and the variability of the racial implications of identifying as a Native American over the years, the question is a fraught one.  Meely is a feral child, living by the Bayou with a father who is equally devoted to fishing and trapping and being a knockdown, drag-out alcoholic It's a boy's life, and the comparison of Meely to a swamp-bound Huck Finn is fair.  

Published 6/3/26

Visting Hours (2012)

by Jennifer Anne Moses

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana 29/30

  I am missing one book from Louisiana, and I can't figure it out for the life of me.  As far as I'm aware, Visiting Hours is the last book from this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Visiting Hours was last because I had to buy a copy- I was surprised didn't have this interesting novel about the grim lives of patients waiting to die in an AIDS hostel in... the 1990s? The early 2000s?  It actually really reminded me of Blackouts by Justin Torres, the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction winner, which concerns a man dying of AIDS (I think) in a New Orleans SRO.  

  I could have used more Bayou.  I'm really loving the swamp-lit of Florida, and Louisiana seems like a missed opportunity in that regard, maybe because the geographical location overlaps so completely with the Cajun population that one supersedes the other.   One other conclusion I drew from this chapter is that Hurricane Katrina did real damage to the city both physically AND psychically. 

Published 6/4/26

A Free Man of Color (1997)

by Barbra Hambly

New Orleans, Louisiana 

Louisiana: 30/30

  I found the missing Louisiana title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  A Free Man of Color by Barbra Hambly.  What happened here is I read the wrong Barbra Hambly novel- Good Man Friday, both volumes from her series detailing the exploits of free man of color and surgeon, musician and private investigator Ben January.  Good Man Friday was cool because January went to Washington DC and ran into Edgar Allan Poe- the actual inventor of the detective story. The juxtaposition of the past of relative racial harmony and toleration and the (at the time of the story) new American regime, where white are free and black are not, provides much of the plot and narrative tension. 

1,001 Novels A Library of America Collected: Mississippi

 1,001 Novels A Library of America 

Collected:

 Mississippi

   I am genuinely passionate about consolidating this blog into 200 posts, with 10 chapters of 20 posts each, with some chapters being chronological and others being thematic, combining autofiction and criticism.   I'd imagine that this project would be one of the ten chapters.  The 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die would be one of the ten chapters.  Writing about World History would be a chapter. Aesthetics would be a chapter.   And then 2008- 2010 would be a chapter, 2011-2013 would be a chapter, 2013-2019, 2020-2023, 2024-2030. That's eight chapters right there. 

  Mississippi is a dark spot on the map of American literature. Faulkner and Welty are both more-or-less canonical authors in the canon of 20th century American Literature.  Beyond that you've got contemporary writers like Jesmyn Ward and Robert Jones Jr.- prize winner types writing about African American experiences.  Honestly, I got more from the non-fiction I was reading about this same area- specifically the cotton plantation economy and its relationship to slavery and capitalism.  That was eye opening. 

Published 9/17/25

Light in August (1932)

by William Faulkner

Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

Mississippi: 1/18

  Faulkner might be considered the apotheosis (a word he uses at least three times in Light in August) of high modernism in America, in that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Faulkner won in 1949, Hemingway in 1954, Steinbeck in 1962.  Only Faulkner is comprable to the high modernism/experimentalist prose of the early 20th century, both Hemingway and Steinbeck are the opposite of the flowery, ornate prose and complicated plot structures of Faulkner.   Faulkner has also maintained a legacy through the writers he influenced- Cormac McCarthy, to name one. At the same time, it's hard not to think Faulkner's time has past- a dead white male, an alcoholic and a frequent user of the n word, there are plenty of textual and non-textual reasons that a contemporary student of literature could through an MFA program without reading more than a short story here or there.

   At the same time- and I'm saying this as someone who is 250 books into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, there is no denying the Faulkner simply is one of the top five American novelists of the 20th century.  It is simply undeniable, even if you don't like modernist prose, the south or writers who use the n word. If you think about it in terms of the south as a literary place, consider that Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, one of the great prose narratives of the South, in 1936.  The movie came out in 1939. Faulkner wins the Nobel a decade later. 

