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July 2017
Features
THE
SISTERS
THE SECRET SISTERS ARE BACK WITH A NEW
BRANDI CARLILE-PRODUCED RECORD. THEY
TALK TOUGH TIMES WITH KELLY GREGORY.
12 The Secret Sisters
A
The siblings return with a Brandi Carlile-produced set and speak to Kelly
Gregory.
22 Glen Campbell
Douglas McPherson on the Rhinestone cowboy’s last stand.
50 Who Killed Country Music?
“We went through a really, really
terrible dark period years ago and we
ended up getting dropped from our record
label, and we went into bankruptcy, and
we were under a big law suit.”
SECRET
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rriving with heap loads of hype, vintage Western wear, and a
T-Bone Burnett produced debut, The Secret Sisters’ Laura and
Lydia Rogers had all the makings of the next big Americana act.
That was 2010, but in The Secret Sisters’ fairytale the princess
didn’t live happily ever after with the handsome prince. Sure, their debut
album cracked the UK albums chart Top 30 and the future looked rosy for a
while but a second album, Put Your Needle Down in 2014, was panned by many
critics and the Alabama siblings’ worlds crumbled when they were dropped
from their label and found themselves with barely enough money to stay on the
road and keep making music.
“There’s so much behind it,” says Laura, one half of the traditional-country
harmony duo. “We went through a really, really terrible dark period years ago
and we ended up getting dropped from our record label, and we went into
bankruptcy, and we were under a big law suit. It was just a really frustrating
time. We intentionally hold back some of that information just because of the
fact that it’s just music business related stuff that people, most people, don’t
really care anything about. Ultimately it came down to one of our business
relationships went sour. It resulted in the law suit that we faced and we ended
up going into bankruptcy, and then right after we filed bankruptcy our record
label dropped us and all of these things just seemed to happen one right after
the other. We just kept thinking, ‘How many more bad things can happen to us
and us still be able to have a music career?’
“It’s funny because even though we had such a good record cycle with our first
and second record, and even though we had so many incredible opportunities, it
can all turn over in just a moment. It can go in the wrong direction really quickly
and it really knocked us off our game, so to speak. I heard a quote the other day
about how you have to live life going forward but you understand it looking
backwards. I think that in the heat of that moment of the frustration and feeling
like we would never make another record or do another tour and we were ready
to get regular office jobs, I think now looking back we see that chapter as very
necessary to our growth and we wouldn’t be where we are right now if we hadn’t
encountered all of that trouble. It was miserable but we’re out of it now.”
The sisters were crushed and retreated to their homes in Northern Alabama
where they started embracing what could be a future without music and, as a
result, no songs were being written.
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Duncan Warwick reckons somebody did and names some of the likely
suspects.
GLEN
CAMPBELL
58 My Darling Clementine
The Rhinestone Cowboy’s Last Stand
DAUGHTER ASHLEY CAMPBELL AND
PRODUCER CARL JACKSON TELL
DOUGLAS MCPHERSON ABOUT
THE COUNTRY-POP LEGEND’S
REMARKABLE NEW ALBUM.
MDC’s Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish tell Duncan Warwick how
their latest has gone country soul.
W
hen Glen Campbell retired
from the road and made a
documentary about his battle
with Alzheimer’s disease, it
looked as though the soundtrack from that film
would be the last music we would hear from
the man known around the world for such
timeless hits as Rhinestone Cowboy and By The
Time I Get To Phoenix.
Immediately after completing his Goodbye
Tour in 2012, however, Campbell went into a
Nashville studio to record one last album while
he still could.
The just released result, appropriately titled
Adios, is a revelation. Although he was in the
latter stages of a disease that has since left
him unable to communicate with even those
closest to him, he sounds, on the Jimmy Webb-
penned title track, and other covers, including
Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’, like a
singer in his prime.
“Glen Campbell is the greatest singer I ever
heard,” declares Carl Jackson, a lifelong friend
of the singer, who produced the album.
“I joke with people sometimes, I make a bet
with them and say, ‘Go on YouTube and see if
you can find a bad note by Glen Campbell!’
“The guy was simply amazing,” continues
Jackson, who maintains that no autotune or
studio trickery was needed in the recording
of Adios. “I worked with him for 12 years on
the road and he was like a machine, vocally. I
see old TV shows that he did and they sound
like they’ve been tuned or tweaked. He was an
R
Reviews
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WHO KILLED
country music
noun
noun: country music
1
a form of popular music originating in the rural
southern US. It is a mixture of ballads and dance tunes played
characteristically on fiddle, banjo, guitar, and pedal steel guitar.
