Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide to Understanding The Roots, Vol. 1

None of the Band's previous work gave much of a clue about how they would sound when they released their first album in July 1968. As it was, Music from Big Pink came as a surprise. At first blush, the group seemed to affect the sound of a loose jam session, alternating emphasis on different instruments, while the lead and harmony vocals passed back and forth as if the singers were making up their blend on the spot. In retrospect, especially as the lyrics sank in, the arrangements seemed far more considered and crafted to support a group of songs that took family, faith, and rural life as their subjects and proceeded to imbue their values with uncertainty.

It’s a special, but also a strange sensation to be releasing an album of one of your early musical heroes. I first discovered The Movers on my very first “record safari” in 1996. My destination was Bulawayo, in southern Zimbabwe, and to get there I had to travel via Jo’burg. While in town I stopped at a store called Kohinoor, in search of Mbaqanga – also known as Township Jive – and found a few tapes which I listened to non-stop on the bus that carried me to the land of Chimurenga Music. One of these cassettes included the songs “Hot Coffee” and “Phukeng Special” which instantly became part of my daily life. Twenty-five years later I’m still grooving to them.

Canada’s fastest moving and hardest working collective are back with one of their finest albums to date, a brand new journey into tropical, soul and jazz styles on their scorching new release, ‘Under Burning Skies’.

To find the roots of a "modest" band called THE LENS, we have to go back to 1976, when guitarist Mike Holmes, Peter Nicholls (vocals) and Niall Hayden (drums) met when according to the urban myth, searching for a GENESIS ticket, so they decide to form a band called THE GILN almost out of nothing. They soon recruit bass player Rob Thompson and keyboardist Peter Blackler and changed the name to THE LENS. They start to play in small venues. Really this was an amateur attempt, to the point that Niall Hayden often was replaced by Brian Marshall, or when the two were together, both played, something similar happened with Peter Nichol's position.

The Long Ryders kicked off their major label debut, State of Our Union, with one of their most anthemic and most explicitly political songs, "Looking for Lewis and Clark," and that tune set the tone for the rest of the album – State of Our Union found the Long Ryders reaching for a larger audience at the same time that they were using their music to say a great deal more than they had in the past. Musically, plenty of roadwork had tightened the band's interplay to an even finer point than on Native Sons (Sid Griffin and Stephen McCarthy were both in superb voice, and their guitar work meshed perfectly), and Will Birch's production gave the songs a poppier sheen that still allowed the band's roots-conscious sound to shine through. Lyrically, State of Our Union took a long look at Reagan-era America as the gulf between the rich and the poor began to divide the nation, with "You Can't Ride the Boxcars Anymore," "Two Kinds of Love," and "Good Times Tomorrow, Hard Times Today" all exploring issues of economic injustice, and even the less obvious political songs often having a progressive subtext ("WDIA," a tribute to the great Memphis R&B radio station, deals with how the love of music brought together black and white listeners in the 1960s).

None of the Band's previous work gave much of a clue about how they would sound when they released their first album in July 1968. As it was, Music from Big Pink came as a surprise. At first blush, the group seemed to affect the sound of a loose jam session, alternating emphasis on different instruments, while the lead and harmony vocals passed back and forth as if the singers were making up their blend on the spot. In retrospect, especially as the lyrics sank in, the arrangements seemed far more considered and crafted to support a group of songs that took family, faith, and rural life as their subjects and proceeded to imbue their values with uncertainty. Some songs took on the theme of declining institutions less clearly than others, but the points were made musically as much as lyrically…