Simrit, Yael Meyer, Family Folk Revival, Jennell, and Ingird Michaelson

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Time to clean the decks again, so here are a few short reviews to alert readers about new releases.

Simrit Kaur is a Greek-born, South Carolina-raised Sikh, a phrase that probably just set off a few "New Age" alarms. Get over it. Simrit performs sacred chant music, but her musical influences include: Greek legend Nana Mouskouri and ancient Byzantine music, Jeff Buckley, Bob Marley, Led Zeppelin, and The Grateful Dead. Plus Loreena McKennitt, which makes a lot of sense because Simrit's dreamy cadences, like McKennitt's or Enya's, often tumble out of frothy mixes. You'll hear bells and angelic harmonies behind her, but also percussion and peddle steel. Songs like "Kal Akaal" are at once deeply meditative, but the bass notes are heavy and vaguely ominous and the feel is evocative of quieter Renaissance folk rock offerings—think Pentangle. "Pure" uses electric guitar for the effect a sitar might induce in an Indian raga, but Simrit's voice has all the power and ornamentation of a pop singer. About that voice—it's one for the ages. Her songs are so gorgeous you might find your pacified mind disconnects from your sashaying body. (By the way, all Sikh women use the surname Kaur in the same way that all males use Singh.)

Speaking of intriguing voices, Yael Meyer is worth adding to singers-you-should-check-out bucket list. In her own way, she's as meditative as Simrit, but she does it more in a folk/pop vein. She's a Chilean-born, Los Angeles-based artist in the indie pop/folk range whose latest release Warrior Heart (Kli Records, 2014) generated some buzz. The title track is a nice mix of lush pop and energetic polyrhythm that creates a solid aural base for Meyer's voice. Hers is delicate palette, but she uses her 'small' voice in confident and interesting ways that make it sound bigger than it is. A personal favorite is "Everything Will Be Alright," an upbeat song with a slightly quirky backbeat and clipped end-of-line syllables on the chorus that punctuate the arrangement and add silent contrast to her light vocals. Meyer won't blow you away with power but—like the TV and movie soundtrack works to her credit—her voice is that background lilt that makes you take notice when you least expect it.

There's a band from Magnolia, Texas that calls itself Family Folk Revival. That's based largely on the fact that three members of the quintet come from the Lankford family, but aside from a few forays into (mostly) acoustic music ("Marfa," "Trash") there's not much on their new record Water Walker (Rock Ridge Music) that evokes a coffeehouse scene. FFF calls itself a "psychedelic rock and roll band" and that doesn't quite cut it either, though lead vocalist Mason Lankford evokes Jim Morrison on songs such as "Dream" and "I Found God." A better descriptor would be to call these guys moody garage country. Thick thwacking bass lines frame the breakdown song "I Drew a Line," and "Darlin'" feels like bluegrass from the place where the mountain stream drains into a swamp. A lot of FFF songs have dark edges and arrangements—the echo chamber used in "Everyone Loves Everyone," the spooky feel to "American Standard," and the grungy guitar and bass of "If It Don't Kill You (It ain't Love)." But yeah, these guys are country. You don't get much more country than a line like line: Now I'm drunk again tonight/Like I was the night before that/And the night before that/And the night before that. But you know what? Slap any label you want on them because they're just damned good. If I were their manager, though, I'd make them get a new moniker. (Try an Internet search on Family Folk Revival and leave yourself extra time!)

Does the music industry ask women to go by one name because it sees them as interchangeable widgets? Here's hoping that a young singer from Wyoming billed simply as Jennell doesn't let Nashville turn her into a replacement part. Her music evokes the indie pop/club music side of things (especially Sweden's Robyn) and her new EP Home is filled with bubbly hooks and energy. You can hear her youth in songwriting way too heavy on ooo-ooo-ooo and woo-ooo-oo filler, but this young woman knows how to use her voice. She can reach up for diva stuff, but she builds to it and has an infectious catch that she uses to good effect. She's strongest, though, when the arrangements ratchet down. "Feels Like Home" and "Pave My Own Way" are winners because she controls the vibe, whereas the other three songs, though they have their virtues, feel more like the mix is controlling her. Lots of promise, though—if she can avoid widget syndrome. [No videos available.]