  I listened to the Audiobook because I've read plenty of Faulkner novels, and I've always felt like they would be good Audiobooks.  This version was only recorded 10 years ago.  I think it a fair observation that the American literary establishment itself didn't appreciate the brilliance of Faulkner at the time he was writing- I went and looked at the New York Times and saw a plea from Malcolm Lowery- published in the 40's, that said Faulkner was out of print. 

Published 12/2/25

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

by Barry Hannah

Clinton, Mississippi

Mississippi: 2/18

  Both Mississippi and Alabama scored eighteen titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  That ties them for last place in this specific chapter, behind Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  18 titles does put them both above the single digit states of the mid-Atlantic.  I've also moved away from the original 13 colonies of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first of the hinterlands that were settled (excepting those that lay within the original 13 colonies).  Here, the dynamic was first, the clearing out/removal of the Native tribes- most of whom were property holding and "civilized" within the usage of that term at the time.  Second, it was the cotton revolution which opened up huge swaths of Alabama and especially Mississippi for enormous, slave driven cotton plantations.   The need for slaves, exhaustion of the soil in the upper south from Tobacco farming and the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad drove a huge, forced population movement, as the slave holders of the Virginias and Carolinas sold their slaves "down the river" to work on the plantations of the newer south.

   Not that Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by moderately well-known southern author Barry Hannah, addresses any of that.   Instead, Orphan is a loosely assembled collection of eccentric and violent characters living around a lake.  It's not a great book- it was the author's last novel- but it, at least, interesting, and neither a work of chick-lit or a YA title.  I will say I've never read a book where so many people were sliced open by knives.

Published 1/9/26

Where the Line Bleeds (2008)

by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

   Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward would have to be at the very top of any serious list of American authors of literary fiction in the 21st century.  Her presence amidst the detritus of YA and chick-lit titles stands out like a beacon from a proverbial light house of literary fiction.  I checked out the Audiobook because I was wondering if I could seriously tell the difference between an Author with such widely regarded literary merit and the run of the mill titles, I've been suffering through for the past couple years.  Where the Line Bleeds was her first novel, and then she dropped Salvage the Bones four years later- that book won the National Book Award.  She won again in 2017 with Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I read during a period where I was reading all the National Book Award finalists.  It's a good book, obviously, but it didn't spur me to go back and read her other titles.

   I could tell the difference between Ward's prose and the run of the mill stuff on a couple of levels.  First, she was able to turn an otherwise prosaic landscape (the unheralded Mississippi coastline) with real grandeur.  She did this in a couple different ways.  First, she was a close observer of the physical landscape- her descriptions of crack houses and swamp parties sparkle with life.  Second, her ability to depict all five senses marks her out from the pack.   Great writers of literary fiction imbue the reader with a feeling that there is depth beneath the surface of the human activity being depicted, but they also provide a many-splendored surface, pairing stylistic flourishes with economy.   She does all these things in Where the Line Bleeds, which is sure to be my top title from Mississippi and a likely top five for the entire chapter.

Published 1/12/26

The Gone Dead (2019)

by Chanelle Benz

Money Road, Greenwood Mississippi 

Mississippi: 4/18

  It isn't often that the titles on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America raise questions about the role of authenticity in fiction, but such was the case for The Gone Dead, by British American author Chanelle Benz. The plot concerns the interracial daughter of a dead-before-his-time African American poet (her father) and what can only be described as her severely misguided attempt to "get to the bottom" of the "mysterious" circumstances surrounding the death of her father.

  Clearly, the protagonist has not read the same books I have about this part of the country because it is just about 100 percent clear that any "mysterious" death of an African American man in the deep South is caused by white racists who are then protected by the local law enforcement and political establishment. I could have told this lady that in a five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee. Fair to say that I didn't linger on The Gone Dead, because reader I knew where this was headed. It was either the cops, friends of the cops or the cops when they were off duty that killed your daddy and you don't need 283 pages to tell the story.

