Review Under Two: Tennessee Jet's South Dakota

Tennessee Jet spent a lot quarantine consuming records. While he enjoyed many of those releases, none of them were capturing what he was feeling in this moment. So he set out to make such an album. The result is a stripped down performance meant to capture the moment- imperfect but powerful and poignant. TJ, a guitar, and sometimes his harmonica are the instruments that lay his characters bare. 

South Dakota is a record that examines the present through the lens of its rich characters. Among his greatest strengths as a songwriter perhaps the strongest is the richness of his 

characters. In just a few short minutes he gives us enough backstory to understand why we should care, opens the door to empathy and understanding, then leaves us wanting to know more about these people and their stories.Characters and the layers of their lives are a bright spot of any TJ record. On South Dakota they are ambassadors of self-reflection and examination. 

The album ends with a song called “The Good.”

“I will kill your hatred/Your conscience I’ll make clear/my love has no conditions/I will see this mission through/Till like me you see the good in you”

On its face the song is about a loved one, a reminder that while flawed they are beautiful and full of potential. The subject seems to be going through a struggle of some sort. It is a gorgeous reminder to look for the good in all of us. But if you listen to Tennessee jet with any regularity, you know he is rarely content to leave things at surface level. These ears hear a call to action for Americans. An invitation to acknowledge the messes that have been made while also looking for - or reminding ourselves of - the good in US.

Review Under Two: Nathan Bell's Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here)

Photo by Keith Belcher

The novel It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis was published in 1935. It tells the story of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrop, a demagogue who is elected as President of the United States and subsequently seizes authoritarian power. Winthrop is in over his head, an unlikely populist juggernaut, and not smart enough to hold the job. Sound familiar? Almost feels like it can in fact happen here, doesn’t it?

Like its partial namesake, Nathan Bell’s Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) is an unfortunately timeless piece of art. Necessary in its import. Heartbreaking in its relevance. 

Written over the course of several years and delayed in its release by the COVID-19 pandemic, Red, White, and American Blues has a transportative quality. The tension of recording in 2019, a stress that is often forgotten due to subsequent events, feels immediately present to the listener. While the record feels like 2019, it also feels like 2015 and 2021 and 1935, because Nathan Bell lives in the present and he has lived.

Lived in the sense of raised a family. Lived in the sense of worked a 9 to 5 job. Lived in the sense of come home from work and put on the ball game. In the sense of read all the books and listened to all the records. He has a poet’s eye with an everyman’s heart. Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) is the self-aware expression of a life well-lived. It is what every songwriter seeks- an honest expression of where we have been and where we are now. 

The album is musically sparse which allows Bell’s command of storytelling and imagery to shine. Bell takes on America’s gun obsession (twice), “Buzz”-Windrop-come-to-life Donald Trump, and more that ails this country. He also celebrates everyday folks, pays respect to his late father, and examines mortality with an optimistic eye. 

Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) would be a powerhouse of a record if the vocals were Bell’s alone. The contributions of Aubrie Sellers, Regina McCrary, and Patty Griffin take songs that stand on their own two feet and launch them into rarified air. 

The collapse of a free society can, and very well may, happen here. It won’t happen for lack of artists like Nathan Bell turning a critical eye on American society.

Lived in the sense of raised a family. Lived in the sense of worked a 9 to 5 job. Lived in the sense of come home from work and put on the ball game. In the sense of read all the books and listened to all the records. He has a poet’s eye with an everyman’s heart. Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) is the self-aware expression of a life well-lived. It is what every songwriter seeks- an honest expression of where we have been and where we are now. 

The album is musically sparse which allows Bell’s command of storytelling and imagery to shine. Bell takes on America’s gun obsession (twice), “Buzz”-Windrop-come-to-life Donald Trump, and more that ails this country. He also celebrates everyday folks, pays respect to his late father, and examines mortality with an optimistic eye. 

Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) would be a powerhouse of a record if the vocals were Bell’s alone. The contributions of Aubrie Sellers, Regina McCrary, and Patty Griffin take songs that stand on their own two feet and launch them into rarified air. 

