Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i UNCUT

“Everybodyknows it’s coming apart/Takeone last look at this Sacred Heart” OCCASIONALLY, in the years since his death, I’ve found myself idly speculating on what Leonard Cohen would have made of the cynicism and chaos around us: Trump, Brexit, Covid… I’ve found his benedictions strangely comforting, their contemplative maturity, wisdom and humanity otherwise lacking elsewhere during a crisis-strewn and deeply weird 2020. This month we revisit an earlier incarnation of Leonard Cohen, as he faces a series of impossible challenges during the 1970s. It’s no spoiler to reveal that he overcomes them, of course; but it’s the striving that counts. Looking back through my inbox, Stephen Troussé, the writer of our cover story, sent me an email early on in our discussions about the piece, where he says, “It feels thematically…

THE man whose name became synonymous with overblown music-biz hype 50 years ago keeps a considerably lower profile in the 21st century. Brinsley Schwarz didn’t do any interviews to promote 2017’s solo debut Unexpected, and is only tentatively sticking his head above the parapet for its forthcoming follow-up Tangled. It wasn’t always so. In 1970, the band who took their guitarist’s name were the focus of a notorious publicity stunt when their management and label chartered a plane to fly 150 journalists from London to New York to witness Brinsley Schwarz play their debut US gig at the Fillmore East, opening for Van Morrison. However, a combination of plane delays and limo crashes on the way into Manhattan resulted in most of the assembled hacks missing the Brinsleys’ set altogether.…

JOHN Moloney, drummer of the free-flowing Massachusetts group Sunburned Hand Of The Man, also doubles as their archivist. For him, presiding over a collection of 300-plus hours of video and recordings of every psych-folk-funk jam in their 24-year existence is only partly about historical documentation. It also offers, in a wild and unknowable landscape of improvisational music, something like a map. “Memory would not help us out,” says Moloney. “I can listen to something and not remember a minute of it. Yesterday I found a bunch of handbills in a folder and there were a couple of shows I don’t remember being at. We played Tonic in New York [in 2004] with Chrome Hoof and Sunn O))) – I don’t remember anything about it!” “At the end it’s flat-out berserk…

1 MUSH Lines Discontinued We open this month’s selection with a song from the thrilling Lines Redacted, the upcoming second album from Leeds trio Mush. You can read more about the group and their sound, with its shades of Pavement, Television and Blur, in our full review on p30. 2 JANE WEAVER Heartlow Weaver has been making music since the ’90s but her new LP, the diverse, grooving and colourful Flock, recorded around Covid lockdowns, could be her finest yet. Luxuriate in its cosmically wistful opening track while reading our feature with Jane on p52. 3 LAEL NEALE Blue Vein This Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter explores the unknown possibilities of the retro-futurist Omnichord on her second album, Acquainted With Night. “Blue Vein” is a perfect example of Neale’s…

Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor has been busy preparing a successor to 2019’s Terms Of Surrende r. Due in late March, Quietly Blowing It MERGE is described by its creator as “a retrospective of the past five years of my life, painted in impressionistic hues”. The album finds Taylor and his group of trusted players – among them Scott Hirsch, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and Dawes’ brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith – reaching deeper into Southern soul, gospel and spiritual jazz. Nashville great Buddy Miller guests on the title track and Anaïs Mitchell co-writes “If It Comes In The Morning”, while “Sanctuary” notes the passing of John Prine. Also out in March is the latest from New Orleans-based singer-songwriter, Esther Rose. How Many Times FULL TIME HOBBY is heavily inspired by…

For pedal-steel guitarist Chuck Johnson, his relationship with his instrument is much more about the complex qualities of sound in acoustic space than any notion of ‘virtuosity’ that’s often applied to solo instrumental music. “Whether I am playing an acoustic guitar, working with electronics, or composing for an ensemble, my intention is to explore the language and palette of that platform, and hopefully convey some feeling in the process,” he concurs. “How can I use that sound to activate the sonic properties of a room? How does it feel when that happens?” To that end, his new album, The Cinder Grove , is particularly instructive; each song draws on the reverb and echo qualities of various DIY performance spaces in his hometown of Oakland, re-rendered electronically. “I used to live…