I can't tell you the number of young women I run into who'd like to be Ingrid Michaelson when they grow up. Small wonder. If you think pop music has to be banal, check out her back catalog. Her sampler A Summer Night Out illustrates why she's an underground goddess. First of all, she owns the arrangements, not vice versa. "Time Machine" is gutsy and bluesy, with Michaelson's voice matching the grit of the brassy horns. In like fashion, she uses heavy bass as the dark counterpoint to her bright voice on "The Way I Am," a song that hold another key to her success: her willingness to take chances—by bringing a cool jazz ambience to pop in this case. On "Warpath" she absolutely abuses what we think about pop by squeezing it into some hand jive and layering it with swamp rock. I could go on, but you really need to hear her—if for no other reason, you'll understand why tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings swoon when her name is dropped. (She's the coolest thing in glasses this side of Tina Fey, by the way.)

Rob Weir

Izzy Young's Greenwich Village: When Art Triumphed over Commerce

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IZZY YOUNG TALKING FOLKLORE CENTER (1989/2015)

Directed by Jim Downing

MVD Visual 52150

* * * *

If the name Izzy Young rings no bells, t'is time to educate yourself. A superb re-release from DVD Visual will help you do so. In 1957, Young—fueled by the energy of the Folk Music Revival movement—sold his life insurance policy and opened a storefront on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village called The Folklore Center. He gave it that all-purpose name because he wanted it to be more than a hootenanny venue, though it was certainly that. In 1961, Young produced the first concert for a kid calling himself Bob Dylan.  Dylan even wrote a 'talking blues' song in Young's honor titled "Talking Folklife Center." The Folklife Center was a drop-in magnet for those identifying themselves as bohemian, countercultural, or unorthodox—a place to hear poetry, discuss politics, watch dance performances, catch a concert, learn about progressive causes, or find publications not sold at your local newsstand. The same year Young welcomed Dylan to the Folklore Center, he led an important free-speech battle in New York aimed at overturning a stupid ordinance that banned singing folk music in Washington Square on Sunday. You could (and should) call that event a precursor of the countercultural Sixties. Young also DJed a progressive music show on WBAI, bankrolled a few publications, wrote a column titled "Frets and Frails" for Sing Out! Magazine from 1959 to 1969, helped bring The Fugs to prominence, and welcomed hundreds of artists to the Center. In many respects, Young embodied the idealism and anti-materialism of the late 50s and 1960s. As he put it, "I couldn't have had a better time, or earned less money."

 Alas, the dream didn't last. Young closed The Folklife Center in 1973, moved to Sweden, and opened a Stockholm version of his vision, where (at age 87) he still presides. This film was originally aired on Swedish TV in 1989, and recounts Young's visit to his former Greenwich Village haunts. Although it centers on Young, one cannot help but muse upon the death of pure art, the decline of idealism, and the triumph of soulless commercialism. That is to say, it's sad for reasons other than the fact that many of those who appear in the film are now dead: poet Allen Ginsberg (1997), musician/anarchist Tuli Kupferberg (2010), former New York Mayor Ed Koch (2013), folksinger Pete Seeger (2014)…. In the film, the Village Young knew is already on its way to becoming a high-rent district for the moneyed classes. The Center site was empty, high rents having driven out several tenants since Young left 15 years earlier. Young noted he was able to open it back in 1957 in part because he paid $75/month rent for his apartment in a neighborhood now occupied by the nouveau riche.

We also see Young back at the mic at WBAI, where old friends such has Heather Woods, Danny Kalb, and Marc Silber polish off a few standards. We also see him with Allen Ginsberg, who does a fine version of "Father Death Blues" before discussing how "workaholism" is a neurosis; with Kupferberg, an unreconstructed anarchist who justified stealing from the rich; and with Ed Koch, who rather presciently opined that "bohemianism is a state of mind" and that artists that missed out on buying cheap property in the Village ought to think about Brooklyn and the Bronx. Koch may have missed the mark on the Bronx, but he was spot on concerning Brooklyn. Brooklyn was also where Young spent much of his youth, and we see him there making bagels with his brother, Oscar, a union baker; and singing Yiddish folk songs with his mother. Later we see him in Peekskill with Pete Seeger—talking about folk songs, of course.