Published 1/19/26

Mudbound (2008)

by Hilary Jordan

Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Mississippi: 5/18

  Mudbound is a classic Susan Straight 1,001 Novels: A Library of America pick, a book that won some award that Barbara Kingsolver made up for unpublished books- it then got published and sold a bunch of copies.  The version I checked out from the library was the Ebook version of the Netflix cover version of the book from the Netflix version I'd didn't know about.  It's about a well-off but "spinster adjacent" white woman from the upper south who marries a youngish widower- she meets him because he is an engineer travelling around for Government projects during the Great Depression (I think).  Little does she know that it is his lifelong dream to go back home (the Mississippi Delta) and become a farmer.  It's "little does she know" because he does not bother to tell her during their courtship. 

 Nevertheless, Laura McAllan (her married name) is cognizant of her incipient spinsterhood and loves the old lug besides, so she agrees to the thing.  The title of the book is her somewhat whimsical name for the farm that Henry (the husband) takes over.   Henry has a damaged (by service in World War I) younger brother who is a manic pixie dream boy circa the 1940's.  The farm has several sharecropping families, some white and some black, and Jamie (the younger brother) befriends the oldest son of one of the black families, Ronsel, also a veteran, and a tank operator to boot (Jamie being a pilot). 

  If you've been reading this blog, you know how this is going to end up, not well for the African American World War II veteran.  And reader, it does not. 

Published 3/23/26

The Past is Never (2018)

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

Forest, Mississippi

Mississippi: 6/18

   I know when the book jacket copy references Flannery O'Connor and "Southern Gothic" that the book in question will be interesting.  The Past is Never is set in the Delta, but the story stretches to the Florida everglades, making this title a bit of a 1,001 Novels: A Library of America Mississippi/Florida cross-over. Like many of the books from this part of the United States, The Past is Never features three young siblings who are being raised in benevolent neglect in a rural part of the country.  Here, the relevant landscape feature is a forbidden abandoned quarry where the children like to swim during the hot summer.  This being a novel, tragedy strikes when the two older siblings who are the protagonists, misplace their younger sister.  Somewhat suspiciously, their money counterfeiting father disappears around the same time.

   The first half of the book features the brother/sister duo struggling with the repercussions of their sister's abrupt and final disappearance, and then the second half has them off the Florida everglades in search of their father, who "dies" under extremely suspicious circumstances in a Florida motel room after a decade of non-contact.  Everything is fecund and you can practically hear the mosquitos buzzing throughout.  Personally, I didn't find much that was Faulknerian other than the locale, let alone any themes or stylistic writing motifs that reminded me of Flannery O'Connor- it just seems like those are the two reference points for any white southern author with any literary ambition. 

Published 3/24/26

Can't Quit You, Baby (1988)

by Ellen Douglas

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 7/18

  Ellen Douglas was a writer of southern domestic fiction (and the pen name for Josephine Haxton).  According to her 2012 New York Time obituary, her wheelhouse was domestic fiction with post-modern influences (she cited Milan Kundera as a primary influence).  In books like Can't Quit You, Baby, much of the action took place inside the home, with the characters telling each other tales from their past.   In this book, domestic servant Tweet and lady-of-the-house Cornelia, spend the entire time prepping a meal in the kitchen.  Within this framework, they both reminisce, with much of the spoke banter between the two revolving around the fact that Cornelia is both literally and figuratively deaf to Tweet's experience. 

  As the book goes on, the reader learns that Cornelia, too, has had her struggles, including escaping her mother's home to marry her Irish American beau during World War II and a son who marries a somewhat questionable mother-of-two against her wishes.  Tweet's struggles are center stage, particularly her experience with her dying guardian-Grandfather and her dissolute father, who returns only to steal her inheritance. 

