A Dozen Impactful Recordings

• September 14 VoxPop Concerts, Tulsa OK

• September 19 Lit on the Low Road, Depew-Oviatt-Bennett, Walnut Valley Festival

• September 27 Bluegrass Battles Hunger, Morris/Depew St. Joseph, MO

I’ve been thinking the past couple of days about music that really impacted me through the years, and I decided I’d try to make a list of really important pivotal recordings for anyone who might be interested in this kind of thing. I’ll put these roughly in chronological order of the moment I remember being affected by them. 12 recordings that made me me.

1. Sea of Life Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. I heard this on a bootleg cassette tape we had when I was a kid of a live set from a festival somewhere probably in the late 80’s, I don’t remember where it was unfortunately but you could hear Peter Rowan in the background on another stage at times. That really narrows it down, right? Anyway, it was the Quicksilver that later became IIIrd Tyme Out: Doyle Lawson, Russell Moore, Scott Vestal & Ray Deaton. Great band. This is a similar set that doesn’t contain the song in question. I can’t find this lineup doing that song, but a lot of the other material was the same.

2. Similarly, there was a cassette bootleg from a Winfield set around the same time (late 80’s) of Doc Watson with Jack Lawrence and T Michael Coleman. I wore both these tapes out as a kid. Blue Eyed Jane was one of my favorite tunes from that one, and one of the first songs I remember learning on the guitar.

3. Nuages Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grapelli. As a kid, I bought a CD of these two guys as a Christmas present for my brother. I knew nothing about jazz, but there were instruments I recognized on the cover, and I knew my brother had a taste for that other music, i.e. pretty stuff that wasn’t bluegrass. Lucky choice that is still some of my favorite music to this day. I don’t know if Jason liked it all that much, though…

4. Old Train Tony Rice Unit. I found a CD copy of Manzanita in our house when I was about 12. I guess Dad had had it a long time but it wasn’t really his thing, so it was buried in a stack of vinyl records we didn’t have a way to play back then. This album totally changed my idea of what music was capable of.

5. Dawgma David Grisman Quintet. I had a teacher in middle school that introduced me to David Grisman. I’d heard him on the Tony Rice record above by this point but hadn’t been exposed to any of his other music. Thanks Chris. There was Newgrass Revival on the other side of the cassette tape she made for me.

6. Wolf am I mewithoutYou. Here’s a totally different direction. This record, and the entire mewithoutYou catalog is, in my opinion, freaking great. I found these guys during my high school venture into (mostly Christian) hardcore and metal. I still love to listen to this band even though I’ve moved on from a lot of the rest of that era.

7. Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition Part II: Carl Sandburg... Sufjan Stevens. My friend Tia gave me a burned CD of some of Sufjan’s music in high school. The Illinois record was one of the first introductions I had to unusual meters and huge, ambitious compositional ideas. There’s so much good music on this record, it’s hard to pick a favorite song.

8. Prison Food Ben Folds. Another album that’s just full of great stuff. I had been aware of Ben Folds Five for a little while when this record came out. If I remember right, I got this one from my sister somehow, who was in college at the time and finding a whole bunch of good music, as you do when you’re in college. My opinion: whoever hired the steel player for this track was a genius. It’s a small part but it takes the song to a whole different place.

9. Opening Phillip Glass. This guy’s work has a big cult following, for good reason I think. He’s a master of taking a minimalist movement and bending it around different ways to create these musical mind-warps that are just so cool. If you’re not familiar with his work, I’d highly recommend checking out the film Koyaanisqatsi, which is completely made what it is by his musical score. I spent many hours working at a small theatre in my hometown through my 20’s and Phillip Glass was very often playing in that huge silent cavern of a room (when there wasn’t a show or a movie or a wedding going on)

10. Up on the Hill John Hartford. The era of Hartford’s career when he was doing this solo thing convinced me that it’s possible to work as a solo songwriter without being a straight up folk-singer-songwriter, guy on a stool with a guitar, which is a category not particularly interesting to me. One man on a stage with an instrument can do a whole lot. I have not incorporated the fancy footwork but it’s on my bucket list.

11. Cadmium Pinegrove. This live recording from Audiotree really hit me when I found it probably around 2017. I was playing in an electric trio at the time, and we all went nuts over this. I even wrote a song I called Not Cadmium because it was essentially a ripoff of the core elements of this song, though I didn’t realize it til I’d finished writing it. I was just listening to this stuff so much right then, it got really in my head.

12. The Angel of Doubt Punch Brothers. Who’s surprised that I’d list a Punch Brothers song here? No one. So here it is. All Ashore is one of my favorite albums of all time, it is an absolute masterpiece of bluegrass instrumentation that is in no way what I’ve historically thought of as Bluegrass.

Of course, there is a long list of other music I love, music that has influenced me in one way or another. These are just a selection of some of the most impactful, at least as I see it at this stage of life…share some of yours if you feel like it!