Director Jim Downing was onto something back in 1989. He gives us subtle glimpses of the downside of gentrification: fast food franchises in spots once occupied by family businesses, sleek limos clogging streets once given over to youth culture, and street characters whose seediness results from poverty rather lifestyle choices. Above all, he shows ubiquitous symbols of commerce—the bucks that replaced the vibes. Even Art D'Lugoff's famed Village Gate closed five years after this film was made; a CVS now stands there and can anyone argue that society is richer for that? Downing did with his camera what those being pushed out did in words; both are lamentations on how artifice supplanted art. As Ed Sanders (The Fugs) put it in his poem "The Five Feet": You've got to have five feet to skitter down the road/One foot in the grave/One foot in the glitter/One foot in the gutter/One foot in the glory/One foot near the Grail. This small film shows us a remarkable man—Izzy Young—but it shows what is lost when you take away everything except the glitter and the gutter. I generally don't get nostalgic about the Sixties, but this film (and a steady diet of hollow commercialism) induced waves of it.      Rob Weir

PS—This film can be viewed as a $3.99 rental on YouTube if you can't find it elsewhere.  

  

Safekeeping: Memorable Characters, So-So Plot

SAFEKEEPING (2015)

Jessamyn Hope

Fog Tree Books, 371 pages, #978-1941493069

* *

Subtitle Jessamyn Hope's debut novel "Where's Dagmar?" Or maybe, "Whither Israel?" Hope's sprawling novel centers, in part, on the fate of a precious heirloom broach with such a long history that it's no longer clear whether it should be in someone's personal possession, or on display as a symbol of Jewish heritage.

The novel's central tension lies in the fact that it does lie in personal hands–those of Adam, a 26-year-old drug addict living in New York City, whose ownership of it is tainted. Though he is a very secular Jew, Adam seeks redemption on many levels; hence he flees New York for Israel with only the broach and the clothes on his back.  His only plan is to cleanse himself by giving the broach to a woman named Dagmar. Why? Because the broach once belonged to his (now deceased) grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, who briefly lived on Kibbutz Sadot Hadar after Israel was founded.  Adam learned that she, not his grandmother, had been the love of his life.

As a birth Jew, Adam is entitled to enter Israel, and as a family member of a former kibbutznik, he provisionally enters Sadot Haddar. Staying there will require finding himself before he sets off to find Dagmar—cold turkey detox, establishing some work habits, and abstaining from alcohol for starters. But the hardest part might be negotiating kibbutz politics and personalities. The year is 1994, and the old socialist ideals of Sadot Hadar are under attack by those who wish to abandon radical equality and bring the place into late 20^th century economic reality. Want some tension? Opposing all efforts to modernize is aged but fiery Ziva, an ardent Zionist, communist, and cofounder of Sadot Hadar; her son is on the other side. Moreover, Adam may not be the most screwed up camper on the premises. There is, for instance, the flirtatious Ulya, a young Belarusian lass who dreams of leaving the dreary kibbutz to live glamorously in New York. Never mind that her image is from a very old issue of Life Magazine. There's also Ofir, a teenaged Israeli soldier whose head is filled with music, not military strategy; and Claudette, a French-Canadian Catholic with such severe OCD that she can barely function. And why is Farid, a Palestinian man, always lurking about after hours?

The strength of Hope's novel lies with her memorable characters. As a storyteller, though, Hope occasionally stumbles. The broach is a classic Chekhov's gun, so we must get its back-story in flashback sequences and let's just say that The Red Violin it's not. The story arc is likewise too predictable, a problem made more acute by the fact that the narrative is driven by mysteries that don't require Sherlock Holmes to reveal. More to the point, it's a problem if readers unspool them many pages before they are officially revealed. Ironically, the non-Jewish Claudette is the only character whose actions surprise us.   

We are supposed to overlay Adam's story, that of the broach, and the fate of Sodot Hadar and then extrapolate that generational clashes over values are analogous to Israel's own growing pains. Sodot Hadar translates as "fields of splendor," and we are invited to muse over the question of how much can change (for people, communities, and nations) before essential character disintegrates into incoherence. Interesting premise—but, in my view, not one fully realized. But maybe that's because I'm like Claudette: a non-Jewish observer. I suspect, though, that it's because Ms. Hope has some growing of her own to do.

