-
Georgette, Georgette 3:090:00/3:09
-
Meltdown 2:120:00/2:12
-
Nettle 3:500:00/3:50
-
I Don't 3:310:00/3:31
-
Cobirds Unite 3:250:00/3:25
-
0:00/2:45
-
0:00/3:45
-
Unnatural 4:140:00/4:14
-
Wounded Knee 4:020:00/4:02
-
0:00/4:04
-
With a Song 3:180:00/3:18
Cover art: Sarah Palmer
In the future, we will all be rich and beautiful
Various artists
Welcome to another installment of the Drums & Wires annual anthology. I'm going to try something a little different this time and invite you into my experience of culling this collection.
It goes something like this... working from a blank canvas, curating the Drums & Wires year-end mixtape always feels like a daunting task. Setting my sites on the first few songs, I reach out to the musicians for their input and blessing, the stories behind the recordings begin to emerge, the connections that link the artists are revealed and point the way toward other artist and song possibilities, and the peaks and valleys, and shapes and colors of the set begin to take a life of their own, the end result surprising and delighting.
This 2024 anthology is no different. It began with Claire Tucker and Jon Hyde, two Seattle artists with whom I've had the great pleasure of collaborating with and releasing their superb solo albums this year. For quite some time I've wanted to do something with LA songster John Andrew Fredrick's band The Black Watch, his immensely catchy "Georgette, Georgette" buzzing in my ears on auto-repeat. This year also opened a door to my connecting with Aaron Semer whose totally fun and poignant track "(Little Black Square...)" offered here feels newly relevant (listen and you'll know).
In addition to the other wonderful artists who contributed their songs old and new to this set - Rusty Willoughby, Ottoman Bigwigs, Loose Wing, 4 Hr Ramona and Richard Brisbois, whose "With a Song" is a preview of his upcoming new album - a conversation with Olie Eshleman, the multi-instrumentalist filling Bill Patton's seat at the pedal steel in Loose Wing, helped tie this collection together. Olie's instrumental tracks provided an album title (keyboar) that is a perfect fit with the image I knew I wanted to use for the cover, as well as Olie's telling of a story about bringing the past to the present vis-a-vis a musical encounter he had with Bill twenty years ago while recording the Corespondents "Carrying the Cat Like a Suitcase" that foreshadowed musical connections being made in the present.
With all this to ponder, I hope you enjoy listening to these artists’ songs, and if you do please consider exploring their other recordings. There's a lot to discover!
– Michael Wells
__________________