VARIOUSARTISTS Cuba: Music And Revolution Culture Clash in Havana, Cuba – Experiments in Latin Music 1975-85, Vol 1 SOUL JAZZ 9/10 Priceless comp goes beyond Buena Vista. By John Lewis CUBA is the island that taught America how to dance. For much of the 20th century it provided the United States (and, by extension, the Western world) with every key dance craze: the mambo, the rumba, the cha-cha-cha, the charanga, the bugalu. When jazz moved into the concert halls it was the Afro-Cuban influence that kept bebop on the dancefloor. And, throughout the 1940s and ’50s Havana was where American hedonists went to party. But then came Fidel, and Che, and the 1959 revolution, and the Bay Of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that cultural dialogue between…

FOR the last decade, Jane Weaver’s currency has been the conceptual. Whether that’s the haunted fairy tale of 2010’s The Fallen By Watch Bird, or the kosmische preoccupations of The Silver Globe, the sublime record that brought her to the attention of many in 2014, she’s a musician who’s strived for something beyond herself. “There are all these themes that are quite easy to grab on to, and to explore their world,” says Weaver from her home outside Manchester. “As an artist it’s easy to go off on a big tangent – and it’s lovely. My last two albums, Modern Kosmology and the Fenella album Fehérlófia, were about [pioneering abstract painter] Hilma af Klint, and a Hungarian animation film where a horse gives birth to a boy.” Weaver is not…

BOND International Casino had seen better days. Initially, a New York dining club during its ’30s pomp, it had since undergone a series of low-rent makeovers. After sitting vacant for several years during the late ’70s, it reopened as a nightclub and music venue – a garish multi-storey disco located in the grit of Times Square. But during three thrilling weeks in summer 1981, Bond’s was the hottest place in New York. It was from here that The Clash pulled off their most audacious coup. “They just took over New York, which is some feat,” recalls DJ and filmmaker Don Letts. “And they did it with style. It was fucking unreal.” After releasing Sandinista! in December 1980, The Clash spent a couple of months touring Europe the following spring. Management…

SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE (1971) Recorded with Bob Johnston in Nashville with the band who had recently played the Isle Of Wight Festival, Songs Of Love And Hate should have been a lap of honour, but instead proved to be the bleakest album of Cohen’s never-sunny career. Starting with the cripples and hunchbacks of “Avalanche”, it’s a long, bracing spasm of dejection that nevertheless delivered “Famous Blue Raincoat”, the latest of Cohen’s modern-day standards. LIVE SONGS (1973) Cohen had hoped to release two live albums to fulfill his contract but had to make do with this souvenir of his 1972 European tour (also featuring “Tonight Will Be Fine” from Isle Of Wight 1970). Though “Please Don’t Pass Me By” and “Bird On A Wire” are proud and stately processions,…

“I THINK what people have missed about Leonard is that they talk about his prowess as a writer or his longevity or his unusual artform or who he was as a womaniser or whatever. But I haven’t really read anything that’s written about Leonard that can convey to the reader what a sweet, sweet nature he brought to the world. “I spent my career as a woman in a man’s world, so it was even more important for me to be around someone who was respectful of women. To give you an idea of what he was like, if we ever had to divide up between all the men on one side of the room and all the women on the other side of the room, Leonard would always be…

YOU’LL find the little town of Saugatuck on the shores of Lake Michigan. These days it is home to a thriving tourist industry, with visitors drawn by its historic downtown, full of galleries, boutique stores and chic restaurants. But on July 4, 1969 – Independence Day – a different kind of incomer descended on the town: 20,000 hippies and bikers, there for the second Saugatuck Pop Festival. Alongside John Lee Hooker, Arthur Brown and Muddy Water were several explosive bands from nearby Detroit – MC5, the Stooges, Bob Seger, Ted Nugent’s The Amboy Dukes and SRC – who were collectively turning the home of Motown into the hard-rock capital of America. Watching with mounting excitement were a band from Los Angeles considered so insignificant they weren’t even mentioned on the…

PART I “ART is not a ‘profession’. There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of Heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency to his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies a source of creative imagination.” (From the first proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919) SPAIN might currently be in turmoil, what with its armed forces’ flexing of musclebound strength posing a threat to its still unsettled democracy, but there are no ripples of unrest to disturb the afternoon siesta of a dozing Barcelona. Only the foolhardy tourists who flood the city every summer brave the unrelenting heat and dust of…

