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Walter Parks & The Unlawful Assembly
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“Walter is a musical treasure, an artist of the highest caliber.
To hear him is to be lifted into a mystical sphere. I adore him.” – Judy Collins
“We can play a country church in Mississippi, or we can draw a crowd at a hipster club in Brooklyn. We connect with a wide-ranging audience,” says veteran musician Walter Parks, speaking of the music on his forthcoming album, The Unlawful Assembly (out Sept. 9 via Atomic Sound). “The joy, gratitude, pain and yearning in these songs is universally felt.”
After studying guitar under jazz guitarist Robert Conti, Parks was a sideman to the legendary Richie Havens for 10 years. He was part of a folk duo called The Nudes, with cellist Stephanie Winters, and has been part of an on-again, off-again band for several years now, called Swamp Cabbage.
Parks is known for his swampy style and gravelly vocals, as well as being an astute music historian. In 2020, he was invited by The Library of Congress to archive his research on and perform his arrangements of music made by homesteaders in the Okefenokee Swamp. Now living in St. Louis, MO, Parks originally grew up in Northeast Florida (or what he calls “the Georgia part of Florida”). “That was during the Woodstock era, and in spite of the peace and love aspects of that movement, I was bullied for being tall, skinny, short-haired, and also playing the ‘very uncool’ viola,” says Parks.
At the start of the pandemic, Parks created a Sunday morning radio series called “Hymns & Hollers” to explore a powerful and strange paradox about origins of spiritual music that he believed could unify and heal. The show has no religious agenda per se, but is more historical and philosophical in nature.
“As a way of enduring hell on Earth and yearning for a better life from the cruel bonds of slavery, African Americans created and sang spirituals, field hollers, code songs and work chants that often borrowed from the Biblical narratives and hymns of their oppressors. Those same spirituals, chants and hollers would soon inspire the great American roots music that followed – blues and jazz which would later inspire gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, folk and rock and roll. Ironically, as if coming full circle, more than a century after emancipation, I and millions of American youth would learn of the blues only because of rock and roll interpretations emanating from England – the country that was once command central for the slave trade and the source of many classic Christian hymns, which influenced the spirituals.”
Parks regards spirituals as a common denominator – an undeniable sonic glue born out of the bonds of slavery, now binding us all together for the common good as reimagined by The Unlawful Assembly, with collaborator/drummer/producer Steven Williams, Ada Dyer on vocals, Paul Frazier on bass, Michael Bellar on organ, and Andrae Murchison on trombone.
“Steal Away,” an Underground Railroad spiritual of Biblical origin, tributes The Mighty Clouds of Joy from the early 60’s. Inspired by Richie Havens’ version of “Follow The Drinking Gourd,” a “code song” reminded runaway slaves how to find and use The North Star. The requisite hymn “Amazing Grace” is a slave ship captain’s redemptive plea upon acknowledging the horrors that his chosen line of work had enabled. “Early In The Mornin”’ tributes Alan Lomax’s original field recording of a Parchman Farm chain-gang chanting in order to strike a piece of track rail in unison.
“Georgia Rice” is based on an Okefenokee Swamp folktale: During the years when Florida was Spanish, if a slave could escape the rice plantations along the southeast Georgia coast, outrun bounty hunters while heading southwest, evade the natural perils of The Okefenokee Swamp, and then find passage across The St. Mary’s River, they could then make a deal for freedom in exchange for converting to Catholicism, and serving in the Spanish army. Many runaways found their way to Fort Mose, near St. Augustine, to live amongst other former slaves who had endured escape odysseys of their own.
European families – mostly of Scottish descent – began inhabiting islands in the Okefenokee during the mid-1800’s. They imported festive fiddle reels and they developed their own relationship with the banjo – an instrument of African origin. They brought spiritual music in the form of shaped-note and sacred harp singing. And they brought hollers – beautiful rolling, yodel-like melodies sung by hunters – through the piney woods, to make notice of an approach to home, after having spent several days out in the wilderness.
