It was a small, quiet crowd in a small quiet venue. The pain got to Guy more than once and he forgot the lyrics to several songs. He’d mutter, “Shit,” or, “Y’all are being very sweet about this mess.” His wry humor was there, you bet. There was no nervousness in the audience, no impatience, no tension. Just sympathy for his pain and joy at his effort.

Anyway, he launched into “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” He got through the verse about “they called me sidekick,” then he stumbled. The words escaped him. A moment later, faster than a mad dog cyclone, the audience sang them for him like they’d planned it all along. Hell, they even sang a little harmony. They sounded reverent and heaven-bound, like the choir that sings with Alison Krauss on “Down to the River to Pray.” Here’s what they sang:

One day I looked up and he’s pushin’ eighty
He’s got brown tobacco stains all down his chin
Well to me he was a hero of this country
So why’s he all dressed up like them old men

And that’s why I still love Texas. Guy’s love of people with all their faults and beauty is there in his lyrics. He made it real tonight with his very presence. His fans love of his love for people was there when they stepped in to sing a song they knew so well because they’ve been waiting, too.

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“This young girl [Fluke] should be absolutely ashamed of herself. When she goes before a Congressional committee and then be off the record. C-span is going to show it.  The whole world should know it. So what did the girl call herself, other than irresponsible?”

And:

“As I matter of fact, I, as a woman, am very offended not by anything that Rush Limbaugh had to say, but that we have a coed at a Catholic University who goes before the United States Congress and testifies, and now her testimony is supposed to be taken off record. We’re not supposed to hold her to account for what she had to say. But she is demanding that you and I as taxpayers pay for her birth control.  That is absolutely something that that woman ought to be taking care of herself.”

I think she means that because she testified Rush Limbaugh should get to call her whatever names he wants to. Now, I suppose it’s not surprising that the paragonettes of moral virtue at the Eagle Forum see non-Eagle Forum members as sluts and prostitutes. They’ve more or less argued that for decades, ever since Phyllis Schlafly entered the national circus tent. But I have to admit that when Adams decided that calling Fluke a slut and a prostitute was okay and that Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers shouldn’t mind (much less the rest of the civilized world), I was shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Adams went on to repeat other right-wing lies about President Obama’s contraception policy,  making the contradictory claims that the policy forced people to purchase coverage they were morally opposed to and then saying the policy forced taxpayers to pay for the coverage for others. Oh, Adams also claims the policy will force taxpayers to pay for others’ sex change operations. Huh? Well, at least we won’t have to pay for their birth control, I guess.

Here are links to the audio of my little talk with Adams:

Part I

Part II

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This, “The Aspirin Papers,” is about a group of unscrupulous obsessives who try to deceive all of America to fulfill their obsessive desire: a return to an ancient dreamtime when men ruled the universe and women, when not dutifully and passively prone before their masters, kept their mouths shut.

Reference is made, obviously, to the following comment from Foster Friess the Fabulous Plutocrat and Rick Santorum mega-contributor:

You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.

Friess was commenting on the wildly anachronistic dust-up over contraception, during which some Catholic bishops and other members of Friess’ all-male club decided that employers ought to have the right to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to their female employees.

The scoundrel and narrator of James’ story, says, “It is not supposed easy for women to rise to the large free view of anything.” Friess & Company agree, I assume, and call upon science to confirm that “the large free view” is simply unavailable to womankind owing to the decumbency of their holy and true vocations, pleasing men and birthing babies.

Implicit in Friess’ statement is the belief that women are always there before their male superiors, their legs open and inviting. Depending upon circumstances, this is, in the Friess frame, either proper, wifely duty or such devilish temptation that it is too much to ask even god-faring men to resist. Therefore, steps must be taken. Here, ladies, please hold this aspirin in place with your knees until you are called upon.

Congressional Republicans are busy arguing that the issue is about religious freedom, not contraception. If a woman’s employer happens to be, say, the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is morally opposed to contraception, then said Church should be allowed to deny contraceptives to said employee. To require otherwise of said Church violates the First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty. Pish posh. If that was true why did Congressional Republicans rush to file legislation giving that contraceptive-denying right to all employers?

And Friess, no stranger to Republican insiderdom, inadvertently let the cads out of the bag with his aspirin-between-the-knees comment. As I noted elsewhere, most arguments in America that claim our obedience to religious doctrine are mere comedy. We’re simply the best at ignoring these commandments. We are damn good at lying about it, too. Baptists are the best dancers. Catholics down more birth control pills than communion wafers. And Jesus’ pleas to aid the poor are taken about as seriously as an Ogden Nash poem.

