Eight Good Gillys

Why eight? Because “eight good Gillys” just sounds good. All those vowels sounds syncopated with hard Gs.

As noted in yesterday’s post Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are coming to Tipitina’s tonight and I can’t promote the show because it’s sold out. Maybe they’ll do an Indian song or some slow Cajun ballad to thank us.

I’ve been an unabashed lover of these two for a decade or so mostly because they get right down into my favorite aesthetic of humanity. Despite a fascination and curiosity about science (particularly astronomy and geology), I cherish and hold tightly to the dirt of us – the dark, tragic, suffering, brief, lives we live out as jealous, flawed, incomplete, yet exuberant souls. Despite the tall buildings and the superfast computers and internets and global economies and what not, the human mind and its constructs still live out the mythos of our spiritual, fire-worshipping ancestors and even further into the essence of that DNA, the apes and animals we descended from. Sometimes we use our departure from them to illuminate our nobility and sometimes we use our intimacy with them to justify some savagery. We like to play fast and loose with our ascendance to the higher order when it behooves us.

To me, and to artists like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and Trilobite and The Handsome Family and former G Bitch professor Harry Crews, the soundtrack of life is in minor chords on stringed instruments rather than Dubstep electronica. It’s filmed in Super 8 not Blu-Ray. It’s a moldy Southern Gothic novel and not a glossy photoshopped magazine cover.

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Lyric: “Well, Miranda ran away – Took her cat and left LA – That’s the way that it goes – That’s the way – She was busted, broke and flat – Had to sell that pussy cat – That’s the way that it goes”
But, WHICH pussy cat?
The Way That It Goes

An uplifting song with near-perfect phrasing and lyrics.
Wayside (Back in Time)

This used to be a Radiohead song…
Black Star

A heartbreaking ode to sharecroppers…
Annabelle

I have a particular fondness for this song because I have loved many a barrom girl and ultimately married one too. Also, it’s a waltz.
Barroom Girls

A driving, fast-paced murder ballad that ends with the would-be rapist with his own whiskey bottle in his neck from deus ex machina.
Caleb Meyer

Among the most plaintive and deliberate of the pair’s songs, about the passage of time revealing truths …
Revelator

Love song to a drug …
My Morphine