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The Civil Wars-Barton Hollow-2011-404
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The Civil Wars Barton Hollow Folk Rock 2011
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Jun 26, 2011
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Artist: The Civil Wars
Album: Barton Hollow
Bitrate: 225kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Sensibility Records
Genre: Folk/Rock
Size: 67.82 megs
PlayTime: 0h 40min 01sec total
Rip Date: 2011-06-26
Store Date: 2011-02-15

Track List:
--------
01. 20 Years                         3:01
02. I've Got This Friend             3:23
03. C'est La Mort                    2:29
04. To Whom It May Concern           3:31
05. Poison & Wine                    3:39
06. My Father's Father               3:20
07. Barton Hollow                    3:25
08. The Violet Hour                  3:25
09. Girl With The Red Balloon        3:49
10. Falling                          3:58
11. Forget Me Not                    2:56
12. Birds Of A Feather               3:05

Release Notes:
--------
In some ways, music doesn’t get much more modest or minimalist than it is in the
hands of The Civil Wars, a duo comprised of California-to-Nashville transplant
Joy Williams and her Alabaman partner, John Paul White. They travel without a
backup band, and on their first full-length album, Barton Hollow, the bare-bones
live arrangements that fans hear on the road are fleshed out with just the
barest of acoustic accoutrements. Each song is an intimate conversation, and no
third wheels or dinner-party chatter are going to interrupt that gorgeous,
haunting hush.

On the other hand, there’s been something distinctly loud about the duo’s
introduction to the world, even prior to the album’s release. Their signature
song “Poison & Wine” was heard on Grey’s Anatomy—in the foreground, in its
entirety, over a key climactic montage, prompting hundreds of thousands of
viewers to Google the mystery music. And they got a wholly unsolicited
endorsement when America’s biggest pop star gave The Civil Wars a seal of
approval. After first tweeting her love for the duo, fellow Nashvillian Taylor
Swift included “Poison & Wine” as a selection in her official iTunes playlist,
saying, “I think this is my favorite duet. It’s exquisite.”

Swift took the words right out of the folk-country-Americana world’s mouth. If
it looks like The Civil Wars’ appeal might cast a net that extends well beyond
the typical audience for acoustically based music, that may be due to the
inherent sensibilities Williams and White bring to their collaboration, which
are quite disparate, if not necessarily warring. Both were gigging and recording
on their own prior to teaming up a year and a half ago, neither solo career
quite suggesting what their conjoined sound would turn out to be. “I do
naturally bend pop,” says Williams, who adds that she “grew up on Billie
Holliday and The Beach Boys.” White, meanwhile, was raised on Kristofferson,
Cash, and Townes Van Zandt by his retro-country-favoring dad. “Somehow we’re
pulling from each other what we crave and what our strengths are,” he says.

If the music ultimately leans more toward White’s native South than Williams’
northern Cali roots, he says, “I think Joy’s got some hillbillies in her
ancestry or something like that. There’s a song on our record called ‘My
Father’s Father’ that we wrote on the day of the inauguration down in Muscle
Shoals, not long after we got together. I started playing the guitar figure and
she starting singing this amazing Appalachian kind of melody, and I’m like,
‘Don’t even pretend that you’re the pop girl and you come out with shit like
that!’ I don’t know where this stuff is coming from, but she’s drawing it from
somewhere, and it’s amazing.”

“Poison & Wine” isn’t just The Civil Wars’ breakout song. It’s also a thematic
declaration of intent for this utterly complementary odd couple, encapsulating
everything suggested in the duo’s name when it comes to exploring the conflicts
that arise as part of couplehood. Speaking of which: They aren’t, that—a couple,
that is. But they’re far from insulted if you mistake them for An Item in the
storied tradition of the Swell Season, Richard and Linda Thompson, or other
famous duos whose on-again, off-again relationships offstage complicated their
stage relations.

