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Foot-stomping yeehaw music with banjos, fiddles, and the kitchen sink.
Genre:
Folk: Traditional Folk
Release Date:
2005
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Five Miles From Town
© Copyright-Grinning Deer Music Company (BMI)
(783707073002)
Record Label: Grinning Deer Music Company
SPECIAL: 20% discount if you buy more than one copy of it today!
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Banjo contrarian David Lovett leads a posse of 25 musicians in a release Metro Pulse called "a glorious Irish, Scottish, old-time, barn-dance racket that reveals the musicians' sheer thrill of performing-and Lovett's knack for tweaking tradition."
Lovett has garnered critical acclaim for his two previous CDs:
"Lovett's instrumental work on the 5-string is topnotch, especially given all the genre hopping." - Bluegrass Unlimited, on the Back Porch Rockers.
"Lovett sounds equally comfortable on percolative, full-bodied clawhammer and rapid-fire rhythmic/melodic three-finger banjo." - The Old-Time Herald, on the Atomic City Rhythm Rascals.
The new CD celebrates Lovett's eclectic and sometimes bizarre - but always entertaining - musical sensibilities. "I've always had ideas that were a little too kooky for bands I was in, so I sort of put them in a box on the shelf. For this project, I took the box down and started unpacking it." The CD includes a country song about a Star Trek character, a Grisman-influenced fiddle tune inspired by a TV theme song, an old-time rendition of a song from a classic children's movie, a set of Irish reels played barn-dance style, a Scottish style ballad about a NASCAR fan's dream girl, and a couple of what Lovett calls "simultaneous medleys." Instead of one tune after another, Lovett stacks and interweaves songs from different genres: an Appalachian hoedown joins forces with a Motown classic, and a Jay Ungar fiddle tune is played over a Miles Davis bassline. Framing these cross-pollinations are more original instrumentals and a selection of Lovett's personal favorite old-time tunes.
The instrumental mix ranges from 3-piece old-time string band to full-blown production numbers including Afro-Cuban percussion, Wurlitzer electric piano, Telecaster, banjo-uke, cowbell, the hammer dulcimer wizardry of Evan Carawan, and a boatload of great pickers and fiddlers. You know - the kitchen sink!
Shawn Kimbro writes: "Just wanted to tell you how much I'm enjoying the CD. Recording quality, overall sound is excellent and the groove throughout is amazing. It's been in my CD player non-stop anytime I've been home today and yesterday. My fav cut is Mariner's Fling, I also really like "Ding Dong" but hell, they're all good."
Banjo player, tunesmith, and band leader David Lovett started off playing bluegrass and melodic three-finger banjo in the early 1970s, then discovered the old-time clawhammer banjo style of North Carolina, and now plays all of the above, along with a little guitar. For the past ten years or so he has been putting together bands. Lovett has performed in 19 states at folk festivals, dance weekends, fairs, and hundreds of dances and weddings.
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. . . a glorious racket . . . Yeehaw!
author: Metro Pulse
Some music scenes are like hyper-charged magnets on a refrigerator. You arrange its players in an orderly, expectable fashion, and the next morning they’re all glommed up in the middle, like a party of positive and negative charges. They’re magnets, er, I mean musicians. They really can’t help it. And David Lovett’s new CD, a display of Knoxville’s best pickers, fiddlers and the like, is proof that such behavior should be encouraged. Billed as the product of “David Lovett and Friends,” Five Miles from Town features 25 players of about as many instruments, creating a glorious Irish, Scottish, old-time, barn-dance racket that reveals the musicians’ sheer thrill of performing—and Lovett’s knack for tweaking tradition. Lovett says songs like “Beam Me Up,” a quirky ode to Star Trek and “Red is the Color (of My True Love’s Truck)” were a smidgen too kooky for his former bands the Back Porch Rockers and the Atomic City Rhythm Rascals,and his current gig in Mountain Soul. Some of these tracks are certainly outside the box—musically, conceptually, and lyrically. As anyone familiar with Lovett’s work with the contra dance band New Lost Weasel Concern knows, some fiddle tunes have a way of veering into wacky terrain, and that you’re not hallucinating if you suddenly hear the theme from Gilligan’s Island. Fellow Rocker and Weasel Greg Horne co-produced the disc and played multiple instruments. Other players include Evan Carawan on hammer dulcimer, Dale Stansberry and Mike Bryant on fiddles, plus a heaping helping of other Friends of Lovett, the bulk of whom are familiar to the old-time and contra dance circles in town. Blues guitarist Hector Qirko even lays down some feisty licks on Lovett’s original “Walland Gap.” . . . Yee-haw!
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