Peter Case - Doctor Moan - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The debut album from Elmiene. With central pillars of grief, acceptance and love, encompassing both the personal and the universal, the album includes the raw recent single 'Cry Against the Wind' and honeyed meditation on self-isolation 'Reclusive'. Production comes from Sampha, Andrew Aged, Buddy Ross, NO ID, Ghostnote, Jeff 'Gitty' Gitelman and soul veteran Raphael Saadiq, with features from the latter alongside sultry new-gen vocal force Baby Rose.

Three time Grammy nominee, Peter Case (Nerves, Plimsouls) returns with The Midnight Broadcast. You're alone, at night, on a long journey in a car, far away from the nearest town, driving in the darkness. The radio is on but only receiving static. A radio station begins to tune in. A broadcast is coming in and out of focus, of a DJ who's announcing records, a rock n' roll DJ with a voice from Finnegans Wake. The music starts, but what is it? One song after another, all different, but all of a piece, like a transmission from the other end of world. Songs of cowboys, lovers, fighters, and shipwrecked sailors, hope, laughter and despair, ancient blues, gutbucket jazz, and singing machines, songs that sound like one microphone is listening in on a roomful of maniacs. Or on someone in the loneliest blue motel in the West. It's The Midnight Broadcast.

On the two CD set, Pete Remembers Woody, Pete recounts his vivid firsthand reminiscences, wide-ranging and frequently humorous, of Woody's adult life Guthrie's transmutation of his experiences and omnivorous readings into popular although often controversial songs, his tips on freight-hopping and saloon singing, encounters with musical contemporaries Leadbelly and others, and many of the life lessons Pete has subsequently used in his own career, still ongoing in this Centennial year of Guthrie's birth. Interspersed with Pete's recollections of Woody are versions of some of Guthrie's most famous songs performed by idealistic links in the topical music chain like Arlo Guthrie (dueting with Pete on one of the few Woody-Seeger co-writes, 66 Highway Blues), the Work 'o the Weavers (This Land is Your Land, So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh!), CD producer David Bernz, whose own three-part Woody's Ghost serves to bookend and provide an intermission between the two CDs, and Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, who added music to Woody's lyrics for Howdy Little Newly come. The Vanaver Caravan, the 40-year-old troupe of musicians and dancers, performs the Depression plaint Do Re Mi, Union Maid, Pastures of Plenty and Peace Pin Boogie, while members of Hope Machine tackle I Ain't Got No Home and I've Got to Know. Woody himself, with another of his running buddies, Cisco Houston, is heard on a 1940's recording of New York Town. Fink's banjo-playing on various traditional tunes helps tie together the masterful sequencing of spoken stories and related songs.