Month: August 2026

I Guess It’s Something in My Brain: Ween’s ‘12 Golden Country Greats’ at 30

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When the Pennsylvania-based alt-rock legends called on the session players of Nashville, it blurred the line between heartfelt tribute and affectionate parody.

Ween was something else. They always were. Non-brothers Dean and Gene Ween (Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman) built a career on being impossible to predict, jumping effortlessly between genres while somehow making every stylistic detour sound unmistakably … like Ween. 

Their catalog is eclectic by default, stretching from homemade stoner tapes as teens in New Hope, Pennsylvania, to wildly ambitious albums that sound like they managed to cram their entire record collection (they are obsessive collectors) into one single release. 

They made versatility an art form. Which is why 12 Golden Country Greats released 30 years ago and set for a wide-ranging reissue on July 31 (remastered, outtakes, demos), remains such a fascinating album. On paper, it sounds like a foolish concept to head down to Nashville to make a traditional country record. But it turned out to be their most coherent and fully accomplished one. An anomaly in their discography.

Everything about 12 Golden Country Greats embraces classic country. Chuck DeHaan’s striking cover painting, entitled “Cattle Call,” resembles a Tex Ritter or Sons of the Pioneers LP from the ’50s. The music runs a lean ten songs in just a half an hour (hilariously enough, despite the title’s promise), echoing the concise format of vintage country albums. It draws from honky-tonk, Western swing and countrypolitan with remarkable authenticity, blurring the line between heartfelt tribute and affectionate parody.

And it sounds incredible.

Producer Ben Vaughn assembled an extraordinary cast of Nashville session musicians, convincing legends like Charlie McCoy, Pig Robbins, Buddy Spicher, Bobby Ogdin, Bob Wray and even The Jordanaires to take part. Collectively dubbed the Shit Creek Boys, they gave a master class in musicianship. Vaughn realized there was little point in having Ween play the instrumental tracks at all — these seasoned veterans could do it better, anyways, in true old-school Nashville fashion. 

Dean and Gene came in at a later stage to mostly add vocals and some not-so-traditional lyrics. Songs like “Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain” and “Piss Up a Rope” make it abundantly clear that Ween had no interest in writing a one-hundred-percent conventional country album. Their lyrics remain mischievous and sometimes deliberately provocative. Some undoubtedly feel more uncomfortable today than they did in ’96, reflecting the era they came from. But Ween’s provocations rarely came from malice. They thrived on poking fun at nearly everyone and everything, including themselves.

That balance is what makes 12 Golden Country Greats endure. The joke is never on country music itself. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek humor lies a genuine love for, and deep understanding of, the genre and its history. Strip away the sometimes eccentric and outrageous lyrics and you’re left with an impeccably played country record that could stand proudly alongside many of its influences. A set of songs that sounds as timeless today as in 1996 (or 1956 for that matter).

Perhaps that’s Ween’s greatest trick: Making it impossible to separate passion from pastiche. With 12 Golden Country Greats, they certainly succeed.

(Originally published in Tidal magazine, July 17 2026)

Kevin Morby: “100,000”

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Photo: Chantal Anderson

Kevin Morby is the heart of the heartland.

His recently released eighth solo album, Little Wide Open, is said to complete an “unintentional trilogy” (per a press release) about his vision of the Midwest — for the past decade, he’s once again been a resident of Kansas City. (The other albums in the trilogy are Sundowner and This Is a Photograph.)

Little Wide Open, produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner and featuring Bon Iver, Lucinda Williams and many more, finds Morby at his most accessible and forthright, with some of his finest songs to date (“Cowtown,” “Bible Belt,” “Dandelion”). Best of them all is “100,000,” an epic road trip through the forgotten towns and endless roads of the Midwest.

According to Morby’s Substack, his aim “was to have the feeling of being in a car on a highway that’s gradually gaining speed, going faster and faster, until it flies off a cliff.” The track builds from humble beginnings toward an epic finale, accelerating through vivid snapshots of the region. It reminds me a little of Harmony Korine’s tales from Xenia, Ohio, in Gummo, populated by “pretty girls / pretty sisters / twirling batons / blowing penny whistles” and “ugly boys / ugly brothers / die for your country / or one another / muscle cars / in the front yard / Master of Puppets / and Kill ’Em All.” As Morby continues rolling down the road, he zooms out on “100,000 people / 100,000 lives / 100,000 teardrops / right behind their eyes / 100,000 corpses / all sleeping in their beds.”

For Lubbock, Texas-born Morby, this is not just about being an outsider looking in. This is his homeland. He writes, “I like to walk the desolate mainstrips and sit at bars and people watch and go on runs through the quiet neighborhoods that almost always stereotypically end up running alongside some train tracks. Salina, Kansas, Odessa and Amarillo, Texas, Jonesboro, Arkansas, etc. God bless you all. The glue that binds this crazy fucked up country together.”

Kevin Morby might envision the song flying off a cliff, but to my ears he’s soaring into the great wide open.

Eleventh Dream Day: “It’s Not My World”

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Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day has remained one of the very finest guitar bands since the early 1980s, seemingly incapable of delivering a half-baked album since their landmark 1988 debut, Prairie School Freakout. In their early days, they managed to secure a major label deal with Atlantic, dropping some of their finest work with 1989’s Beet, 1991’s Lived to Tell and 1993’s El Moodio, with the middle child now finally back in the digital archives.

According to my vinyl copy, it was recorded “in a tobacco barn on the Niland’s farm in Cub Run, Kentucky,” with the core quartet of founding members Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean plus guitarist Baird Figi and bassist Doug McCombs (also of Tortoise fame). This new edition has been given a remastered overhaul along with a couple newly added songs.

Eleventh Dream Day created a monster of an album where ferocious guitar rock collided with ramshackle cowpunk, neatly held together by the irresistible vocal harmonies of Rizzo and Bean — think John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X. There’s a blistering, untamed energy hovering over the LP, perfectly exemplified by one of several standouts, “It’s Not My World.”

Lived to Tell tanked at the time, but some bands are more concerned about crafting timeless pieces of art, and this album remains vital today. In a fair world, Eleventh Dream Day would be superstars.

This reissue is a perfect opportunity to discover their greatness.

Lambchop: “Weakened”

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Photo: Ingo Petramer

For 40 years, Kurt Wagner and his revolving cast of characters, Lambchop, have constantly reimagined the great American songbook from their Nashville home base. They have always been a band fluctuating between different genres and styles — from minimalist to orchestral, folk roots to experimental sounds — touching on lo-fi, soul, post-rock and much more along the way.

Now, Lambchop just announced their 17th album, Punching the Clown, with the single “Weakened.” The song hints towards a more stripped-down approach this time, centered around Wagner’s tender voice, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on banjo, and a gospel-leaning choir. In the press release, Wagner adds some context:

in early 2024 i heard a song on the radio on my way to get some gas. just a minimal single chord strummed banjo and a small group of voices. it seemed perfect in the moment as the moment became perfect in itself. i never found out who it was, sounded kinda like early country gospel? … i wanted to make a record that emulated this kind of music.

Needless to say, they will succeed on their mission and it will be perfect.

Maisy Owen: “Dark on a Sunny Day”

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One of my favorite paintings is Christina’s World (check it out at MoMA if you can!), depicting a young woman in a field, her body twisted by a muscular condition, crawling towards — or perhaps just gazing at — a farmhouse in the distance. It’s a quiet, beautiful, unsettling image, evoking longing and loneliness, struggle and resilience.

Some of those same qualities can be used to describe “Dark on a Sunny Day,” the title track of Maisy Owen’s forthcoming debut. Whether coincidental or not, the cover art bears a resemblance to Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting. And it too leaves us with some questions, though Owen’s figure is not plagued by illness and appears more at ease and inviting. Resting against the house, she looks directly at us — the listener.

Maisy Owen is a young singer-songwriter from Nashville, rooted in a tradition mapped out by artists like Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Bridget St John and Vashti Bunyan. It’s fair to say that sparse, fingerpicked folk music is her home base, though it feels like this is the sound of an artist in the making. She’s clearly carving out her own path, and one that will be interesting to follow.

“Dark on a Sunny Day” has evolved over recent months (based on earlier YouTube clips) into an electric, steady, minimalistic band-driven piece, underpinning Owen’s angelic whispers and haunting poetry. It’s all wonderfully assembled, the sound of a magnetic new voice for tomorrow echoing the hopes and struggles of that painting. This is Maisy’s world.

Mike Richmond: “Small Southern Towns”

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Of all the pioneering bands to emerge from the college rock scene in Athens, Georgia, Love Tractor might be among the most underrated. Appearing alongside peers like the B-52’s, R.E.M. and Pylon, they played a key role in growing the city’s music scene from 40 Watt Club beginnings to global prominence — without quite making that leap themselves.

I first encountered Love Tractor through the massively influential (for me) documentary Athens, GA: Inside/Out. Their somewhat introverted, largely instrumental presence — complete with clarinet, if I’m recalling correctly — didn’t hit as immediately as the more visceral Kilkenny Cats or Flat Duo Jets, but it marked the beginning of a long and lasting relationship. Over time, Love Tractor evolved into a more song-oriented outfit, with a run of smart, distinctive albums culminating in 1988’s Themes from Venus. They called it a day soon after that release, but various reunions and side projects have followed in the years since.

Fast forward to 2026, and we get the first taste of co-founder Mike Richmond’s debut album, Without An Audience. The LP was recorded in Athens with a group of friends including pedal steel maestro John Neff, bassist David Barbe, drummer Joe Rowe and more, from bands like Drive-By Truckers and Sugar.

“Small Southern Towns” is not only a return to a scene or an era, but a deeper dive into Southern mythology. It plays like a love letter to the region, and maps what Flannery O’Connor called “Christ-haunted,” with Mississippi stops at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak and Elvis’ birthplace in Tupelo.

And most important of all, it’s a beautifully crafted song — somewhere between jangly rock and lush Americana, delivered by a seasoned storyteller exploring the South in all its glorious contradictions.

Ed O’Brien: “Blue Morpho”

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Photo: Steve Gullick/Transgressive

Following his first solo album as EOB in 2020, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien retreated from the spotlight, grappling with a period of intense depression. As he struggled to navigate emotional trauma and life’s turbulence, he found a spiritual guide in the Kentucky-based novelist and poet Wendell Berry, using his phrase “To know the dark, go dark” as a compass for what would become a long journey toward faith and recovery.

Gradually, O’Brien rediscovered a sense of peace in nature, his surroundings, and himself. This music is the result of that journey. He emerges from the darkness with a body of work that feels as healing and spiritual for the listener as the process that shaped it.

With support from key collaborators including Adele producer Paul Epworth, composer Tõnu Kõrvits and flutist Shabaka Hutchings, O’Brien has crafted something truly special, and quietly beautiful. Four years in the making, the first single, “Blue Morpho,” carries the promise of a new dawn with its welcoming sound of birdsong, lush string arrangements (performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra) and soft touches of psychedelic delight.

Ed O’Brien found light in the darkness — inner peace and an appreciation for the beauty of the world around him. This is the personal soundtrack to that spiritual odyssey, but it speaks to us all.

The Delines: “Can You Get Me Out of Phoenix”

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Photo: Paolo Brillo

The Delines write songs like short stories. Or maybe it’s the other way around — actual short stories set to music.

For nearly 15 years now, the Portland, Oregon, band has created gorgeous music at the crossroads of folk, Americana and soul, but most of all they serve as a vehicle for Willy Vlautin’s cinematic, slice-of-life storytelling.

Vlautin, formerly of Richmond Fontaine and an acclaimed author, has a keen eye for the outsiders and down-and-outs among us. The forgotten and invisible ones, far from flashy headlines and glitzy commercials. People working double shifts to make ends meet. The untold stories from thousands of motel parking lots. The quiet hardships as portrayed in recent films like The Florida Project and Nomadland.

Their new album, The Set Up, is out now, another collection steeped in down-to-the-bone realism. They’re all great, but this week’s pick goes to “Can You Get Me Out of Phoenix.”

Did I tell you my dad died in his car?
Had a heart attack
In Lee’s Liquor parking lot
A row of thousand-dollar suits
Hung from a back seat pole
In his trunk was everything else he owned
And underneath the spare, we found twenty grand
My mother took the money and put his ashes in the garbage can
But later on I got them out

Now that’s a piece of poetry and music you should spend some time with.

Hiding Places: “One Hand”

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It’s a great time to be alive for those of us with a soft spot for artists seesawing between slacker Americana and fuzzy guitar rock. Wednesday, MJ Lenderman and Sluice come immediately to mind. Hiding Places can easily be included in the list. Beyond a shared musical sensibility, they all have roots in the same fruitful North Carolina scene. Their EP Lesson was produced by Colin Miller (Lenderman, Indigo De Souza), they’ve shared stages with Wednesday, and they’ve been touring with Sluice. Now based in New York City, Hiding Places seem to have found just the right combination of their rural Southern roots and urban Northern roughness.

“One Hand” is a reflection on long-distance relationships driven by a dirge-like beat, one-riff acoustic guitars and the dreamy voice of Audrey Keelin, all constantly under threat of being swallowed whole by surging, distorted six-string attacks. This push and pull between tender softness and the untamed beast creates a quietly hypnotic tension. Embrace it with both hands.