| |
|
I brought him up in a thread on international music a while ago, but he deserves his own, dammit.
Let's just start with -- and I mentioned this in the Happy thread in Convo -- Life is Unbelievable. The video does a pretty good job of summing up why I like Southworth -- ostensibly it's poppish folk, I guess, but there's a feeling of romantic antiquity to it, like he's getting his ideas from an old trunk in the attic, a trunk that was just there when he moved into the old tumbledown house by the railroad track that for some reason still has steam engines on it.
Another YouTube bit I like: an off-the-cuff performance of Mary Poppins' Feed the Birds segueing into his "February Farmer".
John Southworth is the only musician I have ever written to, out of the blue, to thank for making music. And he sent a postcard back, which was very nice of him.
And -- five albums on, countless hours of listening in -- I still can't say what exactly I like so much. It might actually be a (shudder) Canadian thing; a lot of his music touches on things like opening general stores and being the owner of a small country airport; traveling the railroad and growing pumpkins. There actually seems to be full rendition of "General Store" and bits of other songs at the John Southworth Web site.
He also looks like what I imagined Stoats looked like before I saw pictures of Stoats. |
|
|
