Review | Songlines

The Magnolia Sessions

Rating: ★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Lost Dog Street Band

Label:

Anti-Corporate Music

December/2021

Each month from September 2020 until May 2021, the first season of The Magnolia Sessions delivered a new session recorded outdoors by a large magnolia tree in Nashville, mostly showcasing local bluegrass, ‘dark country’ and folk acts. The first in the second series of such recordings, produced again by label/studio owner Dan Emery, is aptly described by Lost Dog Street Band’s vocalist and guitarist Benjamin Tod as ‘songs recorded the way you’d hear us after a long hot summer day in the woods around a campfire.’ Thus, to the constant accompaniment of the thousands of local insects also out enjoying the Tennessee evening air, their contribution to The Magnolia Sessions find Tod and his fiddle playing wife Ashley Mae delivering a live and direct mixture of somewhat familiar covers originally penned by the likes of Warren Zevon, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle and Guy Clark, alongside a brace of traditional tunes and the odd original such as ‘From the Day You Were Born’. Very much in the travelling troubadour tradition that the pair have adopted since their teenage outlaw days on the streets of Nashville, there might be nothing too earth-shaking here but it’s still heartfelt and affecting.

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