Albums
Fool For Love
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FOOL FOR LOVE, Paul Burch's fifth album
and first for Bloodshot Records will be released October 21,
2003.
FOOL FOR LOVE features 12 new Burch compositions on love in
modern life put to the beat of the midnight honky tonk sound
that is his trade mark.
"I tried to make a record like the one I've always wanted to
find by accident--one with songs that were wise, strange, and
sure when I'm unwise and unsure myself. The music one might
hear in a dream that you try in vain to remember in the morning."
FOOL FOR LOVE was recorded in Nashville and produced by PB with
his band, the redoubtable WPA Ballclub: Fats Kaplin, Richard
Bennett, George Bradfute, and Dennis Crouch, along with contributions
by Phil Lee and Tony Crow.
FOOL FOR LOVE is a truly modern country record. The songs whisper,
scream, tumble, and dance to a band of saxophones, steel guitars,
viola, piano, cello, tremolo, Wurlitzer, double bass, dog barks,
tom toms and baby cries, all recorded in the lively, spacious,
and beautifully textured sound that is the hallmark of the WPA
Ballclub recordings.
It rocks. It sways. It swings.
FOOL FOR LOVE is like no country record you've ever heard. |
Last Of My Kind
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Last of My Kind was inspired by the characters
in Jim the Boy, the New York Times bestseller by Tony Earley.
PB: "Tony, who is my neighbor in Nashville, asked if
I would play some old time country music to his reading at
the Southern Festival of Books. I offered instead to write
songs based on his characters. My idea was to give the Glass's
something like a Shakespearean aside--a chance to step away
from the action and talk to us in the voice they reserve for
their souls. My own grandfather was dying as I wrote these
songs so what started out as pure writing became something
more personal."
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Blue Notes
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Blue Notes is about the renewing power of
love and compromise. Blue notes refer to the bend in notes,
the sound between the cracks, the sweet dissonance that musicians
reach for that can't be easily notated. The arrangements were
inspired by the duet recordings made by Duke Ellington and Tennessee
bassist Jimmy Blanton. Blanton, first discovered by Ben Webster
and Billy Strayhorn playing in a hotel lobby in St. Louis (with
a teenage Miles Davis sitting in) was the first double bassist
to play with the freedom and inventiveness of a horn player.
The stellar upright bass of Dennis Crouch (WPA Class of 96 and
a student of country greats Bob Moore and Joe Zinkin) sets the
mood for each performance, threading the album's 12 songs together
into a seamless sound beyond category. A rambunctious cover
of Lester Flatt's "Head Over Heels" brings it all home. Richard
Bennett, guitarist and producer extraordinaire and life-long
fan of Johnny Horton and Jimmy Blanton, joins the WPA as does
poet and songwriter Tom House, Lambchop lacquer can captain
C. Scott Chase, Raymond McLain, and Tommy Goldsmith of the Nashville
Jug Band,
Along the way while recording this album....
George Jones planned to cut "Hitting Bottom" & "Foolish Things
the Lonely Do for his record "Cold Hard Truth". Jones drove
off a bridge before he had a chance to sing them. |
Wire To Wire
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Wire to Wire is a song cycle composed of
stories about a collective of characters winning, losing, killing
and loving in the world of a southern racetrack. The events
take place from sundown to sundown. Grammy winner Ranger Doug,
lead singer of Riders in the Sky, joins the WPA as designated
yodeler and records live with the band on "Some of These Days"
(co written and steel guitarist Paul Niehaus) and also yodels
exquisitely on PB's "Long Tall Glass of Water." Raymond McLain,
from Jim and Jesse's Virginia Boys, joins in on fiddle, banjo,
and harmony.
Unreleased songs from the sessions include Merle Haggard's "All
of Me Belongs to You", Duke Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much
Anymore", Kinky Friedman's "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus
Anymore", and Joe Turner's "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" by Doc
Pomus and Mort Shuman. |
Pan American Flash
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Pan-American Flash was first released on
the French roots label Dixiefrog after the label's owner and
art director chaperoned, by Ken McMahan of the Dusters, stumbled
upon the WPA playing in the Ryman/Tootsie alley at 2 a.m. They
requested "Setting the Woods on Fire" for a half hour
and a record deal soon followed. Recorded by Mark Nevers and
Hank Tilbury, Pan-American Flash was recorded live in the studio
with guest Jason Carter on fiddle courtesy of the Del McCourey
Band
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