I discovered the song “Big road blues” from the album Gearshifter on Pandora (which I’ve grown way attached to recently – kudos to Brian for the tip). This song is way cool, and I suspect I’d really dig the whole album, but I can’t seem to find it for sale anywhere obvious. Anyone out there know how I might part with some of my hard earned cash in return for this fine sound?
Thanks in advance!
In return I’ll leave you with a shot of Eagan’s fine banjo playing, one of my favorites from an excellent chili cook-off and jam session some of our fine students put together back in June.
i don’t know about this louis youngblood fellow, but i’ve been meaning to check out pandora too! isn’t there something like 10 free hours? does it do a decent job of matching one’s tastes?
Actually, it’s just free forever as long as you don’t mind the ads, which is totally trivial at the moment. (I’ve usually got it running in some other tab in Firefox anyway, so I don’t care if there’s an ad there :->.)
I’ve been pretty impressed with what it’s given me based on what I fed it. It’s pointed me at some very cool stuff I didn’t know (like Youngblood), and quite often gives me something I have and really like but didn’t tell it about. It runs in phases, and occassionally it decides to give me several sappy modern country ballads or predictable jazz covers I could do without, but I just tell it that I don’t like those and they go away (for a while at least).
It doesn’t have everything I might want (it’s pretty much crap on cajun/zydeco or tejano), but it often surprises me with what it does have.
All in all, it’s pretty cool, and I can access it anywhere I have a web browser, which is nice since I can’t rip our entire CD collection everywhere I use a computer.
When I was Down in chicago for the chicago blues fest this year he was playing, i got the great chance to meet him and hear his wonderful music. I emailed the label down in mississippi and they told me that they do have a cd and that they might be able to send me one but they never did, Louis said he does not like to be all “technical” so he dosent get cds out much.
Do you remember the label’s name? I’d be willing to harrass them for a copy and see if I have better luck. Personally, I obviously wish he would record more, but I can definitely appreciate his desire to focus on other things. Studio work can be pretty tedious, and quite different from playing live.
This reminds me of a great quote from the excellent book It came from Memphis which was something like “The best bands (songs?) never get recorded, the best recordings never get released, and the best releases never get played”. Sadly, I don’t remember who was being quoted there, and don’t have time to go fish out the book.
It’ll be interesting to see if on-line music (band sites, iTunes and friends, Pandora, etc.) eventually change some of that, or whether the control of the record labels and the problems of simply managing the massive volume of music (and books, etc.) out there makes this sort of problem a mathematical inevitability.