Ricjhard Buckner - The Hill, Vinyl LP, Record, New, Merge
$
40
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Description
First time to be pressed on vinyl. Brand new, sealed. OOP. Sleeve has a couple soft corners (see pictures), but otherwise in excellent condition.
LP includes a coupon for a full download. (not sure if the code is still active or not)
Richard Buckner – The Hill Label: Merge Records – MRG356 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered Country: US Released: Jul 10, 2015 Genre: Rock, Folk, World, & Country Style: Folk Rock, Acoustic
A1 Mrs Merritt 1:00 A2 Tom Merritt 2:27 A3 Elmer Karr 1:37 A4 Ollie McGee 1:46 A5 Fletcher McGee 0:39 A6 Julia Miller 2:22 A7 Willard Fluke 1:00 A8 Elizabeth Childers 3:58 A9 A. D. Blood 1:10 B1 Oscar Hummel 3:03 B2 Mellie Clark 0:45 B3 Johnnie Sayre 3:04 B4 Dora Williams 0:37 B5 Reuben Pantier 3:29 B6 Emily Sparks 0:49 B7 Amanda Barker 2:54 B8 The Hill 1:21 B9 William + Emily 1:54
On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckner’s The Hill.
The Hill started in 1996 in an old garage that had been converted to The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the mouth of Death Valley, between Lone Pine and Dunmovin, California. Buckner, who was en route to Tucson, Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder, and a copy of Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. He tinkered with a few of the book’s poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance discovered it in his truck four years later. Beset with writer’s block and looking for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed.
Recorded in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tucson, The Hill converts Spoon River poems to music. You’d wonder why a poet in his own right would feel the need to sample another’s work. But Masters’ book of poetry tells much the same story Buckner is accustomed to, the kind of story that makes him distinct among storytellers.
Each page of Spoon River Anthology reads as a final, postmortem dictum of a different deceased resident—more than 250 of them now passed—in the fictional Midwestern town of Spoon River. The epitaphs are important for Buckner because, in death, these people strip the breathing city of its dishonesty. Each one, from Reuben Pantier to Elizabeth Childers to Oscar Hummel, is no longer concerned with whispers and pointed fingers that are often the consequence of a life laid bare for all to see. They’re unleashing themselves, without fallacy or attachment.
Buckner chooses 18 of these confessions, each given a unique rendering. Backed by Calexico’s Joey Burns and John Convertino and surveyed with Buckner’s unflagging vocal desperation, Spoon River’s residents come back to life. Like so much of his career, Buckner disappeared into Spoon River and returns to us with its story.
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