COUNTRY
MUSIC ?
asks Duncan Warwick
W
ho killed country music? It’s the ultimate
question and one that’s been with us
for some time. Well, actually, it comes
and goes, falling in and out of favour depending
on the prosecuting attorney at the time. There are
many in the business who say reassuring things
like “Oh, it’ll be okay. Country music goes in cycles”,
and “Oh, it’s like a pendulum. It just swings back
and forth between traditional and pop”. But surely
now it’s gone too far and it ain’t ever coming back,
even though Chris Stapleton seems to have tried
his darndest to try to drag it back to something
recognisable.
Kris Kristofferson may have once said, “If it
sounds like country that’s what it is” but the thing is,
it doesn’t and it ain’t!
As if proof were needed, you’ve only got to look at
(but please don’t listen to) Sam Hunt’s Body Like A
Back Road which has been the Hot Country number
one song for months, but is it a country record?
Answer: not in a million years. It might be many
things but country is not one that comes to mind and
the fact that it’s even included on a country chart
just shows the lack of integrity amongst people in
the business.
Talking of integrity, has Keith Urban got any? It
would appear not if his single The Fighter, which
features Carrie Underwood, is anything to go by. In
fact, neither of them have any yet they are considered
two of the biggest names in country music. The
Fighter is pure PWL and it could have been the
followup to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up
except it’s nowhere near as ‘soulful’. Keith Urban has
come up with a decent pop song but it’s arguably
even less country than Body Like A Back Road. That
sickening piece of lame-assed R&B/rap rubbish.
Imagine this, somebody who is a non-country fan
Regulars
Charts
23
Page 22
30 Album Reviews
48 Live Reviews
4 News
8 Tour Guide
11 The David Allan Page
18 Nice to meet y’all - Hillfolk Noir
29 CanCountry
54 Nice to meet y’all - Casey James Prestwood
57 Americana Roundup
62 Nice to meet y’all - Holloway Road
13
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listening to The Fighter back to back with a-n-other
record from the current pop chart would they be
able to tell which, if any, were a country record? I
think not. And anybody, country fans included, are
you able to discern what actually makes it a country
record other than it’s released by a Nashville label
and it’s by an Australian former country singer who
sold his soul for a fast buck and the winner of a
talent show whose heart may have been in the right
place once but is now seduced by stardom? Because
the record company have labelled it country and
both artists have a history on the country charts
must be the only criteria for making it a country
record? It sure as hell isn’t the instrumentation, it’s
not the production, and in this instance you couldn’t
even argue it’s a song about real life any more than
Donna Summer’s I Feel Love was.
Perhaps one of country music’s ongoing problems
is that anyone who declares themselves a ‘country
fan’ seems willing to accept anything bearing that
label. Good, bad, doesn’t matter, if it’s labelled
country it must be brilliant and it also must be
country. Evidence of this phenomenon can be
witnessed every year at the CMA Awards show and
what used to be called ‘Fan Fair’ where any ropey
old second-rate pop with a country label will be
embraced by today’s country fans.
At this point I’m probably starting to sound a
lot like the old fart that I am but is there anyone
out there who could suggest that Sam Hunt is as
cool, let alone as country, as Dwight Yoakam?
Somewhere between 1986 and now, it’s all gone
horribly wrong and we seem to have reached rock
bottom. I’d like to know who is to blame for what
once might have been murder, but is now the
massacre on Music Row. This ain’t country music,
this is genrecide!
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Nice to meet y’all...
CASEY JAMES PRESTWOOD
& THE BURNING ANGELS
“To play country music the right way takes
a very dedicated, disciplined, obsessed
kind of person.”
I
n a world where country music is becoming harder to
find, a new hero steps up. More than anything Casey
James Prestwood wants a rawness to his sound and
honesty in his music. And there’s good reason that it
turns out like classic honky tonk.
“Good music is good music,” says the Virginia-born
singer and so ngwriter.
“I just like my music really raw and honest for the
most part. I try to create music in this way. If it ends up
sounding like older country that’s because that’s the
music I truly love.”
Now based in Colorado, Prestwood’s been chasing
the honky tonk dream for long enough to release a Best
Of The Early Years, but his latest album, Born Too Late,
might be his most accomplished to date.
Prestwood revels in the whiskey-soaked barroom
sound of vintage honky tonk despite having been a
founding member of rock band Hot Rod Circuit, and if
you were to ask him about his sound he reckons he’d tell
you it’s, “Country....watch their eyes roll, then I tell them
it’s good,” he says with a laugh.