Published 3/26/26

Waveland (2009)

by Frederick Barthelme

Waveland, Mississippi

Mississippi: 8/18

  Frederick Barthelme is the younger brother of noted American postmodernist author Donald Barthelme- who showed up in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list a couple times- enough for me to get the drift that he is a difficult writer to actually enjoy, and to be confused by his prose, which is kinda the point with his brand of postmodernism.  Frederick is a different kind of author, call him a minimalist or maybe a pointillist, in that he specializes in the minutiae of everyday life, often written from the perspective who are going through it.

   His protagonist here is a semi-retired, semi-divorced architect doing a whole lot of nothing in coastal Louisiana. Waveland's characters stood out to me because the protagonist, at least, seemed more like a familiar "coastal elite" of literary fiction than a southerner, let alone a Cajun. His ex-wife and the other characters are more southern specific.  Barthelme does a good job evoking the landscape, a combination of the acuity of his protagonist, the fact that he has plenty of time to sit around and look at stuff and the distinctiveness of the landscape itself.  For example, you know when there is a house on stilts that plays into the plot, you know you can only be in a certain region of the country.

 Unlike most of the books from this part of the country there are no horrific, traumatizing incidents involving race, gender, sexuality or some combination of the three.  Low stakes fiction, but a pleasure to read. Maybe I identified a bit too closely with his protagonist. 

Published 3/31/26

Biloxi (2019)

by Mary Miller

Willow Avenue and Volunteer Park, Biloxi, Mississippi

Mississippi: 9/18

   Louis MacDonald is a recently divorced 63-year-old man, someone who has retired early from an unspecified job/career in anticipation of a substantial inheritance from his deceased father.  As the book opens, MacDonald is at what you would call "loose ends": He adopts a dog under mysterious circumstances from a quasi-neighbor and spends time drinking full sugar Coca-Cola and ignoring warnings from his doctor about his incipient diabetes.  MacDonald is one of those adult American men who doesn't know how to care for himself- he is seemingly unable to cook for himself and mostly relies for sustenance on leftovers his sad-dad apartment compels neighbor brings home from his job cooking at a chain restaurant (are there any other kinds, here in Biloxi, Mississippi.) 

   I've hit a mini streak of his pathetic protagonists inside the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The southeastern Louisiana coast doesn't have a monopoly on the character type, but there is no denying the affinity between the bleak landscape and the bleak lives.  You could put this novel and Frederick Barthelme's Waveland back-to-back and maybe not notice the switch from one book to the next.   The third 1,001 Novels selection from this stretch of coastline is the similarly bleak Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward, which at least had the benefit of solidly depicting the landscape in a way that the protagonists in Biloxi and Waveland seem incapable of doing.  

  

Published 4/3/26

Pariah and Other Stories (1983)

by Joan Williams

Arkabutla, Mississippi

Mississippi: 10/18

   I read this slim volume of short stories sitting in court in a single afternoon, waiting for my matter to be called.   Pariah is geographically distinct because it is the northwestern location within the entire chapter spanning Florida to Louisiana.  Louisiana is further west but the northern border of Louisiana is miles south of the northern border that runs through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  Thus, Arkabutla is closer to Memphis than any large population center in Mississippi. 

  Williams is best known as a protege of William Faulkner- her bare bones Wikipedia page is almost comical in its lack of biographical detail- surely Joan Williams is a candidate for a literary revival?  Perhaps though it's the perspective- like Flannery O'Connor her characters are losers and weirdos- the collection of short stories beginning with three interconnected stories about a mentally challenged person.  There is frequent and unkind use of the n-word- many of these characters can be described as poorer whites who fear and resent the incipient Civil Rights movement, a frequent subject of discussion among the characters.  

 I can see how folks might shy away from reviving stories like these, but I found the obtuseness refreshing, as well as the literary ambition.

