Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#8 Gillian Welch, TIME (THE REVELATOR)

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vs.

#72 Kristin Hersh, SUNNY BORDER BLUE

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have dueling Designated Cheerleaders today! First up, for TIME (THE REVELATOR), it’s @bermanmatt.bsky.social. Take it away, Matt!

The first thing you notice about Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)" is the cover: All rich red-white-and-blues, a beat-up couch, a wood-paneled room straight out of the '70s, and Gillian Welch herself looking just off at something. It's a striking image, made more so in contrast with the covers of Gillian Welch's first two albums - 1996's "Revival" and 1998's "Hell Among the Yearlings" - each of which present her in a cold, Depression-era black-and-white.

You could be forgiven for thinking that color photo promised a half-century leap forward or lush expansion of Gillian Welch's stark, signature Appalachian sound. Instead, "Time (The Revelator)" goes the other direction, stripping back further to present a crisper view. This is not a faded image of the deep past - this is a past within her lived in memory, but also just as much an image of the now. And that color scheme does not lie, for this is an album of American music. Not just Americana, but songs about America: John Henry and Elvis, the Titanic and Lincoln, straight jobs and road trips, Steve Miller and an artist's struggles to survive.

The songs play as a series of spare duets, Gillian's wavering-but-ethereal voice floating upon crystalline guitar lines from her eternal partner Dave Rawlings. Most songs are two guitars, two voices, unless they drop down to one guitar and Gillian's voice alone. These are songs about saviors and America delivered with pure, simple harmony, like you'd see them do in person ("I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll" is actually lifted from a live performance at Nashville's Ryman theater). If anything, musically it's even more of a throwback to what was an already uniquely backwards-looking sound. Gospel, country, finger-picking mountain music. But lyrically not everything looks so far back - there are nods to Taj Mahal and shout outs to wanting to "sing that rock and roll."

And this is key. Where Gillian's first two albums felt like they channeled moments from the past, this one feels distinctly present - albeit a present rumination on past things, an exploration of how everything that came before has made now exactly what it is. Songs return to the theme of time as a revelator - a word repurposed here from its religious roots to mean the need for time to evaluate the worth or meaning of anything. And where before Gillian often sang as characters or folkloric story songs, here she sings mostly of herself. On the title track, Gillian sings of accusations of herself as a pretender and an imitator - an obvious nod to criticism of her for mining the sound of a dust-bowl past or playing at a character. Only time, she seems to say, will demonstrate the truth and value of the music she has created and must continue to create. "My First Lover" brings the theme of the evaluatory distance of time into even clearer view, the song less about her lover than about her inability to remember that much about him - "he gets a little hazy when I think of him now" - but she remembers the freedom of moving on and how it defined herself to herself, a "quicksilver girl," who was "not waiting for a white wedding gown."

Elsewhere, Gillian sings directly of her need to make music and put her art into a world that doesn't value it. She sings of a "fortune lady" walking beside her - whether a literal fortune teller or a promise of fortune, time still slowly revealing the falsity of her words. On "Red Clay Lover," she wonders if she will receive her gold gown when she gets to the pearly gates, but accepts that she will take "the red clay robe with the red clay wings and a red clay halo for my head." Or take "Everything is Free Now" and its far-too-prescient line about making art and who gets paid for it: "They figured it out; that we're gonna do it anyway; even if it doesn't pay."

And always there are songs of love: earthly love, godly love, the love of making music. She is always longing for "somebody who is waiting for me."

These are not songs likely to hit you on first listen. Gillian Welch builds a world that you have to slow down and sink into. But if you let yourself take that time, the timelessness of her sound can cast a spell. Two guitars, two voices, time stretching out ahead and behind you, all coming together to reveal something more, even if it is almost certainly forgotten again.

On "I Dream a Highway," Gillian sings:

"What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you."

Is she singing of a lover? Of the music? Of God? Probably a little bit of all of it. There's a lot to unpack. Give this album your time and maybe it will reveal itself to you.

Thank you, Matt!

And for SUNNY BORDER BLUE, it’s @lanna.bsky.social. Take it away, Alana!

It’s 2005. I’ve been on the phone with Kristin Hersh for over two hours and, as far as I’m concerned, if the phone call went on for another two hours that wouldn’t be enough. I’m gripping the receiver of the cordless phone tight, sure that if I listen long enough, I’ll learn the secrets of the universe.

I live in a trailer with holes in the floor, water that comes down the inner walls, with the child I had at nineteen and, part-time, my partner. I am twenty-six years old, in community college, and discussing my partner adopting my child. We are probably not happy together. We feel compatible, and are likely both wondering if that’s enough.

I am talking with Kristin because my cousin–who is younger and thinner than me and has far more energy and a brighter future than I do–has a zine. She lives at the Jersey shore, and early on in her zine’s inception she got some interviews with bands that later became famous. Those credentials have led to me being able to get photo passes for Ani DiFranco, Badly Drawn Boy, the Pixies. If I aim my sights on the smaller venues, I get interviews.

I have no idea how to interview, but Kristin doesn’t care. This is a conversation to her, and to me too; I feel completely at ease asking her questions about her life even more than her music, because she is in love with her life, with her family, and is enthusiastically sharing her thoughts on relationships and parenting, things I currently am struggling with.

“I find marriage to be wild!” she tells me, and my head explodes at the idea of marriage being the opposite of “settling down,” a thing Kristin, with her constant music output, four sons, and van life, is not interested in doing. “It’s not comfortable. I mean, maybe we’re at peace, we’ve got inner peace going on, but you’ve got somebody with your heart in their hands—any minute, they could just mess up your whole life. The terror that goes along with love is crazy.”

I have always thought of Kristin Hersh and her stepsister, Tanya Donelly, as an either/or situation; Betty or Veronica, The Beatles or the Stones. Never mind that they had a band together. Tanya’s tracks in Throwing Muses, Belly, her solo albums–those were my jams. Kristin’s voice has always been too raw for me, it’s always felt like too much. But I’ve always been too much, myself.

When the call is (sadly) over, the show is next. It’s at The Tin Angel–a Philadelphia venue that has only a few tables that, from what I can tell, you reserve by also buying a meal from the restaurant downstairs. The rest of us stand, watching people who are older and richer than us eat dinner.

Kristin is blonde now, her piercing blue eyes no longer the focus now that she doesn’t have dark hair and heavy, blunted fringe to make them pop. She has an easy, mom haircut. Dressed down, she’s not looking to impress or perform Being a Musician. She looks like someone you could easily pass on the street. Between each song, she talks, and she is as entrancing in front of an audience as she was on the phone. But the songs–!

They’re intimate, they ARE raw, they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. They’re the stories she’s told me, and the ones she’s telling the audience, and more.

I spend the next several weeks listening to her back catalog, and it’s Sunny Border Blue that becomes the album I go back to most often. While the haunting “Your Ghost” off Hips and Makers is still my favorite song she’s done, there’s something about the entirety of Sunny Border Blue that feels like Kristin at her most everything. “Your Dirty Answer” veers away at its most catchy, “Spain” decides half-way through to stop being a ballad. Even though I know “Trouble” is a cover, it feels like hers when she sings it, and might be the most accessible song on the album.

At times, if I listen too closely, Kristin Hersh is still too much for me, but then a line jumps out and grabs my heart, and I keep going.

“It’s my experience that if you’re really paying attention, then [life]’s not boring, that’s for sure,” she told me on the phone. “Everything matters.”

Sunny Border Blue is an album where everything matters, where those small moments of life are on the same level as the hardest moments.

I wish I could care that much, about anything, but it’s been years since that phone call and I am still the person who struggles to keep a broken-down home, to stay in a long-term relationship, to give myself over fully to the hobbies I most enjoy.

But I still think of that call, that show, and all Kristin’s wisdom and joy often. Life, as always, is not boring, that’s for sure.

Thank you, Alana!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #17 Cake, COMFORT EAGLE defeated #48 Ben Folds, ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS, 111-77-5.

Thanks,

Kent