Beyond Sacred Steel

Robert RandolphIn an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument’s Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.
When I asked him recently where that put him in the pedal steel’s development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. “Somebody has to put me there,” he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. “I wouldn’t put myself there.”
But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.

A New Spark

WilcoOne reviewer has called Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky the best Eagles record the Eagles didn’t make, and it’s impossible to shake the timeless soft-rock vibe in the sound, the vocals, and the easy pace. “A Ghost Is Born was to me really jagged … abrasive,” bassist John Stirratt said of his band’s last studio album. “And this record has a certain warmth.”

Simple Is Not Easy

Carrie Newcomer: 'The diner people weren't done with me'Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer tells about a friend who leads a group of people who knit for the local food bank. They’ll set up somewhere and knit with a sign that reads, “Knitting for the Food Bank.” “People will come and talk to them,” Newcomer said in a phone interview last week. “Folks who might not maybe go up to someone on the corner and talk to somebody who has a sign will sit down with a group of women knitting and talk about the issue. ‘What’s happening with the food bank?'” The lesson is that directness often isn’t the best way to reach people. “Sometimes our most powerful activism, our most potent activism, comes out of what we love,” she said.

Promissory Notes of a Better Life

Martin MullIn the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs – suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child’s understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived. White people, the show seemed to be saying, are beyond ethnicity and culture. Mull doesn’t see a meaningful connection between that work and his paintings, which are presently touring the country in a retrospective. The only link, he said in a recent interview, is that they reflect his childhood in Ohio. “It comes from the same vein,” he said, “the same mother lode.”

Good Stupid

Delbert McClintonModesty is a rare commodity in the world of rock and roll, but Delbert McClinton thinks it’s an essential element of writing a good song. “Being a songwriter, you have to know humility, and embrace it,” he said in a recent interview. “In songwriting, there’s what we around here call good stupid and bad stupid.”