The collapse of a free society can, and very well may, happen here. It won’t happen for lack of artists like Nathan Bell turning a critical eye on American society.

The album is musically sparse which allows Bell’s command of storytelling and imagery to shine. Bell takes on America’s gun obsession (twice), “Buzz”-Windrop-come-to-life Donald Trump, and more that ails this country. He also celebrates everyday folks, pays respect to his late father, and examines mortality with an optimistic eye. 

Red, White, and American Blues (it can happen here) would be a powerhouse of a record if the vocals were Bell’s alone. The contributions of Aubrie Sellers, Regina McCrary, and Patty Griffin take songs that stand on their own two feet and launch them into rarified air. 

The collapse of a free society can, and very well may, happen here. It won’t happen for lack of artists like Nathan Bell turning a critical eye on American society.

A Series of Essays on The Marinade's Favorite Albums of 2020 | Roll On by Water Liars

This is the second in a series of short essays looking back at the records we loved from 2020. The series focuses on how each album impacted Jason Earle’s life this year.

Few records rise to all occasions. There are songs for dancing. Those for drinking. Music for lounging. Road trip music. Songs for fucking. Sometimes an album overlaps in a couple of those places. Other records remain siloed. 

Then there are albums like Roll On by Water Liars. The rare artistic effort achieving universality of mood. An album for any moment.

You get home from one of those days for which you were unprepared. The kind where dominoes seem to resist gravity.

You just got a promotion, have been feeling good and taking care of yourself- eating right and exercising. You want to rock. Bounce up and down and sing at the top of your lungs. 

It’s Saturday. The rest of the family is out doing family things. They let you sleep in because you are a lucky mother fucker with a bad ass family. You enjoy the luxury of a slow cup of coffee sitting by the window and watching your world awaken.

Roll On does what its title track promises- carrying the listener through whatever life presents. Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster’s writing spans a lyrical spectrum from epic ruminations on love and perseverance to sparse, abstract nods to anxiety. The imagery is vivid. The mood in each song is set. 

“Down Colorado I followed your shadow/And credit card receipts/The cocaine receding, the western sky bleeding/The mountains in relief/I never deserve you but how could I earn you/When stone ain’t made to bleed?”

On the whole I have been one of the lucky ones in the year 2020. The pandemic slowed me down and made me rethink my day-to-day. I was able to refocus on the relationships that mattered and distance myself from those that were taking more than they were adding. I stood up and advocated for myself. I fought the right battles and let go of the other stuff. 

There were personal and professional challenges, both self-created and as the result of outside forces. It was not a perfect effort but again, relative to most folks I was fortunate. 

July and August was a tough stretch of the year. COVID-19 cases were climbing. Schools weighing whether to re-open despite not having the resources to keep people safe. The 2020 election loomed as the potential final nail in the coffin of our eroded democracy. 

Roll On was delivered right on time. The record was made in 2015 but released in the middle of this year. It may not have reached my ears in 2015. Hell, even if it did I may not have needed it so bad five years ago. Roll On was there for what turned out to be a second half full of hope in 2020. 

I kept coming back to the record, bingeing it and finding new nuggets during each listening session. I also went back into the Water Liars catalog and those of its individual members. I found comfort in the atmosphere of Water Liars. Roll On was a steady friend and a willing partner in the second half of 2020.

The Consequence of Genius: Some Words About Jason Isbell's Reunions

Photo by Jason Earle

An odd consequence of genius is we come to expect it. When Bob Dylan puts out a mediocre or even slightly sub-par by his standards collection of songs, the effort is met with vitriolic critical rebuke. Such is the price of creating art that inspires across cultures and generations. Songs by Dylan and his ilk are not to be casually enjoyed. They are events requiring time to marinate and then parse.

The difference between Dylan and modern standard-bearers is the former is going to have an audience even after each perceived misstep. Everyone watches his mulligans because the competition in his heyday was minimal compared to geniuses in an internet-connected, streaming world.