“A lot of people think that we’re married, and I think that’s actually quite
flattering, to be honest,” says White. “Because we don’t want people to think
that we’re up here acting and feigning the emotions that we write and sing about
and show on stage. But one of the things that really make this special in our
eyes is that if she and I were in a relationship together, it'd be a totally
different act. We would write totally different songs. I don’t think we would be
able to go on stage every night and sing ‘I don’t love you.’ I don’t think a
healthy relationship could withstand that every single night. There’s areas we
can delve into that wouldn’t make sense for somebody that’s
till-death-do-us-part. I think there’s also a tension there that wouldn’t be
there if it was something that was just rote, something that was an everyday
relationship. We try to use that to our advantage.”

“Poison & Wine” fits the paradigm of subject matter too true to be spoken, as
opposed to sung. “That song probably does sum us up—The Civil Wars, the name of
the band—as well as any song that we’ve written,” White says. It’s the one song
on the album written with an outside collaborator, their friend Chris Lindsey.
“We’re all married, and we were all talking about the good, the bad and the
ugly, and just felt like: What would you say to someone if you were actually
brutally honest—the things that you could never say because it would turn them
away or let the cat out of the bag or reveal yourself to be weaker? What would
you actually say if you had this invisible curtain around you and could just
scream it in somebody’s face and they’d actually never hear it? We were all
being very painfully honest, because we’re all very comfortable around each
other and know that things like that never leave the room, except in a song. I’m
pretty proud of that song, to be honest.”

When “Poison & Wine” was heard in its entirety on Grey’s Anatomy—versus in the
background, for a few seconds, as Williams and White had expected—they knew that
if the show’s audience liked what they heard, it would put their search skills
to the test. The title only pops up in a verse, not the chorus, so it involved
some ingenuity or intuition to track the tune down. Fortunately, viewers proved
up to the test of finding, and choosing, their “Poison.” At last count, the
song’s official YouTube video had been viewed 400,000 times.

White and Williams met in 2008 on what he describes as a “blind date, getting
stuck in a room together, not knowing anything about each other.” This was a
strictly professional blind date. As Williams recalls, “I got a call for what’s
called a writing camp, where several writers were called together to work on
trying to write several radio singles for a particular country band. Though I
live in Nashville, I worked mostly in L.A. and came more out of the pop world,
so I was like, why did they call me? John Paul definitely wasn’t bringing a
Music Row sensibility in when he was coming into the write, either, but neither
of us knew that about each other. In that room, it was almost 20 writers,
basically drawing straws and getting to know each other a little bit. And when
he started singing, I somehow knew where he was heading musically and could
follow him, without ever having met him before. And that had never happened to
me.”

“I’ve done lots of co-writes and collaborative situations, but I’d never felt
that weird spark,” agrees White—“that weird familiarity like we’d been in a
family band or something most of our lives. The beautiful part of it was that
neither one of us would let on, so we both played it cool for a while, saying
‘That went well, we should write another,” and so on. I worked up enough nerve
to—so to speak—ask her out. But there was a lot of scuffing my heel on the floor
and ‘I don’t know what you’re doing for a while, but I’ve got this guitar, and
you sing pretty good, but you probably don’t want to. You’re so much better than
I am. Never mind. I’m just gonna go.’ Luckily she felt the same way.”

Months later, they did their first show as The Civil Wars at the French Quarter
Café in Nashville—where their future producer, Charlie Peacock, was in
attendance and definitely taking notice. Their second show was at a club called
Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Georgia, and it was attended by roughly 100,000 fans.
At least, that’s how many people have downloaded Live at Eddie’s Attic, a free
digital album, from their website.

The set included eight originals plus a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to
the End of Love.” “We didn’t even rehearse that much for that show, and we were
flying by the seat of our pants,” recalls White. “But the sound guy at Eddie’s
is legendary for doing really great board takes, and we listened to the tape on
the way home and were pretty amazed at the quality of the recording. So we
thought, ‘What the hell, let’s see what other people think about it.’ The beauty
of putting that thing out as early as we did is, we could always fall back on:
‘Well, it was our second show’,” he laughs.

“Looking back, John Paul and I can’t believe we put out our second show ever,”
Williams says. “Hopefully you can hear the growth from then to now. But I’m
really glad that we did. To get emails now like ‘A buddy of mine in South Africa
just sent me Live at Eddie’s Attic,’ or somebody coming up to us and saying
‘Yeah, my friend in New Zealand was the one that told me about you guys’—in
Alabama, where we were doing a relatively local show—that really took us by
surprise, the way it started a conversation nationally and internationally.”

The Live at Eddie’s Attic release also had some other happy, unintended
consequences. Williams feels that the loose chatter between songs helped
establish that, as personalities, the two of them aren’t always (or even
usually) as somber as their breakout song might suggest. More importantly, it
established them as a fully functional duo that might be harmed more than helped
by the addition of a slew of hired hands.

When it comes to keeping “the band” to an un-band-like two people, “there’s
probably 10 different reasons for that,” explains White. “Some of it is
logistics. It’s so much easier for two people to get into a car. But it just
felt like releasing that record with just the two of us also put that stripped
down, more organic, more raw kind of sound in people’s minds. And we felt like
it was more emotional and told the story a lot better. It’s just she and I and a
guitar and piano. If there’s something that is lacking, it’s gonna be painfully
obvious. So the song’s guts have to be strong, at least for us, from front to
back.”

No frills means no distractions from the quality of their blended voices. “It’s
the strangest thing when I sing with her,” White says. “Even the things we do
with vibrato, typically, they’re the same—we speed up and slow down at the same
pace. She’ll ad-lib something live, and the next time around, I’ll sing the
harmony to it. But if I sat and thought about it, I couldn’t do it.” For
Williams, who’s sold hundreds of thousands of records recording on her own,
sharing the vocals is “one of my favorite things about The Civil Wars, because
when you’re a solo artist, you can’t harmonize while singing the lead. To me,
all harmony is active listening.”

There’s something circuitously satisfying about the fact that “active listening”
is taking place on-stage at The Civil Wars shows as well as among the audience,
heightening the sensation that it’s a conversation being eavesdropped on, not
just a performance. So much synchronization to go around… but also so much
delicious tension, as the duo hardly shy away from the conflict that gives them
their moniker. Harmonious discord, thy name is The Civil Wars.

White and Williams are never going to forge a complete meeting of the minds.
“You’ll be a redneck once I’m through with you,” he tells her, teasingly. “Oh,
just try!” she taunts him. Still a northern California girl after this many
years in Nashville, she says, “I still can’t say ‘y’all.’ I still can’t say
‘fixin’ to.’ John Paul, you say ‘might could’ a lot, which freaks me out. But
yeah, somewhere in there, if it’s only in the melodies, I’m happy to absorb all
that.”

And to dish it back out in the form of universal narratives that are both
elliptical and emotional. “After all the writing I’ve done for other artists or
writing for TV/film or solo music,” says Williams, “the ability for John Paul
and I to share stories of what’s happened in our lives, either current or past,
and let those inform the way that we write intrinsically makes us care more
about it. We’ve got songs that deal directly with loss that we’ve had in our own
pasts. The opening song, ‘Twenty Years,’ is actually about a family secret, more
on my side of the family. We love to write about these things and hint at it
while not giving the whole thing away. If the stories that we’re singing about
and the things that we’re speaking of are true, hopefully they’ll draw out the
stories of the people who are listening, and that can create some invisible
cycle of safety and exhilaration and freedom, and of being transported somewhere
else for a little moment in time.”

Somewhere like… Barton Hollow? Where is the titular location, anyway? “I guess
it’s something to do with the picturesque quality of the phrase,” admits White.
“It’s a phrase that you’re not gonna Google and find, whatsoever. I found that
out the other day. There is no Barton Hollow, that I can find.” But a few
minutes later, he’s changed his tune, declaring: “Barton Hollow is actually a
place that I grew up. It’s