Slaid Cleaves "Rust Belt Fields"

Austin on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend erupted in wildfires spawned by the low humidity, 35 mph winds, and a tinderbox of drought stricken foliage. In the evening there were ten fires reported; Bastrop, Pflugerville, Spicewood, Cedar Parl. There are homes of people we love in these areas, and there are reports of people being evacuated. In Austin proper, the night sky was filled with rheumy smoke clouds hanging in the air - the scent of burning wood. It has been a mean season here, and we are praying for cooler temperatures, a break in the high pressure system that has engulfed the area for the last six months, and especially, we are praying for rain. Texas is not alone in making prayers. In other parts of the country people are praying for other things. Scarcity of a different sort can produce a firestorm of another kind.

Music Fog brings you a new Slaid Cleaves video today. It is a song he co-wrote with Rod Picott, and one that Rod has released but Slaid has not. Slaid does have a new album out today, called Sorrow and Smoke: Live At The Horseshoe Lounge – which is a line from his song “Down at The Horseshoe Lounge.” Slaid is from Maine, and it took him a while to muster up his courage to even walk in this legendary Austin dive bar. His is an important voice, and not to dwell on the theme of Labor Day, but this song chronicles lost employment. To be healthy, to get America back on its feet, we need to manufacture again. We filmed Slaid Cleaves at Cherokee Creek Music Festival in May. This song is not on his new live double album, in fact, Slaid has not released it yet. We commemorate the moment anyway with “Rust Belt Fields.”

-Jessie Scott

Matt King "Hard Luck Road"

I don’t know what to make of anything that’s going on right now. It seems to me we are in the midst of a seismic shift. Kids are graduating from college with no place to get jobs.  Veterans of their craft are sitting on the sidelines. People are losing their houses - their hope, and their sense of the Great American Dream. Whole sectors of endeavor have been devalued. Are we turning into a society of lords and serfs? Where are you supposed to go? How are you supposed to make ends meet? Sometimes I don’t know what is more soul crushing, being underemployed, or not being employed at all.  On this Labor Day, take a knee to be thankful if you have a job. And if you don’t have a job, we wish you a speedy resolution to finding one. Here is a pleading note to American business leaders, “We want to work. We want to buy your products; but soon we won’t be able to, and frankly, I don’t know if that benefits anybody!”

Matt King has today’s video for Labor Day from a session we filmed with him solo at MusicFest in Steamboat Springs in January. He absolutely ices the emotions at hand in ”Hard Luck Road,” strumming to keep the devil away and to keep the wolf from your door. Pouring all the emotion into song - though songs don’t sell the way they used to. It doesn’t much matter. Some people were just born to deliver the social commentary for their time, and Matt is one whose time will come. You won’t hear this on pop radio stations; it comes from a deeper place. It is folk music, and that addresses the cyclical, the common currency of the human condition. But there ain’t nothing common about this song. “Hard Luck Road.”

-Jessie Scott

Jack Ingram "What's A Boy To Do?"

I just went through an excruciating exercise of rating some tunes from a variety of genres for a website, and I am happy to return here, to the music I love. Music that wraps its warmth around you, that isn’t screaming at you insistently, demanding you pay attention. I like Americana, what can I say, and I'm not alone, just last week the word, in its musical sense, was included in Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Americana joins Tweet, m-commerce and around 100 other words whose use is now widely recognized enough to be considered a part of the lexicon. According to the dictionary's editors, Americana is: "a genre of American music having roots in early folk and country music." Simple enough, and now you have a concise answer to the question “What is Americana,” should anyone ask. We are excited to be making preparations to attend this year’s Americana Music Festival, from October 12 to 15, that will be headquartered in Nashville at the Downtown Sheraton Hotel. It was a blast last year, and we will be announcing our plans soon.

Music Fog’s most recent excursion was to Cherokee Creek Music Festival near Llano, Texas in May. While we were there, Jack Ingram came by to play an as yet unrecorded song for us. He wrote it during last year’s CMA week with Mando Saenz, who we have now mentioned three times this week. That might mean we need to get together with him for a shoot soon – wonder if he will be at the Americana Fest! It’s all Jack Ingram right now, though, and it’s beautiful, “What’s A Boy To Do?”

- Jessie Scott