Great heavens, this is 2012. Back in the 1960s a friend’s mom, rather scandalously at the time, pinned to her den wall a poster of the Pope pointing out toward the viewer like Uncle Sam. The caption read, “The Pill is a No-No.” That was 44 years ago. And the Pope’s message was being laughed at then!

Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, who ran away with my World’s Best Blogger award last week when he quoted singer-songwriter Guy Clark (from “Rita Balou,” “You’d of thought there’s less fools in this world”) when writing about the new Virginia law:

…that requires women seeking to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion to have a probe stuck up in them so that they will be shamed like the sluts they are before God and the various meddling members of the House Of Delegates who believe that a woman’s place is in all those movies they watch for five minutes (or less) in their hotel rooms at the annual god-botherer’s convention in Atlantic City…

Anyway, Pierce has also worried aloud that the Republicans will ultimately prevail in this matter by shouting louder than the rest of us, a fear all-too-justified by recent history. By the time the election rolls around, the issue might appear to be over religious freedom and not the re-enslavement of women.

Already we see some Democratic strategerists suggesting the issue will pass when cooler heads (theirs) prevail and the debate returns to the economy, stupid. I hereby ask those tempted to vocally marginalize the progressive side of this debate to place an aspirin or maybe even an ibuprofen between their lips. (Ibuprofen, by the way was patented in 1961, the same year the FDA approved Enovid 5mg as an oral contraceptive, so the gesture would have some aesthetic symmetry.)

It is an issue the Right will use to turn out its base in 2012, and they will not quit shouting about it. If we don’t contest their poppycock, pardon, they’ll succeed in their rhetorical transubstantiation. It needn’t be said that public opinion is on our side on this issue. The proof of that lies in American beds. The issues are women’s health and equality before the law.

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It turns out that the answer is a little embarrassing for those of us who live in or near the more red neck enclaves of red states. I use the term “enclave” to protect the innocent. Anyway, in or near those enclaves,  it turns out that male voters think the controversy involves sex contraptions, not contraceptives. They are, it seems, intrigued by the prospect that their little darlins will now have access to some kind of new fun stuff for after closing time.

My guess is this support will evaporate soon as one of the male respondents gets up the guts to ask his new girl companion where her contraption is. It’s conceivable that it might be the last thing he ever asks, so maybe it won’t matter for support of Obama’s initiative in the long run.

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Oh, I have no doubt that Catholic Church leaders are quite frustrated that their flock no longer does what they are ordered to do by the self-regarding, closer-to-god Church hierarchy. And, it’s probably true that Mormons are, as these things go, a little more obedient to doctrine, right down to their underwear, than members of most other faiths. Credit where credit is due.

Lurking behind the church/state controversy over the morally righteous effort to make contraceptives available to American women is the certain truth that even the most devout Catholics ignore the Church’s medieval doctrine on this one. The controversy was truly like arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin. There are no angels; there are no pins. Just pundits and panderers.

Denial may not be a river an Egypt, as the 12-steppers say, but it’s broader than the Mississippi in America. If there’s anything we do better than escaping religious doctrine, it’s denying that we escape it.

Now, it must be admitted that many can get themselves into a righteous snit when they discover that others have also sawed through the bars and run away across the fields. High-tailing it to freedom like the trio of miscreants in O Brother Where Art Thou, they look over their shoulders and shout at the escapees behind them, “Get thee back to God’s House, sinners!” Their indignation is born of two parents: seeing themselves unhappily mirrored in their doctrine-denying brethren makes their denial a little more difficult; and, they are worried about the lack of parking spaces near the bars, the dancehalls, and the contraceptive-dispensing pharmacies.

Speaking of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, the scene where Delmar is saved by the preacher may be the most accurate portrayal of Americans and faith on film:

Delmar: Well, that’s it, boys. I been redeemed. The preacher done washed away all my sins and transgressions. It’s the straight and narrow from here on out. And heaven everlasting’s my reward.

Everett: Delmar, what are you on about? We got bigger fish to fry.

Delmar: The preacher said all my sins is washed away,
including that Piggly Wiggly I knocked over in Yazoo.

Everett: You said you was innocent of that.

Delmar: Well, I was lyin’. And the preacher said that that sin’s been washed away, too. Neither God nor man’s got nothin’ on me now.