“Georgia Rice” begins with a holler, but the lyrics are sung from the perspective of a runaway slave who, being pursued by bounty hunters, hears a white man hollerin’ far off in the pineywoods. A great risk, the slave heads towards the white man figuring that no slave tracker would be hollering. “Georgia Rice” overlays two periods in history to convey the hopeful premise that when no one’s watching, we do the right thing. In this case, the white swamper, also at great risk, helps the runaway find The St Mary’s.
“Shoulder It,” Parks’ co-write with Stan Lynch, the original drummer for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, addresses a core obstacle to societal progress – the convenient perspective that the challenges of any one culture, demographic or race are solely its own to overcome.
The American imagination pictures the realm of spirituals, blues and jazz in Mississippi or Louisiana but Parks’ inspiration for The Unlawful Assembly comes from southeast Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. A hundred years after the first slaves fled into the swamp from coastal rice plantations, their descendants returned to lay railroad tracks for The Hebbard Lumber Company. Walter theorizes that during this time, the lyrics of work chants sung in unison by black men while arduously hammering steel, began to find their way into the “old-fashioned songs” and hollers sung by white swampers.
Jacksonville, in northeastern Florida is regarded by many as the epicenter of southern rock because The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd formed there. Walter believes that there is a subtle black-influenced “funky” feel (as it was labeled in the seventies) in southern rock that differentiates it from country music and he believes that the music of the nearby Okefenokee was probably a significant factor in this distinguishing aspect.
Parks’ gifts are not only limited to music: “It’s really not possible to just focus on one form of art in the modern age. When sometimes the balance tilts too far away from music, I find refuge in woodworking, studying French, acting and painting in a modern-art style. My wife and I also present concerts.”
He’s a storyteller and yet, himself, an immovable character. He’s the real deal. He’s Walter Parks.
“Parks found a passion researching Okefenokee swamp music… transforming the new knowledge into fresh musical expressions.” – NPR
“The Walter Park’s album is amazing. One of my favorites of the year. Best ever versions of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and ‘Down By The Riverside.’ Staggeringly good.” – BBC Radio 2
“The one thing that people know about Walter Parks is that he is some guitar player.” – Americana UK
“The dramatic noir footage of this video strongly emphasizes the sincere profundity of both the song and Walter Parks and band’s delivery. The whole project is an austere and respectable undertaking well worth the listen.” – Americana Highways
“There is no one doing it better than Walter Parks… pure and incandescent enchantment, a joy, a thrill of consummate artistry.” – St. Louis Mag
Austin Chronicle features new single from Giovanni Carnuccio III “P.C.H.D.M.T.” on New Music Worth Your Bandwidth This Week…
The amalgamated acronym “P.C.H.D.M.T” fuses America’s coolest drive, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the world’s greatest hallucinogen, DMT. Just imagine that road “trip” – fractals on Hearst Castle, Big Sur in the spirit world. Giovanni “Nooch” Carnuccio III, who’s hit the drums in Red Dirt acts like Turnpike Troubadours and Cody Canada, now gets weird with genre-spliced beat music like an uncluttered Avalanches. Teasing July LP A Matter of Time, “Nooch” doses a sprightly flamenco guitar arrangement with dance-floor-ready drum breaks and synthesized Italian folk violin. Headphones recommended for the mind-altering stereo panning.?– Kevin Curtin
Megan & Shane
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Between the two of them, Megan and Shane Baskerville have played just about every kind of American music you can imagine. Born in Wisconsin and based in the Southwest—with a lot of rambling in between—they’re veterans of punk scenes, bluegrass circuits, ska bands, even hip-hop acts, all of which informs their work with the School of Rock franchises they operate in Arizona. But nearest and dearest to their hearts is country music, which allows them a unique opportunity to meld all these disparate interests, and to air their darkest secrets. Defined by Megan’s force-of-nature vocals and Shane’s inventive guitar playing, their full-length debut, Daughter of Country, is a memoir set to music, every word the God’s honest truth, as the husband-wife duo re-create the sounds pioneered by their heroes, while putting their own personal spin on the genre.
