Texas Music Round-Up: Texas Music Mailorder Catalog

Just a Little Lovin'
Just A Little Lovin' is an entire disc of Shelby doing Dusty Springfield songs, which fits the delicately husky tone of Lynne's voice just perfectly.

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RYAN ADAMS & THE CARDINALS
Follow The Lights (EP)
Follow The Lights comes on the heels of Ryan's latest full length album Easy Tiger, which has been widely recognized as some of his finest work to date. The Associated Press described it as "the most cohesive and intricately arranged album [Adams] has ever made", and Time called it "a career breakthrough." Since Easy Tiger's release Ryan & The Cards have been on the road almost constantly, and as Variety recently put it, "[Adams is] probably giving the best performances of his career."

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RYAN ADAMS & THE CARDINALS
Easy Tiger
"It's a lot like Neil Young's Harvest in its focused intimacy, yet nothing's so locked down that spontaneity can't creep in. A career breakthrough." -Time "A fresh maturity has embraced the 32-year-old singer, translating into a more focused effort on his part, especially when it comes to his voice" -Chicago Sun-Times

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LUCINDA WILLIAMS
West
With West, a disc that may well be Williams' most personal work to date, the singer-songwriter channels both her emotion and restive creative energy into a startling set of songs that touch on both darkness and redemption. At turns strikingly spare and compellingly muscular, the album's 13 cuts attest to her willingness to stretch as a musician -- and to put herself on the line as a chronicler of life.

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JOHNNY CASH
American V: A Hundred Highways
In the months leading up to his passing on September 12, 2003, JOHNNY CASH had been recording new material with producer Rick Rubin. On July 4, 2006, American V: A Hundred Highways, the all-new Johnny Cash album taken from those sessions, will be released on the American Recordings label through Lost Highway. It will include the last song Cash ever wrote, "Like the 309".

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VAN MORRISON
Pay the Devil
On Pay The Devil, Morrison explores his inner cowboy more than ever before -- recording a compelling mix of his favorite country compositions as well as a few equally strong originals that more than earn their place among such distinguished company. Morrison has taken some enduring, endlessly relevant songs of the south and somehow made them all his own.

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RYAN ADAMS & THE CARDINALS
Cold Roses
"...Adams' most focused offering in a long time...these 18 songs create a near-existential rumination on the struggle for happiness, an overarching but not overbearing theme he explores in scenarios tangibly temporal in some cases, ethereally allegorical in others." - LA Times "...songs full of tears and self-questioning - leans toward Roy Orbison and the Grateful Dead." - New York Times

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WILLIE NELSON
You Don't Know Me: Songs of Cindy Walker
Willie Nelson's never better than when he's singing lonely-Texas-cowboy songs, and on this album he draws from the best writer of those songs not named William Hugh Nelson: the forgotten but legendary Cindy Walker, whose songs formed the hit parade of Nelson's teenage years. In the Forties, Walker wrote dozens of songs for Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, including standards like "Cherokee Maiden." Her hometown (Mart, Texas) is just forty miles from Nelson's (Abbott, Texas); when Nelson sings on "Bubbles in My Beer" about "a road paved with heartaches and tears," he sounds forlorn, but he also sounds like a man who has come home.

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JOHNNY CASH
Legend of Johnny Cash
Featuring 21 of his recordings on the Sun, Columbia, Island and American Recordings labels, The Legend Of Johnny Cash is the first compilation to include his work on American. Also highlighting the package is a 16-page deluxe booklet with photos and essay by author Rich Kienzle.

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RYAN ADAMS & THE CARDINALS
Jacksonville City Nights
Ryan Adams continues his chameleon revivalism with his most straightforward country music to date. Having evoked the inspiration of bands ranging from T. Rex to the Grateful Dead on previous solo releases, the former Whiskeytown frontman here channels the likes of Faron Young on "My Heart Is Broken," while framing the shot-and-a-beer opener, "A Kiss Before I Go," with honky-tonk piano and pedal steel. "Seems like I'm always movin'," he sings amid the rockabilly kick of "Trains," as the album finds his restless muse ranging from a dreamy duet with Norah Jones on "Dear John" to naked vulnerability reminiscent of John Lennon on "Silver Bullets." Only Adams would cut a track titled "The End" and sequence it second on the CD, or a song called "Peaceful Valley" and inject it with so much emotion.

