Nels had a “wanderlust” and traveled around. I imagine it sounded like that, but without the magic and sense of purpose.” In it, he describes something called “jojking” where an old Finnish hermit (who keeps bees in his coat) sings unintelligable, monotonous songs into the smoke and fire.
I’m reading a collection of Norwegian folk tales at the moment (half my heritage) by Jonas Lie. Music wasn’t anything meant to be performed for or with anyone at that time. As he puts it, “ For a big chunk of my twenties, I was essentially a hermit, living off the grid in a dirt house way out of town in the middle of the desert. In his early 20s he started writing and playing songs on his own, but was too restless to give it any serious thought as a career.
#Chief of female laughing in the wind 2001 how to#
I hadn’t learned how to distill anything down to where it could be digested.” Then came some long-winded, beat-influenced stuff. We ripped off the Beach Boys and our big hit’s chorus went ‘surfing California, is like eating a plum.’ We were more ‘surfin safari’ (the bad stuff), less Smile or Pet Sounds (the good stuff). He recalls: “The band’s average age was about 8. His early efforts (“horrible, I think,” he stated) revolved around a garage band called The Black Blasters. “I always played and wrote songs,” he says. He had songbooks and taught himself a few chords and began playing Beatles and Dylan songs. Tambourine Man” by age 5.įrom the age of 14 onward, he always had a guitar with him. Nels could sing his way through “The Hour When the Ship Comes In” and “Mr.
He would pick out melodies on the piano and beat out Dylan songs on the autoharp thanks to a songbook that came with it. The Bob Dylan, country and old folk albums seemed “pretty square” at the age of 15, but later, around 21 years old, became “the awesomest.” There was a piano in the church his mom worked at and an autoharp at home. He started listening to records in his parents’ collection. The family wound up living in California, where he remained through his high school years. Are you listening, Sundance disciples?Īs usual, I needed to know what elements conspired to form this seer of visions. And all this paradise has sucked the raging river dry…” A film outro waiting to be plucked. For somewhere around the 50th time, I sit transfixed, listening to “Rented White Sedan.” It starts, “It’s a pretty good road, and it cuts through pastures framed in cottonwood. While his website lists Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen as heroes, NelsĪndrews has Jack Kerouac in his veins as surely as if he tied off his bicep, and injected him into a bulging vein. He sings them in a husky, smoky baritone over melodies that sound, aptly, like film soundtracks. Nels has traveled through the outskirts of landscapes, both inner and outer, and brought back cinematic stories inside of songs. Jumping horses midstream, sagebrush to washboard road you dart…” “Wake from a dream, you’ve got a jackrabbit heart We’ve stepped through a portal to somewhere else. Maybe it’s a haze of dust as the late afternoon sun picks up motes that float past. It might be the detritus of machinery left to rust on the side of a road. However they are reached, they offer something exalted to the artist who gets there and mines their secrets.Ĭase in point: Nels Andrews’ latest album, Off Track Betting. The challenge for the artist is to get there. They can be actual, like rocky coastlines or desert dunes. There are far edges to life’s landscapes.
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