It’s been four years since his last release, Honky
Tonk Bastard World, but the proud father and husband
explains the lengthy gap. “We were going through lineup
changes. The guitarist on Honky Tonk Bastard World,
Jamie Davis, whom is a fantastic picker, wanted to move
to Nashville. He did and now plays in Margo Price’s band.
“Then we brought in Adam Lopez, another great
guitarist, and almost instantly started making Born Too
Late. We recorded that record over a years time on the
road, in five different studios.
“Adam left the band, as did long time friend, producer,
and steel guitarist, John Macy. So there were a lot of
changes happening in the lineup and the approach to
our, then, recording style.
“When we did HTBW we were a tight unit, rehearsed
bar band, that all contributed rehearsed tunes. We
recorded the record live at Manuel Cuevas’s house in like
four days. We had guests on the record but not as many
as Born Too Late.
“Born Too Late has a lot of folks on it. So it took more
time, and the material was often written for a three song
session, as opposed to HTBW, where we cut 15 tunes in
a quick chunk.”
These line-up changes re-enforce Prestwood’s
confidence that one day his brand of country music
might be accepted in the mainstream as it once was,
even though he rates its current state as “dismal,” before
adding, “I’m not a negative person, though.
“I understand it’s just been a long game of a ‘bait and
switch’. While constantly trying to keep its sound ‘modern’
or hip/young, country music has completely lost sight of
itself.
“To play country music the right way takes a very
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MY DARLING CLEMENTINE The New Testament...
MICHAEL WESTON KING AND LOU DALGLEISH TELL
DUNCAN WARWICK ALL ABOUT THE COUNTRY SOUL
OF THEIR NEW ALBUM - STILL TESTIFYING.
A
64 Americana & UK Country Charts
65 Billboard Country Charts
Courtesy of Billboard Inc.
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s each My Darling Clementine album unfolds it’s as if we, the
listeners, are witnessing a slide show of a stormy marriage,
or perhaps even, dissections of a marriage on a series of
microscope slides. Real-life husband and wife Michael Weston
King and Lou Dalgleish have reached deep into their souls to bring
forth the gritty drama of relationships. Like a kitchen-sink drama, it
is quintessentially British, but with universal themes that have been
responsible for nearly every song ever written, love, and its deterioration.
If you’ve not personally witnessed their subject matter you darn well
know someone who has.
Yes, it’s a stage persona Michael and Lou assume when they are My
Darling Clementine, and yes there’s a certain amount of artistic license,
but their songs are frequently dark and hard-hitting. Not only that, but
they manage to fold their stories seamlessly into memorable tunes and
present them with real country twang. It doesn’t hurt that Michael is a
seasoned troubadour and Lou comes from a theatrical background, or
that they have surrounded themselves with some of Britain’s best roots
musicians for their projects either. For their latest release, their third,
My Darling Clementine take us down a country soul path. MWK has long
been a fan of the whole Memphis, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, Muscle
Shoals thing so this probably shouldn’t come as any surprise.
Besides, MDC is a constantly evolving entity, and Michael admits it was
a conscious decision. “With the last album we had a track, Our Race Is
Run, which is sort of going down that route and I think the first album
was obviously a clear remit to make this album that sounded like George
and Tammy and we did it and thinking that would be it but obviously
things have evolved and Clementine has taken off to some extent. So here
we are at album three but we didn’t want to keep making that same kind
of country record, not because we don’t love it but it’s like, ‘Well, we’ve
kind of done that’. It was just a natural evolution I think really. The album
is not as country soul actually as maybe, if it had been down to me, that it
would have been.”
Lou adds, “As Michael was saying it wasn’t sort of like, ‘Right, every
song on this album has got to be country soul’. As far as I’m concerned
we just wrote a bunch of new songs and we instinctively were leaning
towards country soul in our writing for some reason and some songs
were obviously out and out country songs and some of them weren’t. The
songs were what they were and had their own genre.”
Michael agrees, “ Yeah, but we decided that we would have less fiddle.
There’s hardly any fiddle on this record; it’s more strings and there’s not
as much pedal steel as on previous records and obviously there’s more
horns. So the soulfulness comes from the arrangements, I think, as well.
But then you’ve got songs like Friday Night, Tulip Hotel which is kind of
a waltzy, country, singer-songwriter song, Since I Fell For You could have
been off the two previous Clementine records, Tear Stained Smile has got
a kind of an Elvis Return To Sender vibe about it with the tenor sax and
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