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HANK WILLIAMS
Turn Back the Years (3CD collection)
Drinkin,' lovin' and prayin'. Never before have those powerful themes been spotlighted in the music of the legendary Hank Williams as they are on the three-CD box set Turn Back The Years: The Essential Hank Williams Collection. Featuring 60 original recordings, newly digitally remastered--20 each on CDs titled "Honky-Tonkin'," "Cold, Cold Heart" and "I Saw The Light"--Turn Back The Years illuminates the forces that shaped and ruled the short and troubled life of a man whose songs are part of Americana and continue to be reinterpreted by artists of nearly every genre.

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V/A
Songs for Tsunami Relief
When Willie calls, Austin responds. Tragedy brings out the best in this music-minded community, as some of the city's finest artists showed by joining forces with Willie Nelson in a concert to benefit the victims of South Asia's tsunami.

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RYAN ADAMS
29
On his third release of a most prolific year, Ryan Adams takes a break from his band, the Cardinals, to fashion an introspective song cycle with stripped-down arrangements focused on acoustic guitar or solo piano. After the propulsive, self-mythologizing title track opens the album in brazen fashion, forging an unlikely bond of comparison between John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and the early '70s Grateful Dead, much of the rest of 29 finds Adams at his dreamiest (the reveries of "Strawberry Wine" and "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part") and most rapturously romantic (the aching falsetto on the lovesick "Starlite Diner").

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MARY GAUTHIER
Mercy Now
A spark of redemption illuminates even the darker songs on Mercy Now, the fourth album by Mary Gauthier. The influence of her native Louisiana pervades her Southern Gothic songcraft, which first won an audience in the folk clubs of Boston. After a series of releases on independent labels, her Lost Highway debut seems destined to expand that audience significantly. Within her mature, weather-beaten artistry, Dylanesque metaphysics go to Mardi Gras on "Wheel Inside the Wheel"; the naked emotion and eye for detail of "Your Sister Cried" and "Empty Spaces" conjure comparisons with Lucinda Williams; and the plainspoken "I Drink" and "Drop in a Bucket" have the bittersweet bite of the best of John Prine. The spare arrangements of producer/guitarist Gurf Morlix, punctuated by cello, organ, and harmonica, give the material plenty of room to breathe. Gauthier's vocals are half-spoken, half-sung, and all soul.

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WILLIE NELSON
It Will Always Be
Ol' Willie has made records like this before, but the highpoints of It Always Will Be rank with some of his most realized, subtle, and sublime work. You'd have turn to the timeless "Always on My Mind" for a Nelson ballad as moving as the title track. When he surrenders the songwriting chores to Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, and even Toby Keith (whose working-class ballad "Tired" devastates), he sings with his unmistakable, harrowing vibrato and arranges with his gift for down-to-earth, acoustic-based country majesty.

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RYAN ADAMS
Love Is Hell
'Love Is Hell' offers a much more cohesive and traditionalist approach to the art of Ryan Adams songwriting. Slow burning moody guitar epics vie with sparse acoustic tracks for your attention, which is never less than absolute.

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TIFT MERRITT
Tambourine
On "Tambourine", Merritt taps deep into her southern musical roots to find her own voice, and that voice has fully blossomed--her enunciation is clearer, her phrasing sensual without straining. Her best songs balance the urgent economy of classic soul singles with a personal, if not precisely confessional, intensity.

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SAM ROBERTS
We Were Born in a Flame
Roberts is a one-man dynamo, playing all the instruments save for drums, singing his guts out, writing lyrics that are never less than interesting and are often brilliant, dropping the kind of hooks that will have you screaming along in your car, and making just about every other mainstream rock band look like unfocused wannabes. Almost every song on We Were Born in a Flame would sound perfect on a mixtape or popping up at random on an iPod.

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RYAN ADAMS
Rock n Roll
Rock n Roll is a lean mean rock critic fighting machine. Only one song tops the five-minute mark and many of the early songs are highlighted by lawnmower guitar riffs and guttural vocal stylings that recall both early AC/DC and a punch-up on The Jerry Springer Show.