IN the 1940s, with the Empress of the Blues already long dead, jazz writer Rudy Blesh persuaded two of Bessie Smith’s sisters and her poisonous second husband, Jack Gee, to speak to him for a putative biography. Blesh was promised access to a trunk of unseen material – photos, music, letters – only for Gee to nix the project with what seemed an outrageous last-minute demand for more money. The trunk promptly vanished. Short on primary sources, later biographers managed to scratch together rough portraits of the Jazz Age giant who recorded 150-or-so songs between 1923 and 1933, but Smith’s story remains tantalisingly blurry. First published in 1997, Jackie Kay’s portrait-cum-character-study Bessie Smith: Singer, Icon, Pioneer brings no new material to light, but her new introduction makes a convincing case…

ON the autumn equinox, Robin Pecknold beamed a little ray of hope into a miserable year by releasing the terrific Shore – Uncut’s No 2 album of 2020. Sticking to the lunar calendar, he chose the winter solstice (December 21) to air some of those songs live for the first time in what was the most compelling livestream event since Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer. Recorded in St Ann & The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, the show opened with a rapturous version of Shore’s “Wading In Waist-High Water”, Pecknold joined by members of the Resistance Revival Chorus –a collective of women and non-binary singers – socially distanced among the pews. He then ascended to the organ balcony for an acoustic set in the half-light of the church’s electric chandeliers, playing…

IN late summer 2019, Cassandra Jenkins was asked to join David Berman’s band Purple Mountains. A long-standing fan of Berman’s work, she immediately cleared her schedule and began rehearsals for a three-month tour. Jenkins had been drafted in to cover Berman’s own guitar parts, “in case he stopped playing, or needed a night off”, she explains. “He was really struggling at that time.” But three days before the tour, Berman took his own life. Jenkins was knocked sideways: “I only knew him for four days but he radically changed my life in that short period.” Jenkins grew up in New York, the daughter of musician parents who soon drafted her into the family band, touring the country in a 1956 GMC passenger bus. Later, she studied at Rhode Island School…

Given that it’s been nine years since singer and poet Christopher Porpora released his last solo album as Cheval Sombre, it’s no surprise that the theme of time looms over the delicate chamber folk of Time Waits For No One . So how has he spent the past decade? “Just a life thoroughly lived,” he says. “Living fully is a way of earning songs, I’ve found. The 10 songs - an instrumental, classical piece, blues and a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘No Place To Fall’ – evoke a perception of time as linear, physical, sensual and shadowy.” The title track was recorded back in 2014, with the rest coming together with the help of collaborators including Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom. “Each time we are in the studio, I’m…

AERIAL EAST writes songs that are so personal that she’s not always sure she should play them. For “Ryan” and “Brennan”, two songs about old friends from her second album, “I specifically wanted to get consent from them before even sharing the songs with the label. They both said that they were very moved and that I didn’t need their permission, but it was still important to me.” East has made and left behind many friends in her life, as her family moved frequently when she was growing up, finally settling in Abilene. She may not sound much like Steve Earle or Guy Clark, but the specificity of her storytelling draws from Texas traditions. “I’m thinking about feelings when I write songs, but I knew going into the studio that…

Given the tumultuous nature of the Glaswegians’ early recordings, it may not have seemed like Mogwai were built to last. Nevertheless, As The Love Continues sees them cross the silver-anniversary mark with vitality intact. Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite explains, “The simplest answer is that we all still really enjoy it,” he tells Uncut . “If what you’re doing isn’t fun, then it’s pretty easy for everyone to tell. It is also harder to get people to keep listening. We are still really excited about doing something different each time, but having fun is the most important part.” That spirit of conviviality and collective purpose was especially valuable given how the pandemic affected plans to travel to the US to record last year. Instead, they holed up at home with producer Dave…