Rob Weir       

Violette, Cocetta Abbate, Gino Sitson, Bill Gable: ALL THAT JAZZ

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You’d never know that jazz is America’s least popular musical genre based on the number of recent releases that have crossed my desk. Here are four:

The most intriguing of the lot is from a young singer named Violette. To say her background is eclectic is an understatement. She was born in Paris and eventually studied at the Parisian Academy, though she spent most of her youth on Ars-en-Ré, a small island about 5 miles offshore in the Poitou region of France. Then she came to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her self-produced CD Falling Strong is a bilingual effort produced by Brian Bacchus, who also produces Nora Jones. Like Jones, Violette isn’t terribly concerned about genres. She’s in the chanteuse tradition of jazz, but her inspirations include everyone from Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel to Ella Fitzgerald and Michael Jackson. Among her dozen original compositions are ones that blur pop/jazz borders (“All My Life,” “I Heart New York”), those with Fitzgerald-like heavy staccato (“Falling Strong”), small combo numbers (“Coming to You”), and those with Brel-like fragility (“Annabelle”). It’s also an album of two distinct moods. When Violette sings in English she’s competent and confident, but when she switches to French, the emotions pop through with more drama. You can hear this in the swingy “Moi Pour Moi,” the catchy “Envol,” and the bouncy “Musique d’Amérique.” The English pieces are bon, but the French are trés bon.

I’ll call Concetta Abbate a jazz artist simply because she plays in jazz venues, but there really isn’t any clean category for her Falling in Time (Waterbug). She’s a classically trained violinist, but she calls this14-track selection “pocket-sized songs,” which is both intriguing and enigmatic—like her music. There’s nothing on this album longer than 4 minutes and several are two or shorter. In addition to her violin, Abbate also performs on harp, charrango, homemade box percussion, and glockenspiel. Guests add viola, cello, guitar, piano, bass, percussion, and trumpet. Her songs are frequently poetic and sometimes downright weird. I can’t promise you’ll love everything on this CD, but you’re unlikely to be bored!

Abbate gives us a Latin flair, but Gino Sitson is a voice of Africa (Cameroon). More precisely, Africa is among his voices. His VoiStrings (Buda Records 4707155) is aptly named and Sitson’s is a four-octave voice that can be as smooth as burnished wood or as taut as a violin string tuned to its breaking point. The band behind him is generally centered on piano, though double bass, percussion, cello, and viola help construct polyphonous arrangements that serve whatever Sitson pulls from his bulging bag of vocaltricks: scat, falsetto, wails, wounded cries…. Some of the tracks border on experimental, others pulse with African soul, and along the way we hear influences from gospel, the blues, and maybe some Papa Wemba and Bobby McFerrin.

Members of the rock band Steely Dan love the songs of jazzman Bill Gable and his album No Straight Lines (Autograph 502) explains why. As the title suggests, this is an album of departures and curves. It’s laid-back, but you name it and Gable weaves it into a song for his trademark counter-tenor voice: flamenco, pop, world jazz, Caribbean influences….  His lyrics don’t mince either: “Everybody sees/what they want to see/Every sinner finds his god/At the end of the day/no one comes to show us the way/No one gives a nod or a hand/judgment isn’t rendered/Bodies lie in state/overwhelmed by fate.”

Rob Weir  

 

Michael Cunningham's Snow Queen: Prose All Dressed up with Nowhere to Go

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THE SNOW QUEEN

Michael Cunningham

Picador, 258 pages, 978-1250067722

* * 1/2

Is there genre for writing that's too good for the novel that contains it? If so, The Snow Queen goes to the front of the class. This is a beautifully composed book whose prose soars so far above its characters one wishes Michael Cunningham had saved it for a better book. Cunningham's literary chops are well-established due to books such as The Hours (1998), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Specimen Days (2005). Those books contained complex characters adrift in thorny situations, and were inspired by literary giants such as Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman. Alas, The Snow Queen is Hans Christian Andersen as filtered through Woody Allen's obsession with love, sex, and death, and Bret Easton Ellis' portraits of bourgeois bohos behaving badly. Cunningham gives just enough to inspire is to plow through this book and admire its gem-like sentences, but it's a toss up as to whether these justify what is, at the end of the day, a pretty lame narrative.

