Songs That Stick To Your Ribs: Vol. 1

Some songs come and go – sweet pleasures, but fleeting ones.

Others, they linger, wearing a groove in heart and brain that runs down the intersection of comforting and challenging.

These are some of those songs.

Off My Mind, Ryan Ross: It’s the plucked string at the beginning, I think. The insistent whang whang whang that reaches out to hook your attention just before the other guitars muscle in, rumbling and grumbling and trying to start a fight. And then about half-way through they settle down and start hammering out a quasi-hypnotic rhythm. I both do and do not want to know what the words are supposed to be; I’m curious, but also suspect context might ruin it.
 

 
If You’re in New York, The Grahams: I have more to say about Riverman’s Daughter, their most recent (and most amazing) record, but this is one of the songs I have been listening to obsessively. I have danced to this on subway platforms from Harlem to Brooklyn, and hummed along everywhere from the center of a swirl of autumn leaves on Central Park West to a rapidly thickening blanket of snow on 1st Avenue. It’s a country song, but it’s a got a city heart, and the city heart is full of joy.
 

 
Have a Cuppa Tea, The Kinks: From Muswell Hillbillies, but driven by the spirit of Village Green Preservation Society this is indeed an entire song about the role of tea in British society. I like to listen to it on my way to work while, yes, drinking a cup of tea.
 

The Kinks - Have a Cuppa Tea, 1972

 
Boys on The Radio, Hole: When Courtney Love is down, she’s down; but when she’s up, she’s radiant and ascendent and nothing can stop her. I am not going to lie, I wasn’t really a Hole fan back in the ’90s. But I’ve come to have an abiding love for Courtney Love in general, and this song in particular, and how it encapsulates how some of us are doomed to always love the boys on the radio, even if they are rotten to the core, and don’t love us any more. I also like to contemplate it as a counterweight to the Felice Brothers’ Radio Song; the other side of the coin, the darkness their romantic light chases away.
 
Hole--Boys On The Radio--Live @ Ottawa Bluesfest 2010-07-09

 
All My Things, SWiiiM: I like the build-up to the drops, the way the synths sparkle and shimmer, and then, whub whub whub, here it comes, trouble in paradise. I would have given all my things to you / I would have bought diamond rings for you. It was good, maybe, but now it’s gone bad. Maybe it was always a losing proposition, a missed connection that should have continued to be missed. It was better that way. Maybe.
 
SWIIIM - ALL MY THINGS - (DIRECTED BY CHRIS ACOSTA)

 
I Don’t Recall, Lavender Diamond: I just wrote about them last week, but I am bringing it back because the crystalline purity of Becky Stark’s voice is just that beautiful, and because this is another song I like to use to start the day. It is both wrenching and lovely, and – I am realizing just now – a song about heartbreak that is meant for grown-ups. If you’ve ever rolled over and realized half of you – your life, your plans, your feelings about important things like breakfast foods and appropriate places to sit at the movies – was abruptly missing, but you still had to fumble through your day and weren’t quite sure how to do it, here is a song to listen to while you figure it out.
 

 
Storm and Stress, Field Report: Go to a car. Put this on. Crank it up. Sit in the parking lot, watch the sun rise or set or the rain fall or the snow slowly pile up, and let it roll over you like a majestic steamroller.
 

We All Come to the Same Place, Rhubarb Whiskey: Because my people are the traveling kind; the ones who wander; who may or may not be lost, and if they are lost they probably like it that way; the ones who send me snippets of streetcorner moments, flashes of foreign trees, sunrises around the world, and more; the ones whose feet will never be wholly still; the ones for whom the roving dies hard.
 

Rhubarb Whiskey: Same Sad End

Rhubarb Whiskey is Emchy (accordion, vocals), Boylamayka Sazerac (guitar, mandolin, upright bass, vocals) and Sizzle La Fey (violin, mandolin, banjo, piano), and they’re back and better than ever with their second record, Same Sad End.

There are, well, not murder ballads, exactly; maybe a murder waltz? Murder two-step? Songs which could be used to score a romantic montage for Bonnie and Clyde?
 