Soul Jazz’s Stuart Baker: record detective Where did you find these records? About 25 years ago I was in Havana recording a Santeria album for Soul Jazz and I started looking for old vinyl. I’ve been back a few times since. Eventually I collected hundreds of Cuban records and thought, “Maybe we should do a Cuban version of our NuYorica compilations?” Gilles Peterson had similar thoughts after visiting Cuba, so we put our collections together. Obviously, there was a lot of red tape to go through with the Cuban government! Apart from Irakere and Los Van Van, did you know about any of these bands? Not really! I felt like a detective. Very little Cuban music after 1959 is documented. I had to trace which artists stayed in Cuba and…

THE GORDONS The Gordons + Future Shock 1972 RECORDS 8/10 BAILTER SPACE Wammo: 25th Anniversary Edition MATADOR 8/10 Celebrating 40 years of noisy, hypnotic Kiwi rock AILTER SPACE are one of B the loudest bands ever to blast out of Christchurch, New Zealand. The long-running trio – guitarist Alister Parker, bassist John Halvorsen, and drummer Brent McLachlan – were renowned at home and beyond for the face-blistering, ear-battering, brain-bleeding volume of their live shows, which enhanced rather than obscured the sophistication of their compositions and the bruised romanticism of their lyrics. Their influence always exceeded their popularity, and you can hear the roots of 1990s alt.rock and 2000s indie rock in this pair of reissues from very different points in their career. Originally known as The Gordons, the band signed…

ON February 24, 1980, The Clash joined Joe Ely on stage at the Hope & Anchor in Islington. Ely and his band had already supported The Clash around London that month and would go on to record Live Shots at The Venue. But the Hope & Anchor session was unplanned. “We had a couple of days when we weren’t doing anything, so we asked The Clash if they wanted to do some jamming,” recalls Ely, who later appeared with them at Bond’s. “We just started playing things we knew, like old Buddy Holly songs and rockabilly stuff. And Clash things too, like ‘Jimmy Jazz’ and ‘I Fought The Law’. You had two complete bands playing on this little tiny stage about the size of a mattress. It’s real interesting, because…

IN 2009, the Black Keys were on the verge of something, but they weren’t sure exactly what. After years spent eking out a modest living on small labels and mid-level touring, they enjoyed a breakthrough thanks to a new label, Nonesuch, and a new producer, Danger Mouse. 2008’s Attack & Release reached No 14 in America and grazed the UK Top 40. Drummer Patrick Carney remembers that their goal had always been to play the Brixton Academy, but that, “We never felt that playing the O2 or somewhere like that was ever going to be attainable.” Behind the scenes, Carney was about to turn 30 and had just got divorced. To compound his woes, he wasn’t happy that his partner in the Black Keys, singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, had just released…

“UP ALL NIGHT” SRC, 1969 Unfiltered, energetic Detroit rock’n’roll from SRC, a popular live band who never achieved the success of their peers. “HELP ME BABY” THE FROST, 1969 Dick Wagner’s The Frost put out three high-energy, blue-collar rock albums in 1969 and 1970 – this was recorded live at the Grande. “LOOSE” THE STOOGES, 1970 A howl from the Stooges’ superlative second album, Fun House , with the Asheton brothers in perfect sync as they support Iggy’s louche vocal. “LAST LAUGH” CRADLE, 1970 Detroit was macho but there was also Suzi Quatro’s band – previously The Pleasure Seekers. This Cream-esque cut was recorded at the Grande Ballroom. “PRODIGAL MAN” AMBOY DUKES, 1970 Ted Nugent-led outfit edging towards metal. “Whenever we played with Ted,” remembers  Dennis Dunaway, “his band would…

The film suffers from being denied the use of any Bowie songs STARDUST Be wary when a film begins with a caption telling you that follows is “(mostly) fiction”. Let’s say then that Gabriel Range’s Stardust is ‘mostly’ a biopic of pre-Ziggy David Bowie, plus a certain amount of fancy. It’s 1971, and a surprisingly naive Bowie (Johnny Flynn) arrives in America for a promotional tour. His host and driver is publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron), seemingly his only ally at Mercury Records. From the start, the singer manages to baffle and alienate everyone from American customs officials – “It’s a man’s dress,” he explains – to DJs and journalists aggrieved at his awkward interview style. Stardust – not to be confused with a certain 1974 film that put to…