Those who recall Andersen's Snow Queen will recall that she rules over snowflakes that look and act like bees. Her kisses pack sting as well–the first warms, the second brings forgetfulness, and the third kills. Cunningham's book is set in 21^st century Bushwick, a section of Brooklyn in the midst of uneasy and incomplete gentrification–a warren in which one can find backbiting hipsters and blood-soaked hooligans. Tyler Meeks is a 43-year-old failed musician still dreaming of a hit in his idle moments he's not wallowing in self-pity. He shares an apartment with two seeming soul mates: his wife, Beth, who is mortally ill with cancer; and his chubby gay brother Barrett who, at age 38, struggles with his own string of failures–one failed love affair after another. Toss in 56-year-old Liz, the owner of the chic secondhand shop at which all four occasionally work, and you've got a collection of people whom one holds in both pity and loathing. It would easier to feel sympathy if Tyler weren't a coke fiend, Beth a passive dishrag, and Liz an amoral cougar. Barrett is the linchpin. During a stroll through wintry Central Park that was intended to jolt him out of despair, he sees an eerie blue light in the sky that he perceives as sentient. Has he just had a religious experience? Beth's seeming miracle recovery suggests this, but is Barrett cut out for the life of mystic? The book's action toggles between 2004 and 2008 as characters seek to address anxieties ranging from trivial—Tyler's inability to write a tribute song for Beth–to more substantial, such as Beth grappling with whether she's more comfortable in near-death or sleeping walking through life.

There are several intriguing twists in the narrative, but I was left with three feelings, that left me underwhelmed by The Snow Queen. The first is that it's hard to imagine Barrett as a holy man of any more substance than a doe-eyed sophomore dabbling in crystals; the second that Beth is passively uninteresting, Tyler a jerk, and Liz a joyless opportunist. Mainly, though, the book feels more like we are reading about Cunningham writing about writing about his characters rather than giving life to them. At best I give The Snow Queen a tepid endorsement. On the plus side, at just 258 pages Cunningham gives us a book in which we don't invest a lot of time if we reach the end and feel unfulfilled. I can also imagine it would be a good read for a book group. If nothing else, Cunningham leaves his title tantalizingly ambiguous. Who is the titular snow queen: pallid Beth, icy Liz, or cocaine? Or is she a metaphor for metro New York's seduction and dangers? If that sounds like enough, by all means read this novel. Just don't expect Woolf or Whitman.

Rob Weir  

Glen Campbell's Sad (and Insipiring) Farewell

GLEN CAMPBELL: I'LL BE ME (2014)

Directed by James Keach

PCH Films/Virgil Films 671075

103 minutes, PG

* * * * 

Toward the very end of I'll Be Me, we see Glen Campbell in a studio crooning the lines to the very last song he ever recorded: "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." There could hardly be a more poignant title; Campbell suffers from Alzheimer's disease and both stage and personal lights went out shortly thereafter. Campbell sounds great on the track, but he only got through it because one of his closest crew members—whose name Campbell could no longer recall—stood beside him at the microphone pointing out the words for him to sing.

I'll Be Me is simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking. In 2011, Campbell got his diagnosis. We see he and his family at the Mayo Clinic, where he jokes about the fact that he can't recall four simple words or the name of first president of the United States, but there's nothing funny about the MRI scans or his prognosis: advanced Alzheimer's. But rather than roll over, Campbell set off on a farewell tour that lasted nearly a year—buoyed by a crew of longtime associates and employees, plus his wife, Kim, and three of his children: Cal, Shannon, and Ashley—a Julia Stiles lookalike who is an amazing musician in her own right. It began on a high note with a spot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and ended in Napa, California, on a bad night made tolerable only by a very forgiving audience. In between there were shows in dozens of towns, an appearance before Congress, and a spot at the Grammys.