Secretly, we’re all thankful for the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. God forbid (pardon the reference) that the State should enforce church doctrines under penalty of the criminal law. If we think we have a prison crisis now…

So what’s behind all the hooting and hollering over the Obama Administration’s contraception initiative? Why is it that even some progressive pundits are arguing for more deference to the Catholic Bishops on an issue that’s not even about religious freedom, but women’s health? I think it’s because they feel we’re not showing enough deference to pretense. That the health of American women would be put at risk by such deference is kind of beside the point.

I don’t mean to in any way mock religion. Many – most – of us draw deep and abiding values from the faith traditions we were raised in or discovered on our own. I think humans come with a wonderful ability to look for answers beyond what’s immediately at hand, and religions can facilitate that and a give us a sense of community, too.

But I do mean to mock those who argue that we must sacrifice women’s health on the altar of a religious doctrine no one in America takes seriously. On the other hand, Republicans who think this is a viable wedge issue might discover it’s a wedge between themselves and the rest of America. I’m tempted to say, go for it.

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As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

At his Grand Old Opry gig, Nixon bragged that White House performances by Merle Haggard and others had been huge successes with his “very sophisticated audiences” because the country singers spoke to “the heart of America.” He was lying, of course. In his diary, Nixon aide Bob Haldeman confessed that the Haggard concert “was pretty much a flop because the audience had no appreciation for country/western music and there wasn’t much rapport.”

Nixon’s tricky fib and Haldeman’s confession are just more evidence of conservative elites’ cynical manipulation of lower middle class whites in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and other transformative rebellions of the 1960s. Nixon had nothing in common with Merle Haggard’s audience. Blueblood George H.W. Bush had nothing in common with Lee Greenwood’s audience when he deployed Greenwood in his 1988 campaign. That didn’t mean they couldn’t pretend.

The right-wing colonization of country music is still very much in play. There was the 2003 Dixie Chicks controversy. Southern whites burned their albums and country stations blacklisted their music after Natalie Maines said she was ashamed of George W. Bush. And then there was Sarah Palin in 2008 singing “Redneck Woman” with country star Gretchen Wilson in 2008. Next thing you know Mitt Romney will sing about his trailer park upbringing.

This would seem to argue against the point of my “Untamable Melodies” piece. On the surface, it looks like one musical genre has been both domesticated and instrumental in the conservative domestication of its audience. A deeper look tells a different story. Country music, too, is untamable and can still be transformative and transcendent.

First, consider historian Steven Mithen’s points in his terrific book, The Singing Neanderthals. Music evolved from human proto-languages or what Mithen calls “hmmmm” utterances. They are marked by different tones, rhythms, animal sound mimicry etc. When language evolved further, though, it took over human-to-human information exchange. The “hmmmm” habit continued on in song, dance and ritual. It escaped language altogether. Its meaning was no longer even linguistically describable. Nineteenth Century composer Robert Schumann said that the only way to explain what music means is to play it again.

Perhaps because of its natural ineffability, it was used to communicate with the transcendent or the supernatural. Gods, for instance. Music has been escaping the confines of language and the mundane ever since. It is, as noted earlier, always lighting out for the territories with Huck Finn.

It’s significant that that the song that began the contemporary conservative/country music alliance was Merle Haggard’s 1968 hit, “Okie from Muskogee.” Haggard has said repeatedly he meant it as a parody. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee” was a line said in jest as Haggard’s tour bus passed by the Oklahoma town. The song was captured by conservatives, it didn’t create them.

The same is true of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” He wrote it to mock the rednecks that beat him up outside of a New Mexico bar. An already existing conservative audience took up the song as their own anthem, as they had done with “Okie from Muskogee.”

There is, of course, a difference between pure musical expression and music with lyrics. Music may have escaped language, but what do we make of language that rides the musical magic bus?

We think of 1960s protest music as helping persuade a sleeping public about the horrors of war, segregation and economic exploitation. I think it’s the case, though, that a growing progressive culture used the protest songs not to persuade but to promote emotional, in-group solidarity. The songs’ polemical content was almost incidental. Dylan and others left the genre behind, I believe, because the need for polemics constrained their freedom and creativity.

My point is that music has always outrun efforts to domesticate it or use it for limited ends. It was born out of the oh-so-human desire to understand, escape or transcend earthbound limits, and its nature remains. Just as Henry Ford accidentally helped drive the popularity of Woody Guthrie or John Coltrane, the conservative colonization of mainstream country accidentally created a big market for the outlaw music of Waylon Jennings and Billie Joe Shaver.

