Well it’s been a funny old week of course and there may be many more funny old weeks to come but we do intend to keep our content overflowing with things for you to read, watch or listen to. We leave you this week with an hour-long recording by Josh Ritter – as one of many artists self-isolating, he’s recorded one of those increasingly common “gig in my house” things, and creatively called it the Silo Sessions which we wish we’d thought of first. You can tip him for the performance here – all proceeds go to Win NYC to help support and shelter women and children in need. Here’s the full Instagram post on the session: Continue reading “Something for the weekend: Josh Ritter records the Silo Sessions – Watch”
Magazine cover discs come and cover discs go, sometimes there’s a track or two that sparks an interest – I first encountered The Decemberists via a disc from Word magazine, that was a good find. Just a few, though, are quite literally life-changing. That may sound like terrible hyperbole but in the case of Uncut’s ‘Americana 2004‘ disc it is quite true. Mainstream popular music in the Nineties had pretty much been a washout for me and I was doing little more than keeping up with the likes of Dylan and Neil Young with the occasional other breakthrough album or artist, but mostly I was back exploring the richer world of folk which was generally finding far more imaginative paths. And this was ok, but I needed some new directions, some new bands, some new voices. And then on a long journey North I picked up at a motorway service station, almost on a whim, the latest issue of Uncut – I can’t really say why, certainly the front cover of The Cure’s Robert Smith was not a big selling point. As the journey went on and the traffic got slower I decided to switch from the radio to the ‘Americana 2004‘ cover disc. And everything changed. 