A performer of Campbell's stature certainly earned some slack: solid sessions work, a stint as Brian Wilson's stand-in for The Beach Boys, multiple Grammys (including his 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award), film credits galore, his own TV show, decades of good-as-gold shows, and enduring hits such as "Gentle on My Mind," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman," and "Rhinestone Cowboy." (None of which he wrote, by the way.) One of the more remarkable things about the film is how well Campbell managed on the tour, as long as technology worked. At no less august place than Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, the teleprompter failed and he simply couldn't go forward until it was rebooted. Still, aspects of Campbell's stage persona confounded much of what we thought we knew about the brain. Campbell couldn't remember words or faces toward the end, but he remembered how the tunes were supposed to go. Is melody more powerful than language? It's hard to say, but body memory certainly is. Put a guitar in Campbell's hands and the notes simply flew off the strings as if they bypassed thought altogether.

Keach's film is filled with cameo tributes from legions of performers: Sheryl Crow, The Edge, Steve Martin, Kathy Mattea, Paul McCartney, Brad Paisley, Blake Shelton, Chad Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, Jimmy Webb…. There are also political tributes, including one from fellow Arkansasan Bill Clinton. Some of the praise would seem mawkish were it not for the fact that many of Campbell's admirers were there because Alzheimer's has also ravaged their families. Brad Paisley delivers one of the more poignant lines. After informing us that his family has been hit several times by this horrifying disease, he turns to the camera and says simply, "I'm next. I'm 41, so let's figure this out, okay?" Kudos to Keach for not sugarcoating the story.

Campbell was no saint in his heyday. He was, in essence, a Southern good old boy—with all its virtues (charm, corny sense of humor, good manners) and its vices (Baptist faith preached but not practiced, chauvinism, rightward political drift). He has been married four times and, by his own admission, was often an absentee father to his eight children. He battled both cocaine and alcohol addiction, and was such a carouser that he took up with Tanya Tucker when she was 21 and he was 44. Much of his life followed the all-too-familiar celebrity-behaving-badly arc. That we feel great sympathy for him despite his shortcomings is another measure of Keach's documentary skills. And we should feel sympathy.

As inspiring as the tour was, the story cannot end well and does not. We see Campbell spiral into paranoia and witness his social graces dissolve one by one. The tour was the last hurrah and things have gone down hill since. The 79-year-old Campbell is now in a long-term facility and, as a final tragic footnote, several of his children have sued Kimberly, accusing her of isolating him. Alas, this too is a predictable story arc. You should watch the film, drink in its brief triumphs, and then contact your representatives to tell them to take up Brad Paisely's challenge.

Rob Weir

The Westies: New York with a West Texas Feel

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THE WESTIES

West Side Stories

WestiesMusic.com

* * * *

Forget a grain, when you've been reviewing music for as long as I have, you learn to take PR come-ons and pullout quotes with an entire cave of salt. For once, though, someone calls like it is. The Westies are the brainchild of singer songwriter Michael McDermott, whose repertoire is aptly described as "songs of love, betrayal, murder, hope, and redemption." His partnership with backup singer Heather Horton forms the core of The Westies. Toss in some talented sessions players and West Side Stories is a dark, brooding, and raw slice of real life. Well what else would one expect from a songwriter who names his ensemble after a Hell's Kitchen gang from the '60s/70s who came pretty close to pulling some hard time of his own. Mix in a dose of the Irish shanachie tradition and filter it through American outlaw country music and you're on the right track. The only curve ball is the album title; West Side Stories has songs set in the Big Apple, but more from its bad core side, and it detours to places such as Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, and Wyoming–the latter being the location for the song "Devil," where the song's anti-hero meets Old Nick "with his jailhouse tattoo and gold teeth grin" in a cheap bar and leaves with his soul bargained away.

McDermott's emotive and strong voice sounds as if its filtered through hard living, anguish, and emotions that gestated in the gut, not in some mythical Valentine-shaped organ. His pas de deux duet with Horton on "Say It" is a love song, but not the hearts and coronets variety. Theirs is a dance of passion, but with doubt firmly in place. And when McDermott reveals "These Dreams About Trains," his somnolent flights freely mix pleasant dreams and nightmares. That is to say, his trains carry people rushing home to loved ones, those fleeing shattered hopes, and even a casket or two. And forget those hokey country bar songs; McDermott's "Bar" is a place where "I hit the bottle so hard… it hit me back." Smart stuff. Call it the West Side of New York by way of hardscrabble West Texas.

Rob Weir