Today we have instant access to truckloads of great songwriters. If one stumbles, our collective attention wanes, and in that lapse a writer may not recover for two or three albums- if at all. Jason Isbell has admitted to feeling a bit of this pressure. In a very candid New York Times piece, he confessed his new record Reunions was a different beast.

Long an Americana darling, Isbell’s notoriety and prestige stepped into a different gear with the Dave Cobb-produced trio of records Southeastern, Something More Than Free, and The Nashville Sound. Ask an Isbell obsessive about their favorite record and you will likely get a different answer depending on the day. This is because Jason Isbell is the best songwriter in popular American roots music. With the mantle of greatest comes a more critical and less forgiving eye.

Reunions will not settle the score. Art is not an objective competition so we cannot discharge the debate. Frankly, Isbell does not owe any further proof of greatness, yet further proof is exactly what this collection delivers.

With every song, he challenges us to think about our place in the world. By turning a mirror on himself, in this case a far-sighted mirror reaching to less proud moments of the past, he challenges the stories of internal valor we tell ourselves and roots out questions about how we are actually going to confront our issues.

If you just looked at Jason Isbell, maybe caught a tiny snippet of him saying something seemingly inconsequential, you would be forgiven for thinking he was just like us. He has a way of remaining authentically down-to-earth while orbiting the creative sphere in rare air.

The truth is in short supply even as access to information increases exponentially. We still get romanticized, sometimes sterilized versions of artists and ideas. Merchants of misinformation point fingers rather than offer honest appraisals of the way things are. Thankfully, Isbell is hyper-committed to the truth to the point of expecting it from himself and the listener.

Like a dog’s peanut butter coated pill, facts are better consumed on a full stomach with an appetizing presentation. All great songwriters have this ability. Isbell does it better than anyone.

On “Dreamsicle” — one of the biggest triumphs in his storied career — the narrator reminisces about a mother trying to make the most of a dysfunctional situation. Despite multiple narratives throughout the album, there are common threads to which we have grown accustomed with Jason Isbell records. Namely, everyone is doing their best, and if they are not then it’s time to start. His characters are broken and battered but each tale is delivered with empathy for the realities that lead to less than ideal situations.

Photo by Jason Earle

Even if you can’t directly relate to growing up in a dysfunctional family, the humanity in each story offers something universally unifying. Isbell never misses. There are polarizing songs on the other records. One person finds “Anxiety” speaks directly to them. Another thinks it a bit too much. A diehard fan names “24 Frames” as their favorite while someone else thinks it falls short of his best. Reunions does not have those tunes. It offers not a moment to check out or allow the songs shelter as background noise.

Honest introspection is typically tough by nature. Baring your scars for a discerning audience to examine and apply their own whims is an even bigger display of honesty. The characters of Reunions leave nothing on the field, including the role of a man supporting his grieving partner and trying to suppress his own jealousy or the performer exhorting their cohort to “be afraid but do it anyway.”

Each song is a masterpiece worthy of marination, and even after just a couple of weeks in the world they already feel all-consuming. It is the right kind of possession, one where the possessed grows stronger with each listen.

Artists on the level of Jason Isbell are lucky to get mulligans these days. Fortunately for Isbell, he has not needed one. If that day ever comes, let’s remember Reunions- a record that raised a bar already set so high only one writer could have cleared it.

Thoughts on The Teenage Years of the 21st Century, an album by Micah Schnabel.

Sometimes, hell often, the constant barrage of information we consume can feel overwhelming. So many of us feel helpless watching from what seems like the sidelines, screaming our muffled voices and wishing for a sea change to wipe out the blatant corruption that assaults basic freedoms we once took for granted.

More than likely, if you read the above paragraph, you are a person who considers it uncontroversial. Maybe even tired. A bromide at this point. Thankfully, you don’t need to rely on me to express such sentiment in the way it deserves to be heard. Micah Schnabel continues to case the American condition in brutally honest and gorgeous prose with his latest record The Teenage Years of the 21st Century.

