Album Notes

Dirt is the powerful debut album from Braden Land that draws from and adds to the canon of great Americana music. This Singer/songwriter/guitarist’s musical and lyrical style may best be described as a translation of monsters like Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, and Niel Young into his own language—a medium combining those qualities with elements of the delta blues pickers and harp players along with many of the fantastic elements of southern and world-wide folklore. The album itself however, ceates an enticing and disturbing South reminiscent of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.

Originally the album was going to be a one-take at Sun Studios in Memphis, TN. “I was doing shows that way. You know, just solo guitar and cross-harp, writing songs that work well that way and I figured the most affordable way for me to make a record would be to just get it together in front of a good mic somewhere and do one-takes until I ran out of money. Seemed like Sun would be the place to do that. I started looking at the rates down there though, and looking at some of their recent projects and it sucked the romance right out of it.” It was around that time (Dec. ’05) when Braden met Memphis songwriter Bryan Hayes and began recording almost immediately at Hayestock Studios under the Retriever Records label.

The freedom of having extra time in the studio gave Land the opportunity to showcase a fuller spectrum of his musical influences and talents by playing lap steel, dobro, mandolin, and electric leads that bring to mind the tasteful styles of J.J. Cale (“Satan’s Train”) and Duane Allman (“So Real”) and to bring in drummer Jeremy Gill and upright bassist Shane McMullen to provide a consistent backbone for the album. The result is a mixture of Dylanesque one-takes like “Any Old Blues,” “In A Place,” and “Her Name” with big acoustic band songs that come at you like a train such as “So Cold About It,” and the only cover on the album, a bluegrass remake of William Cowper’s “There Is a Fountain.”

“The possibilities expanded so much as the album took shape. Lyrically, I wanted to paint a picture of the south, like what’s left of where all this music came from in the first place: the mojo triangle from Memphis to New Orleans to Nashville and everything in between. So that’s where all the songs take place whether it was a hundred years ago or yesterday and even better if you can’t tell the difference. Musically, I wanted to say, ‘this is where we’re coming from,’ and throw in all kinds of references to American music and poetry from Longfellow to Woody Guthrie to the Grateful Dead to whoever, and say ‘this is where we’re going,’ just by establishing a voice that’s part of it and is unique and has potential to evolve while keeping the roots intact.”