When I posted the other day about Cadillac Sky, the whole impulse had been prompted by a chance hearing of one of their tunes within a Pandora station, and at the time I hadn’t remembered which tune and from what album it was.
Yeah, that. That right there.
I needed a bit of a musical rose sorbet today, and so spun Cadillac Sky‘s Blind Man Walking record on the commute. (YouTube playlist here.)
This is one of those groups, for me, that somehow flies under the radar for long periods of time, surprising me anew when I circle back around: “Jeez, how on earth did this fall under the bus for so long–again?” (I recently had similar experiences with Supertramp and John Hartford.)
It caused me to really think about the question: just what is it about this group that makes me love it so much? Because at a glance, it’s not necessarily obvious. Sure, I love mutt music, and Cadillac Sky clearly goes beyond “traditional” bluegrass (which itself is an earlier form of mutt music too), but it’s not just that. Likewise, I will always have a soft spot for the song “Never Been So Blue”, in particular, because indirectly, that song, as the initial seed to one of my wife’s longest-running Pandora stations, years ago now brought me to unexpected and important new worlds, such as Israeli jazz bass wizard Avishai Cohen and Tunisian oud-meister Anouar Brahem. (To this day, if the fam has Pandora playing when I walk in the room and I suddenly have to ask, “wow, what is that?”, it is almost invariably Cathy’s “Never Been So Blue Radio” station that’s playing.) But that’s not all of it, either.
I think what it really is, is that I identify so personally with some of the subtle things going on. For example, a lot of what you hear on Blind Man Walking is either pretty straight-up bluegrass, or not-that-far-out newgrass; there are plenty of other groups out there about which one could say the same. But then they will drop in exactly the sort of “that guy” dissonance, or unexpected chord movement, that I would think I would contribute, if I were in a group grounded in a traditional form. (At group musical jams I am often “that guy”.) It’s there, and then it’s gone; Bill Bruford used to call that sort of thing “demon snippets”. They do it in a way that (to my ears at least) is unique to Cadillac Sky, and you can hear it in the writing, in the harmonies of voice and instruments, and even in the production. (Holy cow, this record is absolutely beautifully recorded and mixed, taking full advantage of the modern studio to bring instrument nuances right up front, without ever losing the acoustic-ensemble aesthetic.)
In its musical subtlety–how all the little “that guy” moments are so beautifully “there-and-then-gone,-don’t-blink-or-you-may-miss-it”–it is reminiscent of John Hartford, but the style is totally different. Unique. And glorious.
Anyway, I really should flesh out my Cadillac Sky catalog. The things I’ve heard via Cathy’s Pandora stations, from the other available records, portend good things in that regard.
To remind myself, I’ll thus bookmark both Gravity’s Our Enemy:
Craftygrass 