![]() Like last year’s event, “You Got Gold” will feature an array of surprise artists, celebrating not only Prine’s esteemed career, but also the beloved music community he built over the past 50 years. ![]() 9) and the historic Ryman Auditorium on Prine’s birthday (Oct. The Prine family presents “You Got Gold” with shows at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater (Oct. Not desolate, and not quite triumphant, this sounds like a substantial artist in the midst of struggle - and holding his own.“You Got Gold: Celebrating the Songs of John Prine” returns to Nashville venues in October, following the success of last year’s inaugural three-day run benefitting the late Americana icon’s Hello In There Foundation. Taylor isn’t alone here and he doesn’t sound beaten there’s a full band surrounding him, making his fragile melodies stronger, and bolstering his wry regrets in aching harmonies. “Mahogany Dread” is maybe the highlight, with its whiskery melancholy wrapped in Stax-y organ wail and framed by tambourine. ![]() The songs that work the best are introspective and bittersweet, yet bolstered by thick, varied arrangements into something more universal than a personal lament. Taylor doesn’t sound comfortable, though, at his most rollicking. “Southern Grammar” follows the same dark, rhythmic seam with greater fluidity, its blues guitar frolicking over a boot-knocking beat, Taylor’s voice echoed by the gospel response of Sauser-Monnig. Wreathed in echo, grounded in grinding bass and blues-bent notes, it has a primitive, insistent rhythm that feels more like ritual than drunken abandon. “I’m a Raven (Shake Children)” succeeds the best at Taylor’s rueful take on letting go. There is something cautious and guarded about it, and even at his most cares-to-the-wind, Taylor is already thinking about the head he’ll have come Sunday. “When Saturday comes, I’m gonna rock my soul,” Taylor intimates, but it is not quite Saturday yet. Still, you find out, as the song goes on, that Taylor isn’t drunk yet, just thinking about it. “Saturday’s Song” works the hardest at hedonism, with its thumping 4-4 kick-drum, its side-stepping bass-and-guitar shuffle it is almost as rowdy as the song name suggests. ![]() Not that Taylor and his crew are exactly boogie-ing. It feels like a performance, not an eavesdropped relevation. It is not as powerful, but more engaging. If Bad Debt gave you the shivers from seeing one man’s exposed soul up so close, Lateness soothes and reassures. His lonely picking blossoms into full-on rock textures with the help long-time collaborator Scott Hirsch and guests – William Tyler, Phil and Brad Cook from Megafaun and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man. On Lateness of Dancers, Taylor, whose voice is naturally full of charcoal shadows and unspoken regrets, lifts nonetheless into something approaching joy. It’s not the good-time record promised by titles like “Saturday’s Song” or “I’m a Raven”’s “Shake children, shake” refrain, but it’s closer than you would have imagined a year or so ago. This outing, the fifth in the Hiss Golden Messenger catalogue, is by contrast, a communal, celebratory affair, almost light-hearted in its porch-picking, soul-smouldering way. Taylor’s Bad Debt recording sessions, now turns up to introduce “Day Oh Day (Love So Free),” joining in to an album that is conspicuously less haunted and solitary than that album, less foreboding than Haw. The little girl who slept, as a baby, through M. Hiss Golden Messenger-Lateness of Dancers (Merge)
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