Folk – Page 2 – 7th Level Music

Review: Pastor Champion – I Just Want to Be a Good Man

Pastor Champion, who left us for the Kingdom of Heaven just as his music was being discovered, was a man of many hats: Pastor, former gang member, touring guitarist, brother, and probably many others we’ll never learn about unless secret diaries or obscure notes are found.

We do know that he preached and played for the 37th Street Baptist Church in Oakland, California. We also know that his one and only album, I Just Want to Be a Good Man, was recorded with musicians who’d never played with him before then, and it was recorded in just two nights at his church. We also know that it’s a stunning record of gospel, blues, and soul that, if there’s any justice in this valley of tears, will win a Grammy for Best Gospel Album.

Champion pleads with people to come back to the church and Christ on “I Know That You’ve Been Wounded (Church Hurt)” – a song for those who have been disappointed, hurt (physically, mentally, and / or spiritually), or crushed by the church, religion, and families and friends practicing their faith in hurtful ways. “Keep on, God will make it work,” Champion sings over simple chords that almost sound like he’s playing a ukulele.

“He’ll Make a Way (Trust in the Lord)” further emphasizes the theme of relying on faith, and the power of Champion’s faith is evident from the first notes he sings in it. The nearly seven-minute “Talk to God” has Champion grooving with these church musicians he’s barely met, and all of them slide right into his groove with the ease that comes so naturally to accomplished gospel musicians.

“Only what you do for Christ will last,” Champion sings on “In the name of Jesus (Everytime)” – a reminder to put the Creator in the lead and trust His guidance. Hearing Champion teach his impromptu band how to play “To Be Used, by You (I Just Want to Be a Good Man)” is fun to hear, and the rest of the track is lovely (and a warm-up for the closing track).

“Who Do Men Say I Am?” has Champion singing a conversation between Christ and His disciples (from the sixteenth chapter of Matthew). “Storm of Life (Stand by Me)” has Champion crying out to God about troubles that plague him at work, at home, at church, and practically everywhere else – including his worry that he might not be ready for death. “In the Service of the Lord” has some of Champion’s most passionate vocals, and that’s saying something when you consider how much he professes his face throughout the record.

The album closes with the title track, expanding on the earlier version of it with, somehow, even more soul and longing. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, Jesus, what do you want me to do?” Champion sings.

He’s doing things we can’t even fathom now, but at least we have this record as a light in gloomy times.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Sam at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Seth Walker drops the truth with his new single “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be.”

Seth Walker has announced his eleventh album, I Hope I Know, will be released May 20 on Royal Potato Family. It’s the North Carolina-based singer/songwriter’s third studio collaboration with producer Jano Rix. Each song on the ten track collection shines with what many have come to love about Walker and his soulful Americana: diverse influences, contemplative lyrics, that signature blue tone on the guitar, and movement both geographic and spiritual. The album’s first single, “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be” is out today (listen/share). Walker will support the album with a U.S. tour beginning in May.

I Hope I Know might best be described as Walker’s ’round-midnight album. Written in the midst of a breakup, relocating from his home in Nashville, TN to Asheville, NC, and the enduring mental struggles of the pandemic, it’s a beautiful reckoning with heartbreak, moving across states and coming to terms with the uncertainty of the future. Its tempos are slower and tonality darker than on previous work. In Walker’s words, he had to just “sit with it.” The music’s creation embodied trying and failing without forcing anything: not time, not the songwriting or its grooves, not a sense of control, not even his own healing. He credits the practice of “search and surrender,” a quest for new meaning in things he may never fully understand.

“This last year and a half has personally cracked me open. In many ways, for the first time, I’m observing myself and how I relate to the music, how I sit with the feeling, the emotion, my shadow and light,” explains Walker. “I have always been in this place of action, and finally, when all this happened, I found myself in a place of relinquishing—an active state of inaction.”

