Performing Songwriter on Sam Phillips’s Don’t Do Anything, the album I’m most excited to hear in 2008:
While Don’t Do Anything retains elements of her early Beatles-inspired baroque pop and her more recent Euro-chanteuse folk, this self-produced (her first without Burnett) album is striking for its uncharacteristically dissonant sonic touches. The distorted guitars and crashing cymbals contrast intriguingly with her fragile, vulnerable vocals, yet they also fit with her lyrics‚ emotional turmoil. … Tunes like “My Career in Chemistry”‚ “Little Plastic Life,” “Watching Out of This World” and the title track shine brightly through Phillips’s set of stormy, heartaching songs.
Thanks, Josh Hurst, for the link!
I’m concerned thought that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have taken the album off their stores. Let me check again…
Yeah, it’s no where to be found. I subscribe to the Nonesuch blog as well and all they are talking about is Sweeney Todd and Magnetic Fields’ new one — while good Distortion is not the masterpiece the press is making it out to be.
I guess I’m just bitter about Sam. 🙂
T Bone is touring as opening act and band director for the Robert Plant & Alison Krauss shows.
Only four US dates announced thus far:
http://www.robertplantalisonkrauss.com/site.php?content=tour
One can’t envy Nonesuch’s position in all this. They’re releasing T Bone’s “Songs From the Tooth of Crime” in March and they’ll get plenty of press piggybacking the Plant/Krauss tour. The easiest angle to sell Sam’s record would be a Richard/Linda Thompson fallout drama, but neither Sam nor T Bone seem to have much patience for leveraging a backstory to sell the work itself.