Published 4/16/26

The Oxygen Man (1999)

by Steven Yarbrough

Indianola, Mississippi

Mississippi: 11/18

   Indianola is in northwest Mississippi, what I imagine to be "catfish country," where cotton farmers converted their plantations to aquaculture in an attempt to adapt to changing times.  Within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, The Oxygen Man is interesting because it is a debut novel on a small press- besides academic imprints there are very few non-major press books in the 1,001 Novels project, which seems like a lost opportunity.  Yarbrough writes in modernist style with the narrative skipping between time periods, for the benefit of the audience the years are added in between segments.  The main protagonists are a brother-sister duo of what can only be described as a white-trash family- Dad is an itinerant commercial painter, Mom is the town whore.   As a pair they have penchant for big fights followed by lusty make-up sex, and they are not afraid to do either in public, to the chagrin of their minor children.

  Unsurprisingly, this behavior impacts the children's lives and attitudes, with the fulcrum of the story hinging on a semi-public sexual encounter between the sister, witnessed by the brother and his friend.

Published 4/17/26

The Prophets (2021)

 by Robert Jones Jr

1833 Haining Road, Vicksburg Mississippi

Mississippi: 12/18

Author Robert Jones Jr.

Published 2/22/21

The Prophets (2021)

by Robert Jones Jr.

  An early front runner for the National Book Award longlist, The Prophets is the debut novel by American author Robert Jones Jr., about a forbidden love affair between two slaves on a Mississippi plantation in the early 19th century.   And although the hook should be enough to pique the interest of most fans of American literary fiction, this book is by no means "just" a LGBT love story set in the antebellum south.  Jones ably blends different voices- the white children of the plantation owner, women slaves on the same plantation as well as voices from Africa- which expand the standard parameters of the American slave narrative across the ocean in time and space.

  Like Marlon James, Jones Jrs' take on the African American LGBT experience is physical and intense.  His two protagonists, Isaiah and Samuel, are nuanced figures, even as their actions become increasingly direct.  Jones deserves plaudits for his frank and direct depiction of the trauma inflicted on the enslaved by their so-called masters, reserving special spite for the "progressive" white children of the planation over class. 

   Although I shouldn't have to say this in 2021, The Prophets is not "just" for people interested in LGBT issues in literary fiction.  It is a broadly appealing work, and it packs a narrative punch that will make you glad you picked it up.

Published 4/21/26

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
Jackson. Mississippi

Mississippi: 13/18

  Looking at a Google Ngram that compares the popularity of Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty, Welty comes in third place.  All three authors have experienced precipitous declines in frequency since the turn of the millennium, with only O'Connor showing some resilience.   Having read the three authors, the simplest explanation is that at some point it became untenable to teach students with materials that use the "n-word," in any way, shape or form.  Welty's short stories are chock full of it, although since her stories cover such a wide swath of time, it is possible to observe some characters holding back from the term as time progresses into the Civil Rights era.  My understanding is that saying the n word in any context in a classroom is enough to get a teacher fired.

  I think Welty also suffers because she never got comfortable with the novel as a format- even her Pulitzer Prize winning "novel" The Optimist's Daughter, clocked in at 208 pages.  Short stories do well in literature courses but aren't as great for the buying public or critics. As I've brought up many times, trying to write a review of a book of short stories is straight up not a good time because you are either summarizing a bunch of plots, or trying to draw connections with little or no insight into the authorial mindset. 

 This was my first time reading her work- my major observation is that she sure did seem like a practitioner of "Southern Gothic" but did not like the term.   Perhaps the development of the entire literary genre was a reflection of the tastes of the audience for literary magazines based in the north- the New Yorker, for example.  It's not hard to imagine that editors at the New Yorkers thought that their audiences were interested in the freakishness of the south, and that they picked stories that reflected that, and that writers like Welty got the message.   Conversely, it is hard to imagine whatever literary culture that existed in the south being happy with the freaks in Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty.   Perhaps though it was preferable to literature which frankly addressed racial practices in the south in the mid 20th century.