MLK/FBI OPENS JANUARY 15 Sam Pollard’s revealing documentary lifts the lid off J Edgar Hoover’s dirty ops campaign against Dr Martin Luther King. QUO VADIS, AIDA? OPENS JANUARY 22 Directed by Jasmila Zbanic, Bosnia’s Oscars entry features a galvanizing performance from Jasna Duricic as a UN translator trying to save her family in Srebrenica in 1995. BABY DONE OPENS JANUARY 22 Taika Waititi-produced New Zealand comedy starring stand-up Rose Matafeo as a tree surgeon in crisis over the prospect of motherhood. SYNCHRONIC OPENS JANUARY 29 Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan discover the pros and cons of a time travel drug in this sci-fi drama from genre specialists Benson and Moorhead. ASSASSINS OPENS JANUARY 29 Mind-boggling documentary about two young women who were tried for killing the brother of North Korean…

WHEN people talk about Bad Brains shows of the late 1970s, it’s often in the same sort of language that you might use to describe a UFO landing in your backyard. The band were an instant phenomenon: four young black men in sharp mod suits and skinny ties, playing the fastest, most technically proficient punk rock you ever heard. Remembering their show supporting The Damned in Washington DC in 1979, Henry Rollins told Australia’s Double J radio: “All these people at the front of the stage looked at each other as if to say, ‘What the hell was that?’ We could not figure out how humans did what we just heard.” “When you’re real, you’re not paying a lot of attention to the business side of things”DARRYL JENIFER Bad Brains…

IF John Lennon’s “Mother” was born in harrowing Primal Scream therapy sessions, David Bowie’s version originated in rather more luxurious circumstances. A request for a Lennon cover arrived at his Bermuda home in 1997 from Yoko Ono, who was planning a tribute album to her late husband; Bowie and guitarist Reeves Gabrels discussed the idea with drummer Andy Newmark on a night out at Newmark’s club to watch ’70s white soul band Kokomo. As Gabrels recalls, “Andy found a drummer and a bass player from a local gospel church and we recorded it with a mobile digital thing.” Yet despite the scratch set-up and breezy island vibes, Bowie was determined to tackle one of Lennon’s most intimate and traumatic songs. “It was a personal song to David too,” says Gabrels.…

“I’m high on codeine/And digging up shadowsin the backyard/Setting firetotheir graves” OVER the course of five albums with LA-based psych five-piece Wand, frontman Cory Hanson has charted a trajectory from the Ty Segallapproved 2014 garage-rock debut, Ganglion Reef, to 2019’s artier and more thoughtful Laughing Matter. The sense of change and development has been palpable, but even so nothing quite prepares you for the sumptuous beauty of Pale Horse Rider, his second solo album. Recorded with a three-piece in December 2019 at a home studio in Joshua Tree and then refined and enhanced by Hanson through January and February 2020, it’s an album that offers epic sound on an intimate scale, with country-influenced songs awash with steel guitar and spotted by delicate ambient textures that maintain a sense of sonic…

When did you write these songs? The songs were kicking around for a while and I was going back and forth trying some of them out with Wand but they didn’t really fit. Then in December 2019 we grabbed all the gear we could – me, Robbie [Cody] from Wand and Zac [Henderson] who engineered Laughing Gear – out to the desert in Joshua Tree and built a studio into this house and made the loosest record I’ve ever done. I made it with Tyler [Nuffer], who played pedal and lap steel, and Evan [Backer], who played drums and most of the bass and the extra instruments. We recorded with them and Heather [Lockie] played some viola, and then they went home and I was left to play with the…

XIXA Genesis JULLIAN/THE ORCHARD 8/10 Arizona six-piece and guests bring dark, intoxicating grooves KEEN followers of Giant Sand will already be familiar with Brian Lopez and Gabriel Sullivan, both having served in Howe Gelb’s loose collective in recent times. The singerguitarists’ other collaborators on the Tucson scene include Calexico and bandleader Sergio Mendoza, associations that feed directly into their own sextet, XIXA. Five years after Bloodline marked their recorded debut, Genesis feels like a defining moment. XIXA are driven by a fascination with Peruvian chicha, its cumbia rhythms underpinning the broad sweep of their music. It’s most evident here on the slinky “Eclipse”, a vivid no-man’s-land of coyotes, thieves and roads beyond the valleys that also blurs into psychedelia. The same hybrid strain propels “May They Call Us Home”, where…