“I’m a daughter of country, raised my whole life,” Megan sings on the barn-burning title track. As her husband provides a hand-on-shoulder guitar solo, she recounts a rough childhood and a broken family, but the song also conveys the solace and wisdom that country music offered her. It’s clear they’ve both taken such lessons to heart, as she channels the grit and integrity of Loretta, the heartache and dignity of Patsy, the clarity and self-possession of Tammy. Growing up, she saw those women as mothers. “Patsy Cline in particular, she’s just so strong,” says Megan. “Her voice didn’t have that country twang, but it was booming and powerful. She embodied strength to me. That was something I wanted to be. She helped me daydream of a different life.”
Country, in other words, raised her right. Megan & Shane don’t simply recount those hard lessons, they enact them with every note and every chord on their full-length debut, turning their tribulations into triumphs. After spending her adolescence skipping school to see DIY punk shows in Chicago, Megan lit out to South Carolina, where she apprenticed herself to a pair of bluegrass musicians named Roger Bellow and Bob Sachs. If Patsy was a mother figure, those two guys “were my musical dads. They helped me believe I could do something.” Meanwhile, Shane was touring with a series of punk bands before a mysterious illness sidelined his career. “One doctor said I had six months to live, but I never gave up. Instead, I packed up and started a career out in L.A.” Many years later, he relocated to Minneapolis and used his experiences to teach kids at the School of Rock (one of his first students was Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus).
It was through that organization that he met Megan, who applied to teach vocals. Instead of asking her out, he invited her to start a ska band. Their first real date was a Motorhead show at the legendary Minneapolis venue First Avenue. The attraction was romantic, but also musical, as they realized they complemented each other in every way. Not long after that, they split for Arizona to open and operate a School of Rock franchise in the Southwest. In 2013, they flew to Memphis, booked sessions time at Sun Studio, then got married the next day at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
The School of Rock has been important to them both as educators and as artists. “We love what it does for kids, and that is really, really special to us,” says Megan. “We love that we can employ other musicians, too. But something was missing. We weren’t feeding ourselves creatively.” When Covid slowed their work with the school, the couple found themselves with extra time on their hands, so they started writing a batch of new songs—deeply personal, deeply harrowing songs about hard upbringings, death scares, true love, and what looked to them to be a world falling apart. It was a creative breakthrough. “We had realized our songwriting was skating around what the actual story was and the real emotion behind it,” says Shane. “We weren’t really digging in. So we just ripped off the BandAid and let it all fly out. When we wrote these songs, we felt like they were different.”
So they wanted to treat them differently, with a bit more care and consideration. Megan and Shane were so committed to these new songs that they sold their house to fund the creation and promotion of an album that would serve as their defining statement. First and foremost, they wanted to hire an outside producer—someone who could bring a different perspective to the music. After considering candidates all over the country, they finally settled on somebody just down the street: Bob Hoag, who runs Flying Blanket Recording in Mesa, Arizona, and has helmed albums by Courtney Marie Andrews and the Gin Blossoms, among many others. To capture both the sound and the spirit of the country music they loved, they recorded to tape rather than digitally, often using first takes to preserve the spontaneity of the performances. One area where they took their time, however, was with Megan’s vocals. “Every time we’ve recorded before,” she says, “my vocals always got pushed to the end and I never got to spend the time to get the perfect take.”
“Megan’s such a stronger singer, and her rough tracks would be pretty solid. She wouldn’t be giving it her all on the rough tracks, but nobody understood that because they were so good. They just assume it can’t get any better,” adds Shane. When Hoag suggested they use her first takes, she put her boot down. Megan insisted she could do better, and that she did, pushing herself to capture those moments perfectly. That was especially important on the standout “Scars,” on which she tells the stories behind the wounds to her body and to her heart. There’s a moment toward the end when the instruments all fall away to leave just her voice confessing unspeakable tragedy: “This one’s when I lost that little baby, Lord how I cried and how I cried.” It’s devastating, but the clarity and steadiness of her performance show just what it takes to survive such heartbreak.
