Straight.com Case strips it down: an interview with Ms. Case on her career and recent accolades. It’s interesting that she notes that Blacklisted is the record she picks as her first mature piece – while I personally adore everything she’s done, the songs on Furnace Room Lullaby are the ones I respond to most strongly.

Walking around in Ballard tonight, we came across the fiddler of The Tallboys. On arriving home I’m pleased to hear their own version of Henry Lee.

A night ago or so I was flipping stations on the radio when I heard the unmistakable howl of Dave Alvin and the Blasters. I haven’t really written about it here, but Alvin is one of my favorite songwriters and I have an especially strong appreciation of his work with the Blasters, his earliest stuff.

Night wolves moan

the winter hills are black

I’m all alone

sitting in the back

of a long white Cadillac

Somehow, although the song has apparently been covered by the likes of Dwight Yoakam, I had managed to never hear the Blasters side “Long White Cadillac.” When I stopped on the station, I was halted simply by the happy feel of hearing a beloved artist. Shortly, as happens often enough with Alvin’s work, I was paying very careful, wondering attention. The driving feel of the song is in direct contradiction to the lyrics, which focus on solitude, failure, and death, and combine an existential dread with the redemptive imagery of the funeral train that provides a winking subject for many great American pop songs.

Headlights shine

highway fades to black

I’ll take my time

in a long white Cadillac

in a long white Cadillac

As I digested this complex work of art, the unmistakable thought crossed my mind: “This song is about the death of Hank Williams.”

One time I had all that I wanted

But it just skipped through my hands

One time I sang away the sorrow

One time I took it like a man

At the time, our internet access was down, and thus I was unable to look into my suspicion. Imagine my satisfaction on googling the song and coming across the link above, on Alvin’s website. The last line on the page containing the lyrics?

-Dedicated to Hank Williams

Fremont art walk, last Saturday. Brad made me stand in the round opening and play guitar, and I was just getting started when our wives all walked in. It was a kind of deer in the headlights moment.

I tried to post this last weekend, but something was goofy on the new phone and it didn’t take.

After much fussing, I have our turntable fully operable. It’s amazing what the crackle of vinyl adds and subtracts from the listening experience. I swear that it was bar for the course to get better dynamic range off the grooves than that I hear today, but maybe thathas to do with a few years of gigging in front of amps. Who knows. Hearing the crackle is delicious and organic, each side my own and known by skips at learned places in the song.

As you may have gathered, this is the stack o’ seventies speakers that arrived from that estate sale on Saturday. They had more speakers and some LPs too but I felt uncomfortable pawing though the deceased’s stuff.

There was a bocce set that I shoulda snagged too, though. Oh well.

This is also the first test of the Nokia 6620 for moblogging. There’s apparently no way to apply rotation to images stored on the camera, so when this post first appeared, the image was sideways. The image resolution is pretty low, too. Wonder if that’s configurable.

One of the things that made it into my car at that estate sale was a vintage Sony tape deck with analog VU meters. Happily, it works just fine. I still have many many tapes from twenty years ago, often of LPs I had checked out of the library. It will be fun to pick through them and hear some stuff i haven’t bent ear to in about fifteen years, I think. First up: Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs.