“Traitor”–New Richard Buckner Song
The cognoscenti know. Richard Buckner is the real deal. We’ve loved Buckner’s work from the beginning. If you haven’t heard it, we highly recommend you pick up Buckner’s album, “Devotion + Doubt,” which is one of the all-time greats (listen to Lil Wallet Picture from that album, way below).
The cognizant have been waiting since 2006 for a new album release from one of America’s best. Comes now “Our Blood,” which Merge Records will release on August 2nd. There’s a reason or two it took so long for “Our Blood” to be finished and released. Read about it below from Merge’s press release.
“First, there was the score to a film that never happened. Then there was a brief brush with the law over a headless corpse in a burned-out car that had all eyes in Buckner’s small hometown in upstate New York turned toward him and his long-suffering truck. Shortly after a move to a safer, less popular corpse dumping ground, the death of his tape machine led to yet another reboot. After Richard called in pedal steel and percussion players and put new mixes on his laptop, his new “safer” place was burglarized. Goodbye, laptop.
Buckner says: “Eventually, the recording machine was resuscitated and some of the material was recovered. Cracks were patched. Parts were redundantly re-invented. Commas were moved. Insinuations were re-insinuated until the last percussive breaths of those final OCD utterances were expelled like the final heaves of bile, wept-out long after the climactic drama had faded to a somber, blurry moment of truth and voilà!, the record was done, or, let us be clear, abandoned like the charred shell of a car with a nice stereo.””
Listen to Traitor, the phenomenal first song off of “Our Blood” below and download it HERE. Traitor is so good that Our Blood has to be one of our most highly anticipated releases of the year.
Check in HERE to read Buckner on “Our Love” generally and Traitor specifically.
Richard Buckner–Traitor
[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/traitor.mp3|titles=traitor]And check out one of Buckner’s all-time greats, Surprise, AZ (as covered by Cynthia G. Mason from The 2005 Believer Magazine Music Issue). The song sings first of a man (woman, as covered?) traveling home with his mother after the funeral of his father, her estranged husband. A relationship and a separation are sung, and he adds, “I think about him still/When I see you all alone.” But his mother counters with memories of her son’s lost lover — the woman her son met when he was 23, who “let me down so far/I never quite made it back.” A son and mother share their memories of lost love. If you’re not affected by this song and its storylines, you simply have no soul.
Richard Buckner–Surprise, AZ
And finally, below is Buckner’s moving Lil Wallet Picture. Buckner knows how to grab you by the ventricles. Fourteen years later we’re still blown away by this song.
Richard Buckner–Lil Wallet Picture
“Underspent
and too young too
I stumbled onto a picture of you
you wild bitter tale
all cherry oak and tears
as the branches looked in
the summer is done
and we are too, dear
pull back the drape
and let the silent light in
soon I’ll be on that highway
And damn this stretch of 99
that takes so many lives
one of them was mine
Hand me that lil wallet picture
1985
one more time
the lights of the street
where I’d walk to you at night
were so blindly lit
yeah, there were four little flames
his, mine, and yours,
and the torch in the attic
i woke up late
and kissed you awake
and as you packed up your load,
there was one last look
and then the U-haul broke free
now the ditches are flooded over the backroads
And damn this stretch of 99 that takes so many lives
one of them was mine
hand me that lil wallet picture
1985
one more time
underspent
and too young too
i stumbled onto a picture of you”