Most importantly, we humans necessarily share music’s escape artistry. Contrary to nihilistic deconstructionists and other pessimists who talk about an escape-proof prison house of language or the impossibility of freedom, music lights an always-unrolling road to glory.

In July of 1972, at the height of Nixon’s popularity, Johnny Cash visited the White House. He refused Nixon’s request that he play “Okie from Muskogee” or Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac.” Instead, Cash sang the anti-war “What is Truth” and the poignant elegy, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” a song about the Pima Indian WWII hero who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima but who died a lonely alcoholic, tossed aside and forgotten by the nation he had served.

Cash’s White House defiance raised a flag of its own, and when we salute it we speak of the love and anarchy that remains at the heart of the human endeavor.

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Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

Tucking the fiddle just so under his narrow chin, he bows each string once, and then, pinching his eyes at the difficulty of playing in E-flat, he begins to play one of his favorites, the 19th Century hit “Home, Sweet Home.” He whispers John Howard Payne’s lyrics as he plays.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

Henry Ford’s industrial brainstorm – a moving conveyor that brought parts for assembly to stationary workers – was matched only by his insight that mass production was worthless without mass consumption. So, he helped invent American consumers. They, like his assembly line workers, would have the goods brought to them for assembly into an all-American consumer lifestyle. In this there would be harmony.

Henry worried, though, that all this innovation would lead people to lose sight of the simple virtues of an earlier agrarian era. So, he conjured up some of those antique trappings – old time fiddling and folk dancing, in particular – and created popular demand for 19th Century folkways. Auto dealerships sponsored dances and fiddle contests that garnered enormous nationwide publicity. American musicologists like John Lomax certainly deserve more credit for the musical substance of the folk revival(s). Henry gets credit for his publicity campaign.

From his music room, Henry could look across a great meadow named “The Path of the Setting Sun” because the summer solstice sun set between a carefully landscaped notch among the trees. It was Ford’s own Woodhenge. Fiddle in hand, he knew he wasn’t making music so much as conducting a movement. Like Merlin atop Glastonbury Tor, he hoped to cast a spell across the land, using music to shape the character of his people in an image of his liking.

But a funny thing happened. Music may be the best measure of the human spirit’s fundamental irascibility and love of freedom. Like Huck Finn, music is always lighting out for the territories. It is neither domesticated nor domesticating. Music is liberating.

Ford played a vital role in the growing popularity of old-timey music. He hoped it would instill a mild docility and respect for mythic village propriety and authority. It backfired. Ford was less like a Merlin and more like Mickey Mouse’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” From Ford’s perspective, the musical magic and the future got out of hand.

Through complicated cultural traditions, routes and inventions (radio, inexpensive phonographs, Joe Hill’s IWW labor songs; W.C. Handy, 19th Century abolitionist Hutchinson Family singers, the Lomax family, etc.) the fad he created helped make possible the widespread popularity of the Blues, of Woody Guthrie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and Rock & Roll.

Ford’s costly folkways initiatives were not sufficient for such musical revolutions, of course. But they may well have been necessary. There were many other influences upon the culture, but one wide road to musical innovation and rebellion led from Ford’s Fair Lane Mansion on Michigan’s River Rouge to the open fields of the Newport folk and jazz festivals.

Here’s another example of music’s revolutionary potential. Stalinist policies outlawed Baltic folk music and mandated mass singing to help pacify and discipline the people. As Andrew Cronshaw points out, the habit of mass singing led to 1988’s Estonian Song rally, an electrifying gathering in Tallinn of 300,000 full-throated, independence-seeking citizens credited with helping topple the authoritarian regime. Like so many Joshuas at Jericho, they sang down the Iron Curtain.

Music’s escape artistry is the creation of the human spirit. We may find ourselves unfree, confined, manipulated and impoverished by a contemporary world that seems to grow closer to an Orwellian or Huxleyan dystopia every day. But if the music we make is unchainable, then so are we. Or so can we be. From the tens of thousand of Youtube amateur musicians to church choirs to garage bands to hip hop to progressive Americana, to campfire singing and children’s piano recitals, humans seem always to be levitating on a musical spell of their own making.

Speaking at 1964’s Berlin Jazz Festival, Martin Luther King said:

Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties — and, if you think for a moment, you realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

I am not arguing that music is always inhabited by entirely progressive ideals. Overt right-wing political strategies (George Wallace, Richard Nixon etc.) to colonize mainstream country music and use it to conservative ends have paid the Right obvious dividends. More on that next installment.

