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“I want you to finish this record with something you didn’t have when you started.” Indeed, Folds’ masterful new collection, What Matters Most, isn’t so much a statement as it is an offering, an open hand reaching out to all those wounded and bewildered by a world that seems to make less and less sense every day. “More than anything, I wanted to make an album that was generous, that was useful,” says Ben Folds. On stage with the 400 Unit, he can be a guitar hero when he wants, and a conductor when he wants, and a smiling fan of the majesty of his bandmates when he wants to hang back and listen to the sound. When he plays a solo show, he is in charge of the entire complicated juggle. He can be private but with them behind him he transforms, and there is a version of himself that can only exist in their presence. They make a big noise, as Isbell puts it, and he feels so comfortable letting them be a main prism through which much of the world hears his art. The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ‘n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or the Wailers. Some will make you cry alone in your car and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive. Life and death songs played for and by grown ass people. Weathervanes is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption.
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“As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.”
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“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell says.
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He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equaling four once you reach a certain age - and carry a certain amount of scars. This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft, observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power.
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Hana Ī Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too. Pour It Out Into The Night įormal Growth In The Desert Little Broken Hearts: Reissue Ĭlosing Time: 50th Anniversary
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