The first sessions for I Hope I Know began in 2019, but it wouldn’t be until the second half of 2020 when Walker would truly dive into the writing and recording process. Oliver Wood—Jano Rix’s bandmate in The Wood Brothers—cowrote three of the songs, as did Walker’s longtime songwriting partner Gary Nicholson, while Jarrod Dickenson also contributed to one song. Among the album’s highlights are “Why Do I Cry Anymore,” which asks unanswerable questions about recovering from heartbreak, ultimately coming to the conclusion that love is still worth it. “Remember Me” haunts with old jazz and blues, a falsetto vocal, arco acoustic bass and dusty drums. The title track came from the “Ho’oponopono Prayer,” a Hawaiian poem about forgiveness and reconciliation that his mother sent him, which translates as “I am sorry. Forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” Special guest Allison Russell adds vocal harmonies.

Three cover songs featured on the recording offer something familiar to hold onto—a tinge of nostalgia, minus the impulse to cling to the past. The Bobby Charles‘ song “Tennessee Blues” perfectly speaks to Walker moving from Nashville into the mountains of Asheville as he tried to “figure out what just happened, post break up.” Van Morrison‘s “Warm Love” is the perfect respite and breather. Bob Dylan‘s “Buckets of Rain” came spontaneously like a dream; Seth woke up one morning with the song in his head and quickly captured this rendition.

The follow up to Walker’s 2019 album, Are You Open?—which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard Blues Album Chart—I Hope I Know is a distinct statement from the previous ten recordings in Walker’s discography. In its totality, the songs create a deep, but relatable journey, offering a beacon of light and ultimately safe haven, centered around the most precious of all gifts—Hope.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Kevin at Royal Potato Family.]

Joe Rainey announces debut album, due May 20th, with powerful first single – “no chants.”

Pow Wow singer Joe Rainey announces his debut album, Niineta, out May 20th on 37d03d (the label founded by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and shares the first single/video, “no chants.” On Niineta, Rainey demonstrates his command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing that’s been heard across the waters of what is now called Minnesota for centuries, and accompanied by cinematic, bass-heavy production from Minneapolis producer Andrew Broder. Depending on the song or the pattern, his voice can celebrate or console, welcome or intimidate, wake you up with a start or lull your babies to sleep. Each note conveys a clear message, no matter the inflection: We’re still here. We were here before you were, and we never left.

Rainey grew up a Red Lake Ojibwe in Minneapolis, a city with one of the largest and proudest Native American populations in the country. The Red Lake Reservation sits five hours to the North, a sovereign state unto itself, but Rainey grew up down in what Northerners call “The Cities,” in his mom’s house on historic Milwaukee Avenue on Minneapolis’ South Side. He was raised less than a mile away from Franklin Avenue, the post-Reorganization Act urban nexus of local Native American life, a community centered in the Little Earth housing projects and the Minneapolis American Indian Center. The neighborhood still serves as a home for both the housed and the un-housed, and the don’t-even-wanna-be-housed Native. It is the birthplace of the American Indian Movement (AIM), the pioneering grassroots civil rights organization founded to combat the colonizing forces of police brutality. Rainey came of age in the heart of this community, but always felt like he was living in a liminal space—not that he was uncomfortable with that. “Growing up, knowing that you weren’t from the Rez, but you were repping them, was kind of weird,” he says. “But I liked that.”

Rainey became interested in Pow Wow singing as a child—at the age of five, he started recording Pow Wow singing groups with his GE tape recorder, and his mom enrolled him in a dancing and singing practice with the Little Earth Juniors soon thereafter. As a pre-teen he began hanging out around The Boyz (a legendary Minneapolis drum group) at a house some of them stayed at in the Little Earth projects. By the time he was a teenager he had found enough courage to help start The Boyz Juniors, his first drum group, before going on to sing with Big Cedar, Wolf Spirit, Raining Thunder, Iron Boy, and eventually, Midnite Express, a new drum group featuring some of The Boyz themselves. Rainey was always just as much of a fan as he was a participant—when he wasn’t at his own drum, he was recording other drums, then studying the tapes when he got home, admiring and cataloging the different singing styles, whether it was Northern Cree, Cozad or Eyabay.

On Niineta, Rainey finds himself in between cultures again. This time collaborating with Andrew Broder, who brought his multi-instrumentalist, turntablist sensibility to the project. The two of them first met backstage at Justin Vernon’s hometown Eaux Claires music festival before encountering each other more frequently through Vernon and Aaron and Bryce Dessner’s 37d03d collective—both contributing to the last Bon Iver album before broaching the possibility of working together sometime in the future. “At first I didn’t know what I could add to Joe’s incredible recordings,” Broder says. “But eventually I came to understand everything is rooted in the drum—even the songs on our record that have no drum, they’re still rooted in the drum.” So each song started with Broder’s beats, the two of them experimenting with various sounds and tempos, before bringing in other 37d03d collaborators to orchestrate and recontextualize the ancient Pow Wow sound in strange, new in-between places. The album pulls from Rainey’s vast sample folder of Pow Wow recordings, layering and remixing slices of his life of singing in venues across the upper Midwest and Canada.

Rainey got his title, Niineta, from his drum brother Michael Migizi Sullivan, who suggested a short version of the Ojibwe term meaning, “just me.” But he’s using the term only in the sense that he’s taking sole responsibility for its content. Rainey is protective of Pow Wow culture—which was outlawed by the United States government for a generation, defiantly maintained in secret by Native elders he deeply respects—while trying to figure out exactly where he fits into it and how he can fuck with it on his own terms. He uses the analogy of working the hotel room door at a Pow Wow. “You can think of this like, hey man, if all these people are going to be fucking knocking and I’m the one answering the door, you’re going to realize that I’m not the only one in this motherfucker. There’s tons of people in here. So if I’m answering that door, I want to be like, hey, yeah, come on in. There’s fucking tons of us in here. It ain’t just me.”
Watch/Stream “no chants”

Pre-order Niineta

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Patrick at Pitch Perfect PR.]

Review: Jake Xerxes Fussell – Good and Green Again

My taste in folk music, not unlike doom metal, is hit or miss. There has to be a certain combination of elements for me to enjoy an album in either genre. I’m not sure if I could tell you what all those elements are, but I can tell you that one of the most crucial is that the artist or band, while being good at their craft, doesn’t try too hard. They don’t force anything.

Jake Xerxes Fussell is such an artist. His guitar playing and vocals are simple, haunting, and the work of an expert craftsman – and none of it is forced. None of it is for show. It simply is, and his new album Good and Green Again continues his string of top-notch folk music that instantly transports you to different times and places that resonate with lessons needed in modern time.

“Love Farewell” is the sound of the sun rising or setting, depending on your mood when you hear it. It can be a song of moving forward after the loss of love or realizing a love is ending. “Carriebelle” adds solemn horns to a solemn song about the perils of booze and heartbreak. The horns continue their lonely cries on “Breast of Glass,” in which Fussell sings about wishing how he could keep a memory inside him forever – all the while knowing his hold on it would be fragile.

“Frolic,” “What Did the Hen Duck Say to the Drake?”, and “In Florida” are three lovely instrumentals on the album, something I hadn’t heard from Fussell before this record, and they’re all great additions. Fussell is great at writing, playing, and singing songs about the plight of the working class (or finding obscure songs about the subject and reinterpreting them in a new way), and “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down” is one such track. He sings about workers watching their jobs being reduced to ashes, knowing their way of life and means of earning bread are gone.

“The Golden Willow Tree” is a nine-minute-long tale of a scuttled ship, betrayal, and the loss of wealth and glory. The album ends with “Washington,” Fussell’s tribute / satirical salute to the first President of the U.S. and the way we, as Americans, tend to deify the Founding Fathers.

It’s another lovely record from Fussell with strength in its subtlety.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Sam at Pitch Perfect PR.]