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* ND #75 Revisited, Part 2

Picking up where the last entry left off, paging through our final issue of No Depression from the feature stories onward:

* It was important to Grant and me, for obvious reasons, to do some of the more substantive writing in the final issue. It was my good fortune that the Weepies, who I'd been wanting to write about since falling fully for their 2006 disc Say I Am You, were releasing their new disc Hideaway during the window of our last issue. Grant's turn follows with his piece on Hayes Carll; and Grant also had the honors of doing our "Artist of the Decade" cover story (partly because I'd writted written the cover story of ND #74, and also the cover story for our LAST "Artist of the Decade," Alejandro Escovedo, back in 1998).

* Speaking of Grant's cover story on Buddy Miller, I've had an inordinate number of folks comment to me about Thomas Petillo's photos accompanying the piece. My sense was that it was not only great photos but also great art-direction by Grant, in the way he used the shots to string through the piece as a sort of visual connective tissue. And something about that concluding shot, with Buddy setting down the guitar and away, seemed to tell our own story as well.

* A couple notes on headlines in the 4-page features: I saddled Sera Cahoone with the chorus lyric of Bobby Sherman's "Seattle" (from the old TV show Here Come The Brides), hoping perhaps it had some resonance to her home turf, but also as an acknowledgment of ND's roots (when we started the magazine, all of us lived in Seattle).... The Blue Mountain headline (Muscle memory") was a nod to both Laurie Stirratt, who'd used the term in a quote from the story about how natural it was to start playing the old Blue Mountain songs again, and to bassist Cindy Toth of the Reivers, who'd mentioned something similar about her band's reunion just prior to the shows I reviewed in the Miked section.... The Weepies headline is, as many of you probably recognized, the title of one of Iris DeMent's finest songs (covered by Merle Haggard, even).... As for the Hayes Carll headline, which reads, duh, "Hayes Carll," forgive us for falling down on the job there. That piece was at one point slated to be the two-page opener for the Town & Country section, where we use the artists' name as the headline; when it ended up getting expanded to a four-page feature, we forgot to come up with a "real" headline and somehow never caught it in the proofing process. Ah well, I guess "Hayes Carll" can speak for itself (er, himself).

* Roy Kasten's lead to the Billy Bragg piece was maybe my favorite of all the pieces Kasten has written for us over the years. It nicely tied in some of the magazine's prehistory to the piece, while also subtly making note of current political realities (i.e., we're STILL enmeshed in Iraq). All in all a very nice profile of an artist who has been somewhat of a beacon for me ever since i first heard Talking With The Taxman About Poetry back in 1986.

* Jason Crosby's illustration opening the Robert Forster piece was a beautiful work of art, and seemed perfectly fitting to the subject. By stroke of good fortune I struck upon a headline to match by tapping the title of an old song that the Carter Family used to sing (among many others). We were also indebted to publicist Robert Vickers (a former Go-Betweens member) and photographer Stephanie Chernikowski for helping us dig up some nice historical shots of Forster's old band.

* Having John Marks write what I believe to be the definitive piece on the Old 97's was something of great personal reward to me. I'd stumbled upon Marks just a few months earlier, sort of by chance via a blog-entry he'd written about our #73 Shelby Lynne cover story, and ended up becoming a big fan of his recent documentary film Purple State Of Mind. That he gladly found the time to write for our last issue was a nice reminder of why this magazine has been so much fun over the years: As much as anything, it's about working with really talented writers.

* Same would be true for Britt Robson's piece on Pinetop Perkins, in fact. We'd also discovered Britt only recently (thanks to a referral from Ellen Stanley of Red House Records) but really wanted to get him on a longer feature while we still had the chance, and it surely paid off with the Pinetop piece. Didn't hurt that Todd V. Wolfson's photos were a work of art as well.

* The lead items in the two record-review sections -- Whiskeytown in Not Fade Away, Alejandro Escovedo in waxed -- couldn't possibly have been more fitting closers. Full disclosure mandates mentioning that I wrote the liner notes for the reissue of Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac; but seeing as how they were the lead Town & Country piece of our first issue, and appeared on the cover of ND #10 when Strangers Almanac was released, there wasn't much doubt that it was the obvious lead review for the reissue section. All the more apropos that we got David Menconi, who did that T&C piece in ND #1, to write it. And Bill Friskics-Warren's take on Escovedo's new Real Animal album nicely referred to our long history with Escovedo, helping to bring our "Artist of the Decade" discussions full-circle.

A special "citation of merit," if you will, for Jesse Fox Mayshark's sidebar-review of the Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet disc. Mayshark's always been one of our finest and smartest writers, but I thought he really went above and beyond here, with such a perfect take on the record that I'm confident there will be none better to appear.... And finally, it was a nice coincidence that the very last record review to run in ND was of a Heybale disc titled: The Last Country album.

* Probably not much needs to be said about the last-page Screen Door piece that I didn't already say on the page. Suffice to say that it seemed to almost write itself. The bit at the end about the wire-mesh screen that we used for the logo seems trivial, in a sense....but to me, it felt, in a strange way, like the heart of everything we've been about.

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on May 16, 2008 12:27 PM | Permalink