Published 4/27/26

Joe (1991)

by Larry Brown

Oxford, Mississippi

Mississippi: 14/19

   I chuckled when I read the jacket copy, which compares author Larry Brown to Faulkner, Welty and O'Connor in the same sentence.  What you mean he writes like three of the five non-African-American authors that matter in the deep south?  If you look up the author online you will soon see that he is associated with a genre called "grit-lit."  The Good Reads page is a mess and lists titles from Faulkner to O'Connor and everything in between.  To me, it sounds like an attempt to rebrand Southern Gothic for the "modern" (aka 1990s) period.   The prevalence of freaks, and freak like behavior in literature from the deep south is unique within American literature, sure every state and region has its dysfunctional families, but the patriarch of the dysfunctional family in this book really takes the cake.  Calling him a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic doesn't begin to do his depravity justice.

Published 4/30/26

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

by Brad Watson

Mercury, Mississippi

Mississippi: 15/19

     Living in California, it is easy to lose track of the relative size of places like it and New York to places like Alabama and Mississippi.  For example, the largest city in Mississippi is Jackson and it has a population of 146k.  In California, Jackson would be the 40th largest city, between Visalia and Victorville.  The total population of Mississippi, just about 3 million, is smaller than the CITY of Los Angeles, let alone the county or metropolitan statistical area.   Of course, the founding fathers foresaw this, which is why we are saddled with a political system which allows areas like the deep south and rural Midwest to put their candidates into the Presidency at the expense of places like California and New York.

     For places like Mississippi, it's not a question of the city/town/rural distinction of more populated areas, rather it is a question of small towns and rural areas.  Even the books putatively mapped onto urban areas in Mississippi take place in rural settings.   The Heaven of Mercury is a pure example of the small-town novel, nominated for the National Book Award for fiction back in 2002 about a local newspaper editor and his lifetime of unrequited love for a childhood almost-sweetheart.

    I've observed before that the use of a map to plot the titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America presupposes certain kind of plots and narrators.  None of the book in the Mississippi chapter split their temporality between Mississippi and some other place.  Characters who leave Mississippi leave the novel.  This means you have a choice between people coming back from some other place and people who never leave.   Within that category Mississippi is almost unique in that NONE of the novels are about people coming back from some other place and ALL of the books are about people who never leave. 

  At least, with our newspaper editor character in The Heaven of Mercury we have a literate protagonist. 

Finus, the protagonist, is, I think, the most sophisticated of any of the protagonists in the Mississippi titles.

Published 5/5/26

Billy (1993)

by Albert French

Banes, Mississippi

Mississippi: 16/19

      Billy is one of the three books from Mississippi that I had to buy from Amazon because they are not available from the Los Angeles Public Library.   It is a work of historical fiction about the events leading to the state of Mississippi executing a 10-year-old for the accidental murder of a white girl during a fight.  Reading the book I surely thought that this was based on a historical case, but it was not.  It is true that American executions of defendants who were juveniles at the time of the murder occurred well into the 20th century, with Supreme Court cases approving the practice as late as 1989 (for 16- and 17-year-olds.)  Billy is yet another novel from this chapter where the use of the n-word is frequent- given the context of the plot (the murder of a white child by an African American child) I suppose it's "understandable" but it doesn't make Billy any easier to read.  Once again, the reader is heavily reminded of the incredible amount of simple hate that white people had and presumably have for the African American population.   As an example from this book, only two characters in the entire book- the defense attorney and the priest at the Mississippi state death house, express ANY reservations about the state executing a 10-year-old for a clearly accidental death.