 
Dreamy sad wandering songs:
 

 
And this one, which haunts me. I keep listening to it hoping the story will change and Ella will get a happy ending and she never does.
 

 

Should you need a revivifying drink after that, the band does have a signature cocktail!

Ships Sail Past My Heart: Rhubarb Whiskey, Cautionary Tales

Photo by Flip Cassidy

Rhubarb Whiskey are Boylamayka Sazerac (Oakland Wine Drinkers Union, Subincision; vocals, guitar, upright bass, mandolin, metal chain, railroad spike on accordion case) Emchy (Vagabondage, Oakland Wine Drinkers Union; vocal, accordion, clapping, musical saw mallet on spice jar) and Sizzle La Fey (The Sweet Trade; fiddle, mandolin, whiskey bottle). They are from San Francisco, and Cautionary Tales is their first full length release.

It is aptly named, as it is jammed full of blood- and whiskey-soaked tales, such as Banks of the Ohio and Birch Bones, both of which are far too bouncy to be called murder ballads. Murder gavottes, maybe, or murder hooligan’s jigs.1

There’s also Bears in the Lot, which is an extremely entertaining meditation on the perils of losing bets and drinking in Alaska, and Whiskey Neat which is mainly about the joys of drinking whiskey, pretty girls and narrowly avoided bar fights. But my favorite song, the one I have been listening to somewhat, er, obsessively, is We All Come to the Same Place.

It’s a song about chosen family; for me, it’s the song I would (will probably) put at the end of a mixtape for a new friend, or lover, to say: this is sound of my ravens rising and soaring over the frozen lake, wing to wing, and my swallows, descending after a long journey home; this is the song of the travelers lantern always kept burning on my porch, for loved ones, and because I, too, often take flight, and need the light in the distance to call me home; these are my people, this is my tribe, and we are the wandering, traveling kind.

Here is a live version, recorded at the Starry Plough in Berekeley, CA:

 

http://youtu.be/WxZbrDLfa6k

 

And if after reading all of that, you would like a strong drink, Rhubarb Whiskey can help you out there as well, for the name of the band refers to an actual drink.

For those of you who have ever tasted raw rhubarb2 and are now thinking Rhubarb and whiskey? Together? But I like having tastebuds!, know that I had the same concern, and inquired how it was possible to drink such a thing and not expire of acute bitterness. It turns out there is a secret ingredient.

Not so secret anymore, though, since below you will find the Official Recipe for Rhubarb Whiskey, courtesy of (and created by) Emchy:

Official Recipe
Rhubarb Simple Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 cup peeled and chopped rhubarb
Boil 1 cup of water, add 1 cup sugar, stir until sugar is completely dissolved, add 1 cup coarsely chopped and peeled rhubarb, lower water to a simmer, let simmer covered for one hour. Put into glass mason jar to cool and then refrigerate. Let sit at least one hour (a full day is better for flavor).

Once your rhubarb simple syrup is cool, add one part syrup to two parts rye whiskey (brand of your choice but don’t go too high end, that insults the whiskey and brings bad luck — we suggest Beam Rye or Makers if you need to get a little fancy). 1-3 ice cubes recommended. Now put on your favorite murder ballads album, drink up, and be careful — it goes down a little too easy.


1 The Hooligan’s Jig was a set dance I encountered at ceilidhs put on by the Cecilian Society at the University of Glasgow, while I was there. It’s not so much a set dance as it an endurance test. Basically you line up two rows of couples and then spend 10 (or more) diizzying minutes running through sets that involve swinging your partner, trading partners, and swinging some more. It’s tremendous fun, especially if you’re dancing with a large group of people who treat ceilidh dancing as a contact sport.

2 My grandmother had rhubarb growing in her backyard – wild or planted, I don’t know, but it was mixed in with asparagus – and I took a nibble of a stalk one afternoon, expecting it to be sweet, like rhubarb pie. It wasn’t; in fact it is still in among the top five unhappy food surprises I have ever had.