On that and every other song on Daughter of Country, Megan & Shane strip away everything that might stand between them and their listeners. It takes a lot of guts to show those scars to the world, but that’s what country is. That’s what makes it so relatable to listeners looking for musical mothers and fathers. “It’s a sad album,” says Megan, “but it needed to happen.” Shane agrees: “I don’t think we even had a choice. It all just came out. We had to bare our souls to put those things to bed and move on with our lives.”
Ditchbird
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Tony Petersen had barely finished creating Real Enough For You Now — the Minnesota native’s debut release as Ditchbird, a solo project launched after the pandemic brought his hard-touring indie rock band, Social Animals (Rise Records), to a temporary standstill — when he began writing songs for a more aggressive, rock-influenced follow-up.
“The name ‘Ditchbird’ sounds like a folk artist,” he says from his home studio in Minneapolis, where both Real Enough For You Now and the harder-hitting Some Dreams EP were recorded, “but I wanted to make sure people were aware that I’m not going to sing songs with an acoustic guitar on my couch forever. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have more rock songs in me. It’s the sound I grew up hearing.”
Raised in Cloquet, Minnesota, Petersen discovered rock & roll while riding around town in his father’s car. Those memorable trips — with music on the radio, Petersen in the backseat, and his Dad behind the wheel — left a lasting impression. Petersen began playing electric guitar and eventually hit the road with Social Animals, opening for acts like Dashboard Confessional and All-American Rejects, while playing an anthemic, modernized version of the genre that had first captivated him. Along the way, he stockpiled a number of newly-written songs that didn’t necessarily gel with Social Animals’ cathartic stomp. Those songs piled up, unused, for years, then found their way onto Ditchbird’s full-length debut, Real Enough For You Now, in early 2021.
If Real Enough For You Now merged Petersen’s abilities as a multi-instrumentalist with Americana influences, folk-rock arrangements, and scaled-down sonics, then Some Dreams finds him plugging in and turning up. “Better Than Nothing” is a heavy-footed rocker that both salutes and skewers the road-warrior lifestyle, while “Think She Was Right” rides a guitar riff and drum loop toward its own hook-filled horizon. Throughout it all, Petersen pulls triple-duty as singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. He keeps the guest list small, with keyboardist Ben Cosgrove and mastering engineer Bruce Templeton serving as the only collaborators on what is otherwise a one-man record.
“Real Enough was a collection of songs I had been sitting on for a long time, and once that was complete, I fell quickly into a distinct group of songs in a very different sound and different voice,” he says of the five-song EP. “I knew I wanted to showcase more electric guitar, more powerful instrumentation, and more aggressive vocals. I clicked into a different place, spontaneously. I immediately wanted to get back to work while I had the time to do so this summer, and I felt I really needed to make this next collection happen, to show a different side of Ditchbird.”
Petersen’s music has always been multi-faceted. With Social Animals, he’s an internationally-celebrated rocker and lead guitarist, adding atmosphere and attitude to songs built for stadiums. With Real Enough For You, he scaled his songwriting back to its acoustic roots, reworking the influence of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and The Replacements to his own brand of heartland folk-rock. Now, with Some Dreams, he punctuates songs about the artistic experience — the elation, the anxiety, and the long drives from one show to the next — with guitar-heavy arrangements that nod to his rock & roll roots. This is Petersen’s story, but it’s our story, too: a universal tale about chasing down one’s dreams, set to a soundtrack that’s as melodic as it is muscular.
