Browse by Artist: SMALDONE, MICAH BLUE

Artist:	SMALDONE, MICAH BLUE
Title:	The Red River
Label:	IMMUNE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	IMMUNE 002CD

"The Red River is the fourth solo offering from Portland, Maine's Micah Blue Smaldone and the first to be released on Chicago label Immune. Here's what Micah has to say about it: 'Rather than construct a thick frame of reference for this new album, I'd prefer to describe simply where I've come from in the past few years, and then let this music speak for itself. My first solo effort, 2003's Some Sweet Day, was a collection of ragtime and country-blues, a fervently authentic homage to great influences -- John Jackson, Blind Blake, Robert Wilkins, etc., who all helped me through some tough times. 2005's Hither and Thither was much more internal, an urgent telling of germination in a harsh climate. This new one reaches a little further both into the past and the future. The title is borrowed from 'Red River Blues,' an old chestnut that goes 'which way, which way do that blood red river run? From my back window home to the rising sun.' I suppose this is the big theme of the album - 'Never fight evil as if it were something that arose totally outside of yourself.' It is simple faith in the goodness of people, the depth of love, and the infinite wisdom of nature, which allows for this path to be cut with patience, humility, and an eagerness to share. So let this album be a little way-mark, and never a hitching post.'"

Artist:	SMALDONE, MICAH BLUE
Title:	The Ring of the Rise
Label:	IMMUNE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	IMMUNE 030CD

"Smaldone's latest on Immune features much full band accompaniment, exploring sonic reaches of early '70s era Neil Young, or Richard and Linda Thompson's first albums, with electric guitars and homemade tube amplifiers, as well as Micah's familiar acoustic finger-stylings. The Ring of the Rise continues Micah's relentless efforts to mine future truths from the past, this time hauling out a slab of marble spanning the 1950s through the 1970s, veined with slapback echoes, plate reverbs, tube equipment, and hefty old American iron. The sounds are both new and familiar, tugging at a collective consciousness particular to our era, where the past clamours for reconciliation with the future."

Artist:	SMALDONE, MICAH BLUE
Title:	Hither and Thither
Label:	TEQUILA SUNRISE RECORDS
Format:	LP
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	TS 12002

500, 180 gram vinyl, pressed at Record Technology inc. with an 8-page booklet in full color 'old-style/tip-on jacket' printed at Stoughton printing. "Micah Blue's got an original voice, reedy and spare, and he's a virtuoso ragtime finger-picker, too. His songs are charming, antique ditties -- austere Tin-Pan Alley tunes with lyrics by Soren Kierkegaard. Like a single bright light, his music illuminates much while also casting a lot of sharp shadows, lovely, dark and deep. When he plays live, he tenses up his whole body -- tenser than you'd expect for a folk musician, like he might snap the strings, or snap the neck of his guitar, or just snap. But there's not a trace of irony in his music or in his performance, and I guess that's the Yankee in him. See, it gets cold at night up there in Maine, where he's from, and when you got the blank eye of god bearing down on you, and you got the Jukes and the Kallikacks next door getting high on Freon or something, it just makes a man think seriously about where he fits in. Willem de Kooning, gazing up at the star-spangled sky over Black Mountain in the forties, remarked 'the universe gives me the creeps,' and I imagine Micah might agree. Human consciousness may be a makeshift contraption held together with bailing wire and duct tape, but it will have to suffice. And it may well be true that regret and loss are inescapable human conditions (if you marry you will regret it, and if you don't marry you'll regret that too). But it is also true that music is a bulwark against such notions of human frailty, and Micah Blue's music does more than suffice. It offers balm and succor to a weary soul." -- John Jacob Niles

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