Tele & The Ghost of Our Lord – The Old Man Keeps Yellin’ At The Clouds
“You can’t stop rock n’ roll!” That’s what Dee Snider sang rather famously. But if there ever was one dinosaur music genre that could not be slashed, it is country music. Part of North America’s modern identity and rarely ever cool outside of rural areas, you’d think somebody would’ve been able to slash the throat of this kind of yodelling over slide guitar parts.
But it always comes back. And it’s usually the coolest musicians who bring it back. From Gram Parsons and the 60s country-rock bands to Ryan Adams and the alt-country bands of the 90s, someone slick enough will always make it cool while sounding extraordinarily old. What is it about the music then? Maybe there’s some eternal wisdom trapped in there. Or, maybe, all of us, listeners included, feel, from time to time, ancient and defunct.
“The Old Man Keeps Yellin’ At The Clouds” is a very well-written dark comedy of a song. And the man who goes by the moniker of Tele and The Ghost of Our Lord might be singing about a world he no longer understands; he may be lucky that most people of all ages feel the same way. Before we make any sense of this age and how it’s all going to end up, we’re better off sitting here marvelling at the rhymes matching each other perfectly and that really old familiar slide guitar, still working a bit of its magic.
Cameron Curtis Stiles – The Night Before
The only truly great musicians are the ones who are great fans. Not even the most confident or arrogant ones can get away from this. You are what you consume. Or, in the case of music, you end up sounding like what you hear constantly. There’s no way to hide this. It’s a good thing that the Gallagher brothers, likely, only even listen to The Beatles or 60s retro rock. They could’ve ended up as on Oi! Punk band otherwise.
But just because you are the most obsessive fan of great artists doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be able to do things of similar worth. Sitting and listening to great records doesn’t in itself make you better. The really great ones start their own dreams and populate them with bits and pieces of the dreams of others. The really great ones first express themselves using someone else’s words before giving their own speeches.
Cameron Curtis Stiles has great taste in music and a terrific way of understanding great old songs that would fit in if they were written today. “The Night Before,” originally a composition by the cult 60s songwriter Lee Hazlewood, is given a cinematic reworking. Stiles puts a heavy weight on every single word sung and makes “The Night Before” resemble the intro to a murder-thriller Hollywood movie. Stiles’ performance is striking, but the musician’s greatest contribution to the song, besides finding and reinterpreting, is creating the impression that they’re withholding part of the story for our own benefit. It’s a ghost story that Stiles brings to life here.
