Going for adds this week on Top40 radio is Cage the Elephant, with “No Rest For The Wicked”. This hard-touring band from Kentucky evokes the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club with this bass-heavy (seriously, listen with good speakers) single.
In the “Blast from the Past” category, 60s Italian/country crooner Al Martino has released “Trying to Find My Way” to AC Radio. You can listen to a (very short) preview at CDBaby, and it’s supposed to be on iTunes soon as well.
Finally, released to College radio this week is Booker T’s “Potato Hole”, off the album of the same name (order by 4/21 and get an autographed copy). Booker is backed by the Drive-By Truckers and Neil Young. I couldn’t find a preview anywhere, but Amazon had an interesting video.
David Ford strikes me as a man with better things to do.
Perhaps not at the moment I was talking to him. He was on the road in Idaho, en route to a show in Salt Lake City, when we battled our way through cell phone connectivity issues and spent a few moments discussing music and all the things that seem to come part and parcel with today’s music industry. But like I said, he’s got better things to do. Like, say, writing and performing music.
Ford’s been a working musician in Great Britain for more than a decade, and has even seen some measure of success as part of the band Easyworld. Since 2004, he’s been a solo artist, and has been steadily gaining fans in the United States, among them Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. He has toured with Ray LaMontagne, Suzanne Vega, Sara Bareilles (in April 2008) and Augustana (this month), and in June will be touring with Aimee Mann. (All of his summer tour dates are available in the OFTV events calendar.) His latest album, Songs For The Road, was released last year and is available for download on iTunes.
I first heard of Ford thanks to Kired over at Cursed Monkey Paw, and I was immediately struck by the honesty and sheer musicality of his songs. No pop songs, these, although they could easily do well in a better musical atmosphere than the current music industry. Therefore, I thought he’d be a perfect fit for our readership here — we’re all tired of the current music industry, yes?
Here is the utterly enjoyable and admittedly most “pop” song from Ford’s Songs For The Road, “Decimate”. As Ford says, “It’s a positive song about inviting someone to lay all their problems on you, to take their hardships and lighten their load, wanting everything to be OK. It’s kind of like a love song.” The video, I think, is also the most “pop” of the videos I’ve seen.
More representative of both Ford’s music and his videos is “State of the Union”. The video was shot live, in one take, with one camera. “It’s a challenging thing to keep it interesting without relying on clever editing and cuts,” he says. “There’s a sense of realness as well, you’re actually watching a moment in time that happens as you see it.” Read the rest of this entry �
