John Prine and Nanci Griffith: The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

No Depression went from one of the best magazines ever that wrote about Americana music, to being the best site today for the music. I check the site every day, to learn, to listen, and to enjoy.

Today there was this little treasure from 20 years ago. If you've ever been in a spot in your life where you just want to be left alone, you'll instantly catch on to this song. And, if not, Prine's and a young Griffith's voices just meld together, with Prine's voice taking on the characteristics of a footfalls on a gravel road and Griffith's like wind on the trees.

No Depression's new Web site rocks

It's out, and by all appearances the new No Depression Web site just might be on its way to being a success.

About nine months ago, the founders/editorial staff at No Depression Magazine, a publication geared toward alt/indie music, realized that the decline they were seeing in advertising revenue was going to continue and the magazine was a sinking ship. So back then they made plans to retire the printed magazine and enter the digital world. That's not an easy thing to do. The print world and the digital world work under two completely different business models, and frankly, it seems that not too many understand how to make money in the digital world. I don't know, that's for sure.

But what I do know is that the new ND site gives me everything that I loved in the magazine, plus some of those extras that you can only get in the digital world.

The site is rich in its coverage of alt/indie music. Every time I picked up a copy of the magazine I found myself Googling names of bands and artists I had never heard of, and checking them out on YouTube and MySpace. And after surfing the site for a couple of days, I'm already fans of The Bittersweets and The Decemberists, two bands I wasn't familiar with.

And I'd like to tell the staff of ND right now that they can pick up phone and call their advertisers that just yesterday, after visiting that site, I logged on to Amazon.com and ordered CDs by The Bittersweets and Chris Knight, both of whom I learned about from ND, and Lucinda William's new CD, who I knew about when I discovered ND, but who had a darn good feature on her in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. I know this because I have the cover pinned here to my bulletin board. ND sold CDs; it's just a damn shame the advertisers and labels didn't or couldn't see that. And I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the advertisers' blindness causes talented, creative, passionate people to keep pursuing their passion.

The site also has all the great content (that's digital talk for writing) that was in the magazine. The writing has always been the foundation to ND. It's intelligent writing about music and life written by writers who obviously know about both and which some people realize are as inseparable as whiskey and A minor. That's the side of life that alt/indie music captures. Just get a look at something Grant Alden wrote about Chris Knight. I defy you not to keep reading through the beginning, even though he doesn't mention Chris Knight's name after the first paragraph until about halfway through. And I defy you not to want to hear some of Knight's music after reading this piece.

And that piece is also a pretty good example of maybe why it was a good idea to shelve the printed piece and bring ND into the 21st digital century. There are links and embedded mp3s and a video from YouTube--all the sights and sounds that paper just can't deliver. And in the end there are comments from readers. Somewhere on the new site a reader wrote that now we can read all the letters that were written, not just the ones that they chose to print. That give and take is so important to the today's readers, and it's great that ND recognized that.

They're still selling t-shirts and they've put together a "bookazine", which is a compilation of their writing. NoDepression.com's publisher, Kayla Fairchild, who was a co-publisher of the magazine and who headed up the digital effort, asks in her initial column for people to spread the word, do a little viral marketing.

She writes:
"There were the expected naysayers along the way who said it was virtually impossible for content providers to monetize on the web. I’m asking you to help me prove them wrong. I believe it can be possible for writers to be paid for their craft. You can help by visiting the site often, telling your friends and associates about it, becoming a member of the site, buying the bookazine directly from us, supporting our advertisers, buying music, shopping at Amazon by entering through the No Depression web site as we get a kick back from every purchase you make, whether it’s music or not. It’s going to take an army to keep this thing alive and I’m counting on you."

In essence, we're in this together, which we knew or should have known all along, whether we're talking perpetuating good music and art or riding out the economy.

Life after No Depression

The final issue of No Depression is on the newstands with Buddy Miller on the cover.

Okay, a few things here. If you don't know what No Depression is, it's a music magazine that's been around for about ten years that covers American music, and by American I mean that place in America where rock, country, folk, the blues, and even punk all merge. It was named after (pick one):

• No Depression in Heaven, a 1936 song popularized by the Carter Family
• No Depression (album), a 1990 album by the alternative country band Uncle Tupelo
• No Depression, a term used synonymously for alternative country music.

The song by Uncle Tupelo goes like this:

And if you don't know who Buddy Miller is, you've got one good chance to learn all about this pillar of American music 'cause you've got one more chance to hold the actual paper in your hands. I suggest if you really love music, any kind of music, you go pick one up and read it cover to cover. Not just for the great reviews and feature stories of some of the most amazing, talented artists in the country today, but also for the heartfelt letters saying goodbye and what the magazine has meant to readers and even the ads of companies saying thanks for all the great years.

But, life goes on, and darn, if I've learned one thing it's get up every morning because you don't know what's going to happen in the day.

Life for No Depression is going to go on, in the digital world. And if that doesn't make my heart skip a beat, I don't know what does. I love the music, I love the life, and I love the digital world. It's where we're all going, and I'm glad Grant and Peter, the two founders, decided to do this. They're smart guys, and they're going slow, as they should. Too many people dive into the digital world, not knowing what they're doing and where they're going. It seems Grant and Peter want to replicate the magazine online, which is a good start, but hopefully they'll see they can do so much more online.

So they're going online but they also have a deal with the University of Texas to print what they're calling a "bookazine." It will be more in line with the other books they put out, their introduction to alternative music and the best of ND.

As everyone knows, the Web's audience is short attention, click here, click there, link this, link that, and long, thoughtful, well-written copy like you'd find in the magazine may not do so well on the Web. So they're going to use the bookazines as a outlet for some of their longer stuff.

But still, check out the introduction to a review of Alejandro Escovedo. (And if you don't know who he is, you definitely need to start connecting with ND. And don't freak, a year ago I didn't know this stuff. ND is a great university for alt/indie music, whatever that is.)

I still remember the dreary January afternoon, ten years ago, when Grant showed me the mock-up of the cover of ND #14. It was the day before the magazine was due at the printer and I was helping with some last-minute proofreading. When I saw the words "Alejandro Escovedo: Artist of the decade" splayed to the right of Glenn Hilario's illustration, my first thought was, "You gotta be kidding. Alejandro is terrific, but what about, I dunno, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle or Lucinda Williams? Or maybe an omnibus nod to '90s alt-country progenitors Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt and Wilco?"

Grant had recently moved to Nashville and we were working in his second-floor apartment above a garage in southwest Nashville. When I asked him about the thinking behind the decision to lionize Alejandro in this way, he shrugged and said that there were just some artists you went to the mat for, and that "Al" was one of them.

Something to that effect anyway. Grant cited a couple-three other names as examples -- Billy Joe Shaver, the Bottle Rockets, maybe Steve Earle -- before going on to say that making the announcement two years before the decade ended was sure to get people talking, not to mention attract attention to a deserving and largely unsung artist.

So, you're into the music, right? You want to learn more, because all this sounds so cool, right? Last thing, go take the survey on the ND site to help Grant and Peter get a better idea of what direction they should be taking this project.

The Web ain't all about selling shit and surfing for porn. And ND the digital version is going to a great new neighbor, you mark my words.

No Depression is coming to an end

The March-April issue of No Depression magazine is the second-to-last issue that will be published before it shits the bed. I read the editor's letter on the subway yesterday, after buying it at Border's on Downtown Crossing where I've been buying it for the past year.

Great magazine, if you love alternative music, which is a label for music that I'm prefer to call just plain American. It's the music that's being written and played in America, divorced from the big corporate music world, particularly in Nashville.

The reason for the 'zine folding seems two-fold. Advertising is down, which is where a magazine earns its keep. And the music industry itself is in flux, and the before mentioned advertisers would be the labels, major and minor I suppose, and they don't know which end is up right now. They don't know how to run their businesses right now, and advertising (or media) budgets are critical pieces of the mix. I can understand what happened in the music industry to a degree, but you can't blame it all on the digital world and downloads. A lot of it was shear greed. The price of a CD is still upwards of 18 bucks or more. I still buy CDs, and probably will for awhile. I have an iPod, and download, and while I like being able to buy just one song rather than a whole album, there's still nothing like the quality of my home stereo playing a CD.

And I don't think what the labels get is that the business model has changed so dramatically, and like so many other dinosaurs, they just keep doing the same thing over and over again even though they're not getting the results they want. They are just dumb, dumb, dumb. Money is going to be in concert and beer sales and t-shirts and shit like that, and I learned about so many new artists through No Depression and yes, then went out and bought CDs and told all my friends about them because I get so stoked about talking about new music I've found and went to concerts, the most recent one being Steve Earle (who I learned about from the No Depression cover story a couple of months back) at the end of last month. (Allison Moorer opened for him, and the ad for her CD, Mockingbird, is advertised on the inside back cover.) Right now the cover of No Depression (January-February 2007) is pinned to the bulletin board of my cube here. Lucinda Williams is on the cover. I already knew about her before I found No Depression, but again, have seen her twice in the past year with the accompanying couple of cups of expensive crap beer.

