Duncan Barlow has left an indelible impact on the Louisville music scene as a member of seminal acts including Endpoint, Guilt and By the Grace of God. Around 20 years ago, Barlow left Louisville behind to pursue his profession as an educator and writer. He has spent the interim decades writing and releasing books, while continuing to create music, both solo and collaboratively. READ MORE…
It’s been a period of loss for Nick Dittmeier. Around the time he was writing songs for his forthcoming album, All Damn Day, the Southern Indiana-based country musician’s mother-in-law succumbed to cancer, and his great-grandmother and dog also passed away. Tragedy and death are woven through the album, which is set to be released Friday, but the poetic, story songs are composites of truth and fiction, pulling from real life people and places, as well as the fictional universes of desperate characters in tight situations. Take “Two Faded Carnations” for example, a song that was written with his mother-in-law in mind, referencing a real cemetery, but featuring a made up and mysterious character in mourning. Like the best Jason Isbell songs, such as “Decoration Day” and “Speed Trap Town,” the listener gets evocative, yet vague fragments of the narrative, creating an ambiguous puzzle. It’s a song that will make you run through it again and again, just to see if there’s something you missed.
“I wanted the listener to figure it out for themselves,” Dittmeier, who is 33, said. “I didn’t want to make everything in plain English, because there’s a lot of songs or shows or stuff where that ambiguity is how you find your audience. It’s based on what they don’t tell you. A good example is ‘Pulp Fiction’ — the briefcase, you never really see what’s in it.”…………READ MORE