Two Sundays of great music have left me as giddy as a schoolgirl. Last Sunday I hit the jackpot at the Saxon Pub in Austin, slipping into a Resentments show on a Sunday when Scrappy Jud Newcomb was in Austin and Malford Milligan was sitting in with the band. Scrappy played my favorite song, “Damaged Goods,” first song, and the show only got better as the band (Bruce Hughes, Jeff Plankenhorn and Jon Greene) drove us down a “misty avenue” of bluesy rock enchantment.
Yesterday in an Amish furniture store, not a record store, I saw a posting for Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison’s Sunday night show. Tonight, in Long's Park in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Kelly and Bruce took me back to my Mucky Duck days with songs like “Wrapped” and “Heaven's Just a Sin Away.” The best part of the show: The feeling that I had to buy new music after hearing new songs. (That’s a feeling that I don’t have too often anymore.) Their songs also brought back a few acoustic memories.
-Bruce once told my daughter, Ella, in Cactus Records, that she was the prettiest little girl in Houston.
-Ella thought Kelly was singing about some kind of cinnamon pastry in “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away.” ("Mom, what's a cinnaway?")
-When Kelly played her song about an old boyfriend tonight, I recalled she once sympathized with me during the early show at the Duck and played a song for my old boyfriend during her second show that same night when he was there and I had vacated the premises for the nuclear winter of a relationship gone sour.
Now I have Bruce's new CD, You and Me, that I'll be listening to for a long time, along with the acoustic memories of two consecutive Sunday nights of musical bliss.
What’s it going to take to get you off my mind?/
Summer, summer’s almost over/
Taking you right back to the world you left behind/
I’m still hanging on hoping you might show/
I don’t wanna stop and I can’t let go.
-Bruce Robison and Miles Zuniga, “Dreamin”