The bolts of this record are not new to fans of Schnabel’s work. The unmistakable sound of his voice. The tissue deep way in which he bares his feelings and thoughts. Those things are all consistently present in Micah Schnabel’s catalog and they ring true on this record.

What stands out is that he has taken another huge leap forward as a writer. One whose voice continually confronts its fears and anxieties. A voice punctuating conviction with poetry. 

It’s not easy hearing Schnabel sing about mobility justice, or the potential early unceremonious demise of those we love the most because they lack access to health care. Micah has always been gracious with his emotions for the sake of art. Perhaps never more so than on this record. 

Micah Schnabel’s work has aided a shift in my world paradigm. I was a libertarian-leaning registered Republican until the end of 2015, two years into my work with kids from underserved communities. Black kids in a racially segregated Southern town named after a genocidal former president. At that point, the Republican party had committed to an overtly racist platform, one that forced me to pay attention to not just race but class in this country.

I was reading Ta-nehisi Coates and Jeff Duncan-Andrade at the time. Both of whom heavily contributed to a reevaluation of how I viewed our political and social structures. In the summer of 2017, Youth Detention (Nail My Feet Down to the Southside of Town) by Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires and Your New Norman Rockwell by Micah Schnabel entered the canon of my personal midlife political revolution. Those records became the soundtrack for an unlikely transformation.

The characters in each of those albums were people I knew as a kid and folks I’d met as a thirty-something. People I viewed differently through the lens of time. In some ways, it took Schnabel’s Henry from his song and novel Hello, My Name is Henry and Bains’s young black girl who is just “too damn loud” for her teacher, to bridge that gap. 

The truth is, I’m a stubborn man. One who keeps an open mind but is nonetheless slow to change it. If nothing else, I am a thoughtful person. When I commit to an idea, it takes a person or movement for which I have a great deal of respect to shift that thinking. Ten years after I first started listening to Micah Schnabel, that shift has become tectonic.  

Schnabel has created an influential artistic world that deftly straddles fiction and real life. The protagonist in his excellent novel Hello, My Name is Henry reads a comic book called Memory Currency, which is also the title of my favorite song on The Teenage Years of the 21st Century. Micah has been playing it, and other songs from the album, live for a while now. The tune lays me out each time I hear it because I am confronted with Henry’s lessons on a regular basis. 

When we first recorded an Episode of The Marinade with Jason Earle, Micah said a number of things that made me reevaluate my worldview. I made a joke about people from Florida and Ohio being proud of the place from which they come. Micah’s whole demeanor changed. He said that being proud of the place from which you come is ridiculous. 

I was in my thirties. Well educated, well-read, and well-traveled by most of society’s standards. The simplicity of the statement and the way in which it was matter-of-factly delivered shook me. The fact that I had not fully considered such an obvious reality left me second-guessing a lot about how I viewed the world. Micah had not expressed a new idea to me, but I was not ready to holistically commit to an examination of my attitude about place until he challenged me. 

Micah Schnabel has a lot to say about place, class, policy, politics, humanity, and so much more on this record. He chooses words carefully but bares his heart with abandon. 

Maybe we are headed for “nuclear war.” Maybe the currency of our memories is all we will ever have left. None of it is easy to hear and Schnabel does not spare the listener many details of the peculiar times in which we live. 

Still, I find solace in the fact that, in spite of overwhelming messages to the contrary, there are a lot of powerfully convicted people like Micah Schnabel- courageously making art and treating it as their lifeblood. 

The Teenage Years of the 21st Century is triumphant, even if its namesake has not always gone that way.

Album Review | Rod Picott's Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

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Rod Picott found himself free-soloing up a sheer face. The soles of his shoes slipping 2,000 feet above an abyss, imminent peril the likely result. While confronting impossible odds, Picott kept creating. And, after some semblance of normalcy was restored, he created some more. The result is a stunning work of art called Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil.