Published 5/19/26

The Hate U Give (2017)

by Angie Thomas

Carnation Street, Garden Heights, Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 17/19

   This YA novel was adapted into a pretty popular YA movie (with Sabrina Carpenter as the racist white friend from prep school).  It's about a young, African American girl (high school student) who is riding shot gun when her friend from the neighborhood is shot by a white cop.  Readers of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will not be surprised by the events which follow, though Thomas deserves some credit for evoking the specific time and place (the following/unfollowing of a race-themed Tumblr blog is a minor plot point).  At 400 plus pages, I didn't really linger on the prose, but I think I got the drift of it. As a criminal justice practitioner I didn't find the details of this particular fictional shooting of a young minority man by a white cop in the deep south particularly troubling, as far as those circumstances go.   Here, the cop mistakes a heavy comb being stored in the front driver door for a glock, which is ridiculous, but also something that no African American south would ever do (one, what teenage male owns a heavy duty hair brush let alone keep it in their driver side door while driving around the deep south.

Published 5/27/26

Wolf Whistle (1993)

by Lewis Nordam

Arrow Catcher, Mississippi

Mississippi: 18/19

     The end of each state is a cause for reflection on my part- what I've learned, any avenues I am interested in pursuing further, etc.  Mississippi is a dead end- I think I'll always be interested in Faulkner because of his interesting canonical history, but the more books I read set in Mississippi, the less interesting Faulkner becomes.  Here at the tail end of the chapter, Wolf Whistle has been kicking around my Kindle for six months.  This is an example of the "post-Faulkner" genre of southern lit, where authors with literary ambition are compared to one or all of the handful of authors from here with any literary cache.  Wolf Whistle is a surprisingly "even handed" recounting of the Emmett Till murder, mostly from the point of view of the murderer.     Considering how many of the books in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America deal with the murder of an African American male at the hands of local white people, I'm not sure Wolf Whistle was a necessary pick, but no doubt my viewpoint of this book was largely informed by it's second-to-last place in the random reading order.

   

Published 6/8/26

A Time to Kill (1989)

by John Grisham

Mississippi: 19/19

    I'm elated, finishing Louisiana and Mississippi in back-to-back weeks.  Florida is a real (metaphorical) breath of fresh air after reading so much about racial hatred and race-based injustice.  Fitting to end Mississippi with John Grisham, Mississippi best-sellingist author and all-around good guy.  Artistically, it's hard to say much about the man beyond pointing to his status as a perennial best seller.  He doesn't have the literary fictionish touch of Stephen King, and the court room thriller doesn't have the cache of detective fiction or police procedural.  And, with a net worth estimated at 400 million, I doubt he cares, or at least, he doesn't act like someone concerned with his literary legacy.

   A Time to Kill is, of course, his first novel, about a young-ish criminal defense lawyer in small-town Mississippi who is hired to defend an African American accused of gunning down the two white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter.  It's the kind of crime that transcends racial prejudice, a fact which is key to the plot in many different ways.  For me, it was all very "busman's holiday"- reading about my day-to-day concerns of being a criminal defense lawyer.  I think, though, you can tell that Grisham wrote this book without an inkling that he would became a mega seller of popular fiiction.

The Lonely Silver Rain (1985) by John MacDonald

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Lonely Silver Rain (1985)

by John MacDonald

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Florida: 13/21

   Florida is a strong chapter in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, led by the detective/police procedural titles.  The Lonely Silver Rain is a fine example of the genre, the last book in his Travis McGee- boat bum and private investigator for all things South Florida. If you look at the associated map, you will see that almost half of the Florida titles are concentrated on a swath of coastline that runs from Fort Lauderdale in the North down to the immigrant heavy suburbs south of Miami.   I often find myself musing that the noir/crime caper book is the best use of the 1,001 Novels project because the always specifically address a place in the United States.   The requirements of the genre mean that the characters move around in the landscape- few books from these titles involve characters who spend the whole book in a square mile of geographical area. 

  The plot in The Lonely Silver Rain starts with a stolen yacht and embroils McGee in a plot with cocaine smugglers, money launderers and undercover DEA Agents.  Fun stuff. I'd be down to read/listen to more John MacDonald in the same way reading an Elmore Leonard book makes me want to read other Elmore Leonard books.