Meanwhile, I return to Henry Ford, alone in his aerie, trying to fiddle the world into conformity with his paternalistic vision. Once set free, the melodies made it clear the land he surveyed wasn’t his it all. This land is ours.

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Clearly unthreatened and acting with a sociopathic coldness, Pike had obviously dehumanized his targets. I just don’t think it’s possible to act in that fashion against other human beings if you regard them as sharing your humanity.

But I also think a concept of authority is growing in America which wants to justify any action by authority against anyone perceived as defying its power.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote:

I can’t see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We’d think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That’s what I think here.

These twin evils – individual loss of empathy and social retreat to authoritarian absolutism– feed one another. Sociopaths seem “normal” in the midst of an anti-human milieu that condones dehumanization and violence.

Pike’s pique and subsequent action has, thankfully, been widely condemned. That is all to the good, but the rash of brutal and excessively violent treatment of peaceful OWS protestors is another reminder of the need for vigilance and humane leadership.

Pike might have been deterred in a culture less forgiving of unnecessary violence. There is plenty of evidence of a rising authoritarian absolutism. We see it in the more extreme fundamentalist churches and in the lazy and dangerous embrace of private armies and security firms. We see it in all forms of “eliminationists” who see their opponents not as fellow humans to be persuaded but as enemies that should be cleansed from the nation.

It must annoy the hell out of your average college policeman that students usually easily intimidated over parking violations and library fines are refusing his or her authority. That is, in the authoritarian mind, not the way the world is supposed to work.

That the authorities across America are threatened by a few nylon camping tents is, well, damning. A culture so morally confused it can’t deal humanely with what are at most unusual inconveniences for bystanders is a culture on the edge.

Some remain silent about the violence against peaceful citizens because they share the mentality of the abusers. Others have tactical reasons: messy street scenes can hurt the public image of protestors even when the moral motivations of the demonstrators are shared by a good majority. So, send in the police to mix it up and it’s a threefer. You clear the streets, reassert authoritarian absolutism, and turn public opinion against your political opponents.

It’s time for President Obama and other national political leaders to speak out forcibly against police brutality. And the rest of us should join them in denouncing these decidedly un-American actions.

In the essay quoted above, Fallows also asks another very good question.

And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?

These new cop costumes are just another sign that we are slipping ever more dangerously toward a police-state mentality that is okay with excessive force in the name of authority. It will be argued that the sci-fi riot gear is needed to protect the “peacekeepers.” Really?

Needless to say, the police have dangerous jobs and they deserve all the protection we can provide for them. But isn’t it a bit odd that they are better outfitted than the men and women of our military were when first sent to Iraq back in 2003?

In any case, I’m not arguing against the protection of men and women who secure our safety and security. I am saying that such militarized peacock displays have no real place in a democracy and are intended, in part, to signal to the rest of us to stay quiet and do what we’re told.

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Anis Mojgani performs Shake the Dust at HEAVY AND LIGHT

Sometimes beauty hides in the magic of a URL. The nearly indecipherable strings of letters and numbers that only make sense when fed into a machine. But the code and the sound and the light the machine spits back is pure beauty. Pure magic. Pure love.

And sometimes this gift is delivered with the simple chime of the arrival of a new text message. Cutting through haze and blur of just another day. Landing like a burning ember, glowing red hot, right in the crotch of our day causing us to jump and slap wildly, dancing, flailing.  Trying in vain to maintain the shroud of an ordinary day.

The spark sets us alight. And for a few minutes, as the flames consume us, feeding off the tinder we pull over ourselves to keep out the cold, we can see in the light a different world. A place flickering with hope. Shining with love. Radiant with life.

Shake the Dust came to me today. Sent unheralded, unannounced. A flaming cannonball shot over my wall. And my kingdom is ablaze.

May the fire spread to your heart. The amazing and incomparable Anis Mojgani.

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Back to the album. I believe that had I listened to the album at the time of the first interview, talking about the living room flavor would have made a ton of sense. While it is, as promised, intimate and not at all overproduced, enough hard work and I assume, massively creative energy has influenced what this album has ultimately become.  What I hear when I listen closely, is a sophisticated layering effect that I usually find in great bluegrass.

Don’t get me wrong, the album sounds nothing like bluegrass.