Picott has long been one of the great songwriters of his generation. His bonafides are well established, but this record cements him as something different. It is the best of an impressive catalog and there are a few clear reasons for that.

Born on either end of a major health scare, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil is as raw as a fresh breakup wound, a reflection on the origin story of a man’s life as he stares down death and loneliness and wonders where to go from here. The record is not overly romantic. In fact, in parts it thumbs its nose at the notion of romanticizing life’s brutal bits.

The mood is one of sitting on a precipice looking down between dangling feet, taking in the struggle of of the climb. Celebrating progress while recognizing the mistakes that were and those that could have let to the catastrophic destruction of everything that matters.

The gift of this record is that it is a window into the thoughts and emotions of a great writer. Picott opens the cellar door on his fears, crutches, and desires. He leads us down the rickety steps of his psyche by shining a lantern on each rung. At the end of the journey we reach a room filled with hope. Not a dank, closed basement, but a space walled with doors and mirrors, reflections of ourselves leading to the possibility of self-discovery and improvement.

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil demands heavy lifting from both artist and consumer. The work is rewarding. Rod Picott’s new record Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil comes out on July 19. Stay tuned to marinadepodcast.com for a conversation with the man himself starting July 5th. It’ll pair well with your Fourth of July hangover.

Album Review | Reed Foehl's Lucky Enough

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“We’ve all got holes to fill/Them holes are all that’s real” -Townes Van Zandt

Reed Foehl’s excellent album “Lucky Enough” (available 2/1/19) takes the listener on an existential journey to fill life’s holes. Written at an impossibly difficult time in Foehl’s life, while he was caring for his mother who was battling cancer, Foehl would be understood for writing a melancholy record. Lucky Enough ducks expectation. It does not feel melancholy. It feels settled. Not resigned, but at peace with life’s challenges and tribulations.

The common current running through Lucky Enough is acceptance. Going out and searching for something to make us whole. The album is sequenced as the tale of a person navigating existence, learning lessons, failing and growing, and finally finding a place and a person who fills in the holes.

Lucky Enough kicks off with the infectious melody of lovers “Stealing Starlight,” lyrics about the simple pleasures of life. The “taste of Basil Hayden’s” on the tongue. Footprints washed away in the sand. Sleeping in together. Stealing starlight.

But, as restless spirits are wont to do, our narrator takes off cross country clicking through “American Miles.” It’s a cinematic tune a la Bon Iver. A restive tale that acknowledges all the narrator loves is all he knows.

Who knows what we are going to encounter on that road; that American road, the one serving as a metaphor for our life’s journey. The journey is long yet it feels at times like it is flying by too quickly to grasp. It “takes a long time to make old friends,” our narrator tells us. And, really, we are just “charting the courses of carousel horses,” lost in this day-to-day.

Sometimes we feel we should be “on an Island” like the protagonist in the opening track to Lucky Enough’s side B. He admonishes us to remember that “You don’t know me till you can walk in my shoes.” But an island is no place for a battle.

Our struggles can seem so enormous yet really we ultimately “running out of nothing left to do.” A regiment of blinding agents keeps us moored to our carousel. None of us on our own really knows what we are doing. We need each other to navigate this world.

Foehl employs an almost whimsical feel to help his narrator work through this existential angst on the heavy yet fun “I Wish I Knew.” Ultimately, the heady musings of Lucky Enough come to the realization that what we all need is someone or some group of souls to fill in our holes. We can only do so much on our own. Once we have rambled the miles, made and lost friends, endured the day-to-day, and run out of nothing left to do we are faced with ourselves. Our strengths, our insecurities, our charms, our anxieties- all of it needs the tempering influence of people we love.

Lucky Enough ends with the arresting “Color Me In.” “What will you do with me, my darlin’?” Foehl’s narrator asks, followed by an entreaty to come and lay with him, to relish the moment they have together. Together they can make it. No, together they will make it. What may not be possible alone is attainable with someone there to fill the holes.

-Jason Earle