Jonathan Byrd

So I started a songwriters series here in Springfield this past fall. It's called the Sangamon Songwriters Series. The idea was to bring top regional and national songwriters to Springfield. We did three shows, and honestly I have a lot to learn about putting on concerts. For the last of the three shows I took the advice of a friend of mine and looked into Jonathan Byrd. I listened to some of his stuff, liked it and brought him for the series.

Now that I've seen him I feel confident in saying he is obscenely good. Far and away one of the best songwriters/performers I've ever seen. He deftly mixes humor, sweetness, wisdom, sadness, poetry and great guitar playing with a sort of pulp sensibility. Idiomatically he touches country, folk, rock, gospel and bluegrass. He is the complete package. He does everything well and most things better than everybody else. These videos give you a taste but they don't begin to show what a great talent Jonathan Byrd really is.

I lost a lot of money putting on that concert, but it was worth every penny.

P.S.
You can download a free live show from Jonathan's Website! Just click music and then look for "Live at the Saxon Pub". If you like it you should buy The Law and The Lonesome it's phenomenal.

Ray Lamontagne

There are times when you hear something that makes you stop and turn your head. Ray Lamontagne is one of those people. He blends that smooth, cool, and soulful feel of Sam &Dave with the acoustic folk troubadour thing. He manages to pull it off by having great songwriting chops and a warm gravelly voice that has an incredible amount of feeling in it. Despite this visceral component of his music the former Lewiston Maine factory worker seems to be an incredible introvert. Definately I a guy I'd drink a beer with.

The Music Videos of Beck

Periodically I come across Beck and I think “Oh yeah I really love this guy’s stuff.” Idiomatically he straddles so many genres, anti-folk, electronica/dance, hip-hop, and several types of rock, and he does it with seeming ease. The songs have this strange coherence where the seemingly dispirit elements that make them up fit together in a way that is so perfect, in a way I never thought that they could be, like turntables and acoustic guitar, harmonic and programmed drums.

It wasn’t until last week that I saw the music video’s for many of his songs that I really like. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they too had the same internal coherence. They have that “je ne sais quoi” that the Spike Jones directed videos of Fat Lip, The Beastie Boys have. They have a visual playfulness (that is mirrored in the music), coherence, narrative and internal logic that seem incongruous given the fact that I couldn’t tell you what any of Beck’s songs are actually about. They often seem to play on some vaguely familiar style of art, film, or television, but do it in a way that seems original and fresh.

Here are a few, but the Universal Group You Tube page has a bunch more (they have embedding disabled).