The Bigger Picture
No Depression: Charlie Louvin Interview
by Roy Kasten
No Depression gets Charlie talking about murder, brother Ira, touring, and working with Lambchop's Mark Nevers on his latest Tompkins Square release, Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs.
In 1956, the Louvin Brothers released their first long-playing album on Capitol, Tragic Songs Of Life. The collection of murder ballads and songs of lost love would become their best-selling album and an influential aesthetic document of country tragedy. The Louvin Brothers always sang of so much more than doom and despair, but no country group ever found more beauty in the themes.
More than half a century later, Charlie Louvin, at age 81, revisits the scene of those crimes with Sings Murder Ballads And Disaster Songs, his fourth release for the Tompkins Square label and another chapter in his remarkable collaboration with producer Mark Nevers of the Nashville indie-rock collective Lambchop. Louvin knows these songs like few singers alive, having grown up when many of them were still topical, when they moved through the air like headline news. His voice may be, in his words, "tore down," but out of the cracks and crevices of his phrasing, the emotional truth of the stories rises up, buoyed by the surprisingly swinging rhythmic arrangements of flat-top guitar, snare, bass and fiddle. In the hands of Louvin and Nevers, these timeless death songs sound present, full of musical life. More...
For video interviews and original live performances of Charlie playing murder ballads, see our Sing Murder.
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