No Depression - The Bi-monthly Journal of Alt- Country
#58 - July - August 2005
This is a bit of a strange one and had me wondering if this was a case of No Depression ticking an Equality box.
I picked up Salt the 2003 debut album by Lizz Wright on the Verve labal on a whim in a St Andrews charity shop. I have it currently on the Soul shelves but in reality it is pretty much a jazz album albeit with the occassional gospel number as befits a minister's daughter.
The article gives that background but concentrates on her second album Dreaming Wide Awake, again on the Verve label, and released on June 14 2005 shortly before this edition appeared.
Wiki states that while the record maintains the jazz and pop blend it incorporartes folk music which didn't stop it reaching number one in the Billboard Top Contemporary Jazz chart (pretty niche)
This is picked up in the article which tells how she confided in producer Craig Street that she liked artists such as Jeff Buckley, Damian Rice , Nick Drake and Fiona Apple.
They then discussed how they could use her favourite records as a template for the album Hence the likes of Neil Young's Old Man and Joe Henry's Stop appear on the album and feature below. Maybe different subject matter but to me they are not that radically different to the jazz of Salt and certainly not Alt Country. This is acknowledged in the editorial which concedes that it not country but that it does relate to the American musical landscape upon which the magazine has long been based
For the One from the Top or in the case of this edition the One From the Bottom I've gone for Graham Parker from his Bloodshot Americana paper. 2005's Songs of No Consequence is the album featured. I don't have that one so you are getting one from its 2004 predecessor Your Country.
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