The Roadhouse

Happy Friday,

I found this picture I took last November in NYC when the Pilots were on tour. This is a view from our pal Seth's apartment in Midtown, where some of us stayed. To this day, the best television show I've ever seen was sitting on Seth's balcony and watching peoples lives through a pair of binoculars and open shades. Reality TV ain't got nothing on the live's of anonomous New Yorkers in their apartments.

Today, I wanted to share with you two of my loves: Country and Soul music. For anyone who has ever spent a lot of time with Gram Parsons, Ray Charles, Johnny Paycheck or Nina Simone, you might recognize the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated genres. You can actually trace them both back to gospel, and see that those sentiments still very much exist in modern interpretations of these genres. Listen to Elvis, and you will hear all these ingrediants: gospel, soul and country. What is fascinating about them, is actually how similar they are. The best way to appriciate this is listening to them back to back.

My hometown college radio station (which also happens to be the best radio station in the friggin' world) KEXP, has a show every Wednesday night called The Roadhouse, with Greg Vandy. This may be the best radio program i've ever heard. I've never heard someone so seemlessly transition between soul and country music. Roots, music - as it were. There is something extremely thrilling in hearing Nina Simone and Fred Neil played back-to-back. It sounds so right...

Luckily, KEXP archives its weekly programming, so you can check out Greg's show this week: http://www.kexp.org/programming/progpage.asp?showID=4&1413=38875.75-1&96=38875.75-1&20=38875.75-1&256=38875.75-2