One of the reasons that rarely, if ever, sell back CDs is because somehow even mistakes are important, and you never know when a disc might be due for re-assessment. I found one such disc this week: Tomorrow The Green Grass by the now-defunct Jayhawks. Their American Recordings debut Hollywood Town Hall was a spare alt-country masterpiece with songs full of back roads, small towns, high desert loneliness, and longing. I remember buying the follow-up with no small amount of anticipation after hearing the first track Blue on the radio. That first track did grab me and hold me... but the spareness of Hollywood Town Hall was gone. Tomorrow The Green Grass was denser and louder, and did not evoke the wide open, empty spaces that its predecessor did. It got put on the shelf, and pretty much stayed there for about a dozen years -- though it did get ripped for my iTunes music library earlier this year with all my other discs.
I have harri3tspy to thank for finally dusting this disc off and giving it another listen. I included a Jayhawks track Sister Cry on a mix CD I sent her last Spring. I went back to look at her review of the disc this week, and she mentioned Tomorrow The Green Grass. When I was scanning through my iPod albums list shortly after, I thought "well, why not?" Blue grabbed me again, but this time I could listen to the rest of disc for what it is -- natural, organic, noisy, and pretty much everything that much of the music made since is not.
Maybe it's time to give another alt-country disc that got put on the shelf, Son Volt's Straightaways, a listen too.
said drgeek
on 2007-11-17 at 10:09 p.m.
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The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
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