IDEAS forever above their station, baroque two-piece Nirvana were thrown to the wolves somewhat in 1967 when they were billed to play an Island Records showcase at London’s Saville Theatre. With the stage still half set for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (featuring Cleo Laine and Bernard Breslaw), and the audience eagerly awaiting new rock sensations Traffic, Patrick Campbell-Lyons, Alex Spyropoulos and their mini-orchestra were barely audible. “We had only had three rehearsals,” Campbell-Lyons recalls ruefully in the sleevenotes to this remastered vinyl collection of their five studio LPs, plus an unreleased sixth. “It was a dreadful experience.” Wobbly-voiced aesthetes with no stomach for paying their musical dues, the original Nirvana found themselves on the wrong side of history as rock got heavy in the late 1960s, but…

You first met at La Gioconda on Denmark Street: correct? ALEX SPYROPOULOS: Everybody would meet along Denmark Street because there was so many studios and publishers. I met Patrick there, and it sparkled straight away. I’m Greek, he’s Irish; we were two foreigners and two opposites. CAMPBELL-LYONS: I’m a bit of a pessimist, he’s a bit of an optimist. There was no-one like us on Island. Spooky Tooth were talking about Don Covay or Sam & Dave; Stevie Winwood was talking about Ray Charles. When we first met, we didn’t talk about music: we were talking about James Joyce, Dalí and Buñuel. We brought something a bit different to the table. That Saville Theatre show supporting Traffic was quite a shock to the system. SPYROPOULOS: At that time, you couldn’t…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Birth Of Soul: Los Angeles Special KENT/ACE 8/10 Proto-soul and adjacent sides, deep and hidden, from the glitzy city FOR some, Los Angeles might not have quite the aesthetic and historical cachet, the cultural capital, of soul’s reigning, myth-heavy cities such as Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. But the West Coast city, long a creative ferment thanks to its central position in the entertainment industry, made significant contributions to the birth and development of soul. It offered support and succour to Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke in the 1950s, both relocating from Chicago to make a name for themselves; Ray Charles landed there for a time as well, working as musical director for blues legend Lowell Fulson. The Motown label would relocate from Detroit to LA in 1972;…

LINDSEY Buckingham is not alone among rock stars of his generation in observing that a song he wrote back in the 1970s has taken on new meaning in the present day. He introduces a sombre version of “Never Going Back Again” as a repudiation of four years of the Trump regime, while also acknowledging that it’s been a fairly grim time for him personally, citing “my separation from Fleetwood Mac” and “having a bypass”. He suggests both were equally devastating. Usually when an artist splits from their band, they endeavour to put as much psychic distance between themselves and their former situation as possible. This has never seemed likely or possible for Buckingham, and almost every song he plays on this (sometimes painfully) intimate livestream is either explicitly about Stevie…

CHARLEY PRIDE Country-pop superstar (1934-2020) HAD it not been for an injury to his throwing arm, Charley Pride may well have realised his ambition to become a top pro baseball player in the US. But sport’s loss proved to be country music’s gain. Blessed with a smooth baritone and an everyman touch, Pride became country’s first black superstar, selling over 70 million records for RCA. Only Elvis Presley shifted more product for the label. The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Pride started singing and playing guitar as a teenager, enthralled by the sound of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. He pitched for a number of minor league baseball teams during the ’50s and early ’60s, while also holding down heavy manual jobs and playing local gigs in Helena,…

LONG MAY NEIL RUN Thanks, Uncut, for your Neil Young Top 40 [Take 285]! After all the understandable furore over the botched roll out of Archives II and the madly overpriced anniversary reissue of After The Gold Rush, your list was a welcome reminder of what matters most: Neil’s music. There were tons of songs you could have included in your list, but what I enjoyed most were the first-hand recollections of so many wonderful musicians who’ve played with Neil throughout the years. Considering how many of his collaborators have sadly passed away – from Danny Whitten, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin to David Briggs and on through Ben Keith, Rick Rosas, Dallas Taylor and more – it was heartening to read such vivid memories from so many other surviving…