Laura Cantrell - When The Roses Bloom Again

Hello everyone. I am going to write Adam's blog today.
[editor's note: If I was Stephen King, I would say, "Uncle Stevie's gonna be your driver today, kiddies!"]

Who I really am is Chris Myers, sometimes known as The Christopher Myers around these parts. I would previously ramble at The French Inhaler blog, but that quickly turned into a dream diary or something. I'm not sure when I met Adam Hopkins. The first time I remember seeing him was in high school when I noticed that he was part of some weird cult that sat in a hallway all the day long and refused to go to class. And in the odd chance that they weren't sitting in this hallway, you could tell they were part of this cult because they had "Mr. Belvadere" [sic] written in white-out on their backpacks. To this day, I don't understand how he, like I the year before him, won the "Dumb Kids Math Award" by just sitting in that hallway all day. Because of that, I would argue that I haven't met the real Adam Hopkins, yet.

For my first post, in true Friends Recommend fashion, I'm going to ramble on about a Recommend that was already very near and dear to my heart. This one was mentioned on my good friend Ricky B's list:



I wouldn't say that I hated country music growing up. I sorta appreciated the Dan Seals Greatest Hits tape that my mom would play in the car. And there were worse things than the early-nineties WPOC that my dad would play in his truck. But I wouldn't say that I loved it.

In late 2000, I finally bought a two-fer of Gram Parson's "GP/Grievous Angel." From what I could gather, the style of music that I loved [Wilco, Evan Dando...] was an amalgamation of Big Star and Gram Parsons. Having gotten into Big Star [the pop side of things] a few years earlier, the time had finally come for me to take the leap and explore the more country side of the equation. Spend a week with GP, and you'll never again be fearful of the classic country drawl.

Fast forward six months and I owned everything that Gram Parsons had ever recorded. I had a girlfriend from Texas that introduced to me a few great Kenny Rogers songs and I rediscovered my love for this one:



Having never seen that video before until a few minutes ago, I can now safely declare Dan Seals as being my left-handed role model. I might discuss this video in full in a future blog. One of you needs to recommend it first, so please do it now!

At this point, it was debatable whether or not I knew precisely what Country Music was.

Then came July 12th, 2001: the fateful night when I first saw this beautifully-voiced Laura Cantrell perform. It says a lot about her performance that although I went to the show to see the headliner, my all-time favorite Teenage Fanclub, I found myself humming her "Not The Tremblin' Kind" and "Pile of Woe" on the drive home instead.

Over the course of the next month, I purchased both of her albums, "Not The Tremblin' Kind" and the apple of Ricky's eye, "When The Roses Bloom Again."

I agree with Ricky. This is a Top-5 album. It has usurped the Teenage Fanclub. The Gram Parsons. The Big Star. The Wilco. The Evan Dando.

It was the true impetus for me falling in love with Dolly Parton, discovering the Louvin Brothers and learning how to look past Lucinda Williams' crazy-ass voice [and to delete all of her self-indulgent/bluesy stuff from my iTunes].

The title track, coincidentally, was arranged by Wilco during the Mermaid Avenue sessions. They also recorded a version for the Chelsea Walls soundtrack, but LC's is truly the definitive version.



Recently, my fellow FR poster Michael Ward spearheaded a project where I was asked to make a CD of my Top 60 Minutes of music - songs that I could listen to at any time, any place and never tire of. The majority of the songs were released before I was born. The opening track to this album, "Too Late For Tonight," was the most modern song on the disc. The song is disturbing absent from the internet, but it is 2.5 minutes of pure country-pop magic. A beautifully weaved representation of how it feels to be apart from your true love:

I've been sittin' all night,
Listenin' to my records,
Makin' up my mind.
I'd call you up,
But I'm never on time,
And it's too late for tonight.

If you weren't so far away,
I'd just ring you up:
Got a lot to say.
But the city sky,
Soon will see it's first light.
And it's too late for tonight.

You brought me home one night and left me,
Standing on your stairs.
Turned around to lock your door,
But I wasn't even there.

That was a long time ago,
I'm thinkin', laughing:
An' I miss you so.
An' I'm all right,
But I can't close my eyes,
An' it's too late for tonight.

The hours are long and quiet,
An' it's drifting through my mind.
Some sweet, sultry night,
You'll be by my side.

I can see the sky so clearly now,
The silver an' fiery moon.
Oh, the record player humming so dearly,
In the other room.

Was it BJ, 1972?
He's wishin', he's hopin',
And he's feelin' blue.
An' I'm floating,
On a sweet lullaby,
An' it's too late for tonight.

Oh, goodnight, my dear, goodnight.

I'm sure you enjoyed having to scroll quickly past those lyrics. I don't know why I posted them. One of the greatest tips I can give to any sort of reader is to ignore anything that's indented or italicized. Its always tangential. Let's call that the "Rule of I."

Like a lot of great country singers, Cantrell only had a hand in writing 1/3 of the songs on the album, but has such an amazing ability to choose cover songs that she easily fools you into thinking that she wrote it all. She owns everything she sings. This album and its predecessor are perfectly crafted albums. "Yonder Comes A Freight Train" is the only hiccup on this one, but relatively speaking to some other singers, its hardly an atrocity.

Ricky's favorite song on the album, "Early Years," is also not easily represented on the internets. When I'm asked to do my top 120 minutes of music, this one would easily make the cut, along with a couple others from this album..."Mountain Fern," "Oh So Many Years," "Vaguest Idea." Holy crap, this is a great album.

I'm glad that I have Ricky to talk with about LC. We've driven to Philadelphia twice with the intention of seeing her perfom. Unfortunately, we only saw her once, because the first time, we accidentally got to the venue about a day too late. My bad. When we did actually get our act together to show up at the right place and time, it was to our disappointment that she was opening for some non-descript singer and was relegated to only a 40 minute set or so. That didn't stop her from absolutely wowwing us, regardless. Afterwards, we found Laura at the bar and told her how much we loved her and she made us feel like we were the greatest guys in the world. Oh man, that lady.