But I draw the analogy because like great bluegrass, skilled musicians take us on a ride full of pleasant surprises, full of complex and unexpected arrangements.  However, unlike Bluegrass, the overall effect of this ride is subtle.  Noticeable, yet subtle.  And actually, I didn’t notice it at first.  Initially, I was swept up by the vocals and the lyrics as you might be–you’ll want to know more about what she is saying; you’ll sit still and imagine the situation that provoked those words to come together the way they did.  See what I mean in the track titled Gold and Silver:

Love could never live here
In a house that is so cold
The windows bolted down for good
The window panes are dull
The floor it creaks with every step
And echoes through the air
‘Til it’s swallowed up by silence
Through the cracks and down the stairs

-Alone in This Together, Star Anna & The Laughing Dogs

And have a listen to Star’s vocals, which are frankly just becoming indescribable for me.  Flipping through a thesaurus for hours wouldn’t give me the right words.  The effect of her vocals on her fans (if I may say so) is more of a gestalt experience—the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Back to the subtlety.   Now that you hear how down right awesome the title track is and recognize that  you are also, in fact, hearing is Mike McCready of Pearl Jam on guitar, the word subtle might be a confusing description.  Here’s what I mean:  you can sit on a plane and listen to this album four times in a row (yes, I did this) and sometimes you really notice how the guitar (Justin Davis) goes left while the keyboards (Ty Bailie) go right and something interesting is happening with the drums (Travis Yost), or you connect to the lyrics—your mind winding down a road you took once and the nostalgia it still evokes in you.   Still another time, you listen to the album while you read and it just works without you noticing much at all.  As Peter Griffin might say, it doesn’t insist upon itself.  But it is there for the taking.  I never have exactly the same experience when I listen to Alone in This Together.  I think that speaks to the depth of the album.  Star and the dogs are never self-conscious or affected personally or musically.  As I mentioned before, they are deep, genuine and just all around great people to meet.  And maybe that is what Justin Davis (guitar) meant when he described the album as having that living room sound.  Could be it…provided that your living room has Star’s unflinching and smoky vocals, a talented band that loves doing what they do together and guitar accompaniment by Mike McCready of Pearl Jam.  So yeah—I definitely need a living room upgrade.

Listening to Alone in This Together, or any recording of the band, for that matter,  leaves me with an intense craving to see them live.  The album is great.  Instantly a favorite.  I have two.  No shit.   I bought one, got one as a gift and I’m keeping them both. However, listening to this album just allows me to get a fix in between the few shows I can make in Seattle.  Much to their credit as musicians—this is a band that is best live.  Which brings me to their east coast tour.  If they are going to be anywhere near you—buy tickets.  Go see them.  Show the hell up.  Anyone who has seen them will back me on this.  You can not miss them if you are lucky enough to be anywhere within a 3 hour radius of them.  Even if they are planning to play children’s instruments (probably not).  Do it.

Here’s a little taste of them live with Mike McCready at PJ20.

Here are their tour dates.  Get out your calendar.

10/14/11 Great Falls MT- Machinery Row
10/15/11 Bozeman, MT – The Filling Station
10/16/11 Spearfish, SD – Back Porch
10/17/11 Sioux City, IA – Chesterfield Live
10/18/11 Des Moines, IA – Mars Cafe
10/19/11 TBA
10/20/11 Chicago, Il – The Hideout
10/21/11 Milwaukee, WI – Shank Hall
10/22/11 TBA
10/23/11 Cleveland, OH – Brother’s Lounge
10/24/11 Buffalo, NY – Mohawk Place
10/25/11 Albany, NY – Valentine’s
10/26/11 Allston, MA – O’Brien’s Pub
10/27/11 Brooklyn, NY – Southpaw
10/28/11 New York, NY – Piano’s
10/29/11 Hoboken, NJ – Maxwells
10/30/11 Philadelphia, PA – The Fire
10/31/11 Asbury Park NJ- The Saint
11/01/11 Washington DC – The Black Cat
11/02/11 Chapell Hill, NC – The Cave Tavern
11/03/11 Atlanta, GA – Smith’s Olde Bar
11/04/11 – TBA
11/05/11 Kansas City, MO – Czar Bar
11/06/11 Lincoln, NE – The Zoo Bar
11/07/11 TBA
11/08/11 TBA
11/09/11 Boise, ID – The Reef

Purchase their album and visit their site www.staranna.com.

Check out my work at www.keeshadavis.com and www.simfotico.com.  I am a professional photographer and do freelance web design while I juggle a full schedule at the University of Washington as a Ph.D student in Education.  Photos of Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs copyright Keesha Davis, Simfotico, LLC.

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