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RYAN ADAMS
Demolition
Recorded at four different studio sessions in Nashville, Los Angeles, and Stockholm, with a cast of musicians that includes his road band the Pinkhearts, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Ethan Johns, Chris Stills, Bucky Baxter, and Greg Leisz, Demolition proves that Adams is still a work in progress: brilliant one moment, sloppy the next. When he's good, he's very good: the rousing country-rocker "Hallelujah," the brooding acoustic ballads "Dear Chicago" and "Tomorrow," and the jangly power-pop number "Gimme a Sign" are as fine as anything on Gold.

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LYLE LOVETT
My Baby Don't Tolerate
Lyle Lovett is in a nostalgic mood on My Baby Don't Tolerate, his first studio album of all new and original songs since the country-minded The Road to Ensenada in 1996. But he still fuses country, blues, jazz, folk, big band, and pop like no one else on the planet.

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JOHNNY CASH
American IV: The Man Comes Around
Johnny Cash has no doubts about how "The Man Comes Around," his fourth collaboration with producer Rick Rubin, stacks up next to its Grammy-winning predecessors. "I firmly believe that it's the best record we've done," he says. "It reaches out even farther than the others did, it goes in so many different directions, but they all come together with me and how I could make these songs my own. They come together in being my songs."

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RYAN ADAMS
Gold
Throughout Gold, Adams shows that his true strength is his brittle heart. As "Somehow, Someday" and "Harder Now" make clear, there's perhaps no songwriter on such intimate and heart-rending terms with lost love this side of Hank Williams. When he wails "You're free/free with a history" in the latter's chorus, the collision of affected, offhand cool and acute desolation lurking beneath his vocal control are enough to drive a brass-knuckled fist square into the solar plexus of anyone who's ever lost a love.

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LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Six years in the making, Car Wheels somehow lives up to its lofty expectations because of Williams's direct songwriting and her wonderfully unaffected vocals. With assistance from cohorts such as Steve Earle, Williams uses the acoustic accents of Dobros, mandolins, slide guitars, and accordions to add color to her grooves, whispers, and rumbles. Her lyrics are undisguised as she presents to us the travelogue of her memory.

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LYLE LOVETT
Pontiac
Pontiac is Lyle Lovett's finest album, but it still contains the strengths and weaknesses that have become Lyle's hallmarks. Crack playing, keen observations and clever lyrics, and a neo-traditionalist aesthetic that pulls in everything from Texas folk, honky-tonk and Western swing to old-school pop all shine brightly here.

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BILLY BOB THORNTON
Private Radio
You wouldn't expect the man behind Sling Blade to turn out a pedestrian album, but Billy Bob Thornton's country debut turns out to be surprising both for its risks and for its routine. To his credit, Thornton, with Marty Stuart producing, bypasses radio formula for a different kind of connection with his listener, veering from lengthy spoken verse to retro hillbilly deluxe.

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LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Essence
The hauntingly beautiful, wistful, and often breathtaking Essence is another case in point of how far raw emotion and honesty can carry an artist. Williams's singing is at its paralyzing best throughout 11 bare originals, an incredibly affecting vocal performance by a woman who was not blessed with exceptional tone, range, or pitch. Throughout, her voice is incredibly naked, vulnerable, and wrought with feeling.

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LUCINDA WILLIAMS
World Without Tears
Most artists who appeal to adult listeners tend to settle into a comfortable niche, but Lucinda Williams refuses to play it safe. Instead, her music stings like an open wound, as she continues to strip away the protective layers from her art's emotional core. Though Williams has long been prized for the naked honesty of her music, "World Without Tears" is even rawer than its predecessors.

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RYAN ADAMS
Heartbreaker
Ryan Adams steps well above Whiskeytown with Heartbreaker, his solo debut. By turns raucous, wistful, raspy, and simply sweet, Adams makes the most of a top-shelf acoustic band, including Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and even a guest spot from Emmylou Harris on the tenderly yearning "Oh My Sweet Caroline." There's little dependence on the usual alt-country twang and a far more rounded sense of textures here (the multiple vocal tracks on "Amy," for example, sound Beatles-esque), with glockenspiel, organ, and more signaling a sonic field of extensive depth. His spare guitar and stretched-thin vocal delivery alternate smartly with a bigger-shouldered guitar and throaty voice, never leaving behind a band conception straight out of Parsons's oeuvre.

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