Giovanni Carnuccio III
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When tuning into A Matter of Time’s first track “Requiem,” it’s not hard to imagine the Doof Warrior (of Mad Max:Fury Road fame) orchestrating some manic Fellini-esque carnival and finally finding his perfect drummer. As the drum set shatters in a moment of hardcore jazz lunacy, we are thrust into the opening salvo of producer, solo artist, and shit-kicking drummer Giovanni Carnuccio III’s new album.
The majestic splinter of this head-turning intro perfectly conveys his unadulterated and singular style of clattering boom-bap drums, jazzy progressions, western-influenced guitar hooks, and blissed out orchestrations, all of which makes for as unique an artistic vision as you are likely to see all year. Of course, the ability to make records like this wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for his decade plus of hard work, be it in his solo efforts or in his litany of production work with artists like Zach Aaron, Jason Eady, Courtney Patton, Turnpike Troubadours and a bevy of others in the indie/folk/Americana canon. In fact, it’s this hard work that has earned him countless wins & nods at year-end award shows, most prominently a “Best Americana Album” Grammy nomination with John Fullbright for their work on From the Ground Up.
While enduring the pandemic like the rest of the world, Carnuccio was struck by – and still exists within – a stretch of creative inspiration, using the past year to let his freak-flag fly: “[I] invaded an acoustic record with synths because so many normal everyday interactions and communications with people had just been forced onto screens.” Surprisingly, though Carnuccio has made a reputation for himself being a polymath on the Americana scene, A Matter of Time defies classification by mixing elements of psych-rock, trip-hop, jazz, and Ennio Moriconne, all while maintaining frenetic, whiplash rhythms. Aforementioned opener “Requiem” might be a daunting show of skill in someone else’s hands, but Carnuccio imbues it with the skittering immediacy and fluidity of Busta Rhymes – an inspiration on this song and others. Songs like “Hot Time Traveler” ride a Massive Attack-like gait, with clacking drums, while the strings and guitars create an acid-drenched dreamscape. And then there’s “PCHDMT,” which wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on say – Rosalia’s last record, all fluttering flamenco guitars and ebullient strings, with an additionally healthy serving of the psychedelic. Appropriately, the song itself was inspired by Carnuccio’s own trips down the Pacific Coast Highway.
Elsewhere, the playfully titled “Baby Godzilla Steps” tethers jazzy piano stabs to phased-out keyboards, giving us what you can imagine Mark Ronson and Tame Impala might create if they indulged their more cinematic tendencies. Fittingly, the album’s closing track “Why is This Happening” is also its most contemplative, lush, and engrossing, as Carnuccio utilizes his gift for creating atmospheric orchestrations and takes direct aim for the heartstrings. Pathos aside, these are songs that are “designed to be jammed out by a badass live band,” a vibe easily heard in the album’s expertly executed psychedelia; while being careful not to downplay or overstate the importance of their role in his early oeuvre as a solo artist, Carnuccio credits DMT, mushrooms, peyote, and other mind-altering subs with deference.
At this point, Carnuccio half-jokes, he is hoping for this whole “folk Mark Ronson shit to take off” before wryly qualifying that he might actually be “like an Italian unplugged Dr. Dre or something.” All jokes aside, this isn’t too far from the truth as his creative touch has added a dash of the cutting edge to a genre steeped in obstinate traditionalism. Instead of allowing himself to sit in tradition, Carnuccio aims to innovate by taking cues from the atmospherics of Nine Inch Nails, the pluckiness of the Punch Brothers or Cornelius, and the orchestral dramatics of Spaghetti Western classics.
Carnuccio’s genre-melding style, though lighthearted and playful, conveys a much more timely and heartfelt message than you might expect. Whatever the future holds for Giovanni as an artist, producer, and musician, now we have A Matter of Time, a kaleidoscopic journey reminding us to embrace creativity and cast our fate to the wind.
“Mouth-watering sonic clarity, modern flourishes that’ll make a gunslinger gawk, and bizarrely beautiful instrumentals.” – KUTX 98.9
“An acid-drenched dreamscape.” – VENTS Magazine