The fat suits don't get viral marketing, social networking, or guerrilla marketing. They don't get that people like me push their CDs harder than they do. They just keep counting their money, and more to the point, they keep counting the money they're losing, rather than how their making it and putting more toward that.

And sorry, dudes, just like the rest of America, you may just have to take a cut in pay. Horrors. That's really it. It's really fat cats (hogs, really) feeding at the trough and are more willing to cut off their own snouts than share the trough.

But I'm getting off the point of losing No Depression. For me, who spends, hell, I don't know how much I spend on music and music-related stuff, but it's a lot, from CDs and magazines off the rack to guitar strings and shit like that, a magazine like No Depression was invaluable to me. And guess what, you fat hogs--I'm invaluable to you, but you're not willing to admit that.

Carrie Newcomer

I'm always digging for new music. Rounder, it seems, is pushing out some of its artists. You see it in magazines. Web sites. Suddenly you start seeing the same names, ads, records. I mean, Steeldrivers and Amanda Shaw suddenly show up on big pretty pages in No Depression, and on the Gather.com site for their Rounder Records sing-a-long or whatever it is their marketing people brainstormed.

I just don't go for that bluegrass sound though. And I didn't think No Depression did, either. But that's fuel for another blog.

There's a big PR machine at work out there. With YouTube and every other rich media site, what's a poor musician to do?

But Rounder and Gather also were pushing Carrie Newcomer. And not to diss Steeldrivers or Amanda Shaw, Newcomer soars above them all.

Beautiful voice. Deep, poetic, beautiful, thoughtful lyrics. Her site's pretty cool, too. Simple, and you learn a lot about her, which is so cool. You can hear her songs on her new album, The Geography of Light. You can watch videos of her playing a bit of each song, then explaining where she got the idea for the song.

I love knowing what's going on inside the singer. I want to know where they came from. Where their ideas come from. And while it seems that a lot of Newcomer's muse is rooted in the Lord (well, hell, she is from Indiana, what do you expect?) like the Bible her songs don't have to be taken that way. Just like a good Bible story, you can say, wow, that's a nice little story. Or you can say, oh, that's what it means!

A favorite download is Where You Been. Sounds like a song about a good friend. But she explains she wrote it because she began wondering where great prophets come from.

Here's a bit of text from her:

I come to expect holiness in unexpected places and that it is best not to limit where and within whom we look for the Sacred. A true compassionate and radical love has always been counter culture. Hope has always been an audacious act of belief in the possibility for something better. As Jim Wallis and others have stated, “We are the prophets we’ve been waiting for.

So, knowing that, here are the lyrics:

He was driving in to Chicago in a borrowed El Camino,
On a hazeless day in springtime I think the Cinco De Mayo.
Maybe it was St Paddy's Or the Gay Pride parade,
But I've never seen nobody light up the street that way.

Chorus:Brother/ Sister where you been? Hold on if you can.
Just do your best then
say, “Amen.”

Called in sick and spent the weekend, drinking St Paulies in Wisconsin.
I'd been fishing with my buddies most of Sunday afternoon.
And there beneath the halo of the Old Milwaukee sign,
He said, There's big ones in the shallows I see them all the time.

Chorus

I stopped into the Seven-Eleven, I was buying an Aquafina.
He was wearing knock-off sneakers I was nursing a hangover.
He said, “You're worth a lot more baby than you've ever dared to dream of.”
Like he knew all the secret sketchy places I'd been looking for love

Chorus

A tall skinny guy with dread locks said they're giving' out free bagels & lox.
So I took the kids and all my plastic bags and walked the seven blocks.
There were joggers and commuters, skate board kids and Goths.
There were drunks and dogs and meter maids in that downtown vacant lot.

He said, “The universe is unfolding and the center still is holding,
There’s enough if we just share it, now ya'all don't forget to pass the basket.
Blessed are all the good hearted, the poets and the dreamers,
And all us crazy holy hungry ones who believe in something better.”

Chorus

I saw Jesus on talking shop, with Buddha at the Starbucks,
I saw Gia and Ganesh, doing double Dutch in the park,
And Mohammad was throwing popcorn to the pigeons and the sparrows.
And all us crazy holy hungry ones still believe in something better,

Chorus:

Pretty cool, huh?

Rainy day music

Welcome to Boston. It's May and cold and rainy.

And when I'm feeling particularly shitty, I try to cheer myself up buying music. (They're just CDs, John. They're not love.) I swear there was a point in my life when I was personally responsible for Newbury Comics' stock to rise significantly.

Bought Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and what's becoming my favorite magazine, No Depression. Miranda Lambert, the crazy ex-girlfriend, is on the cover. I almost bought her CD but...I had $11.00 credit and didn't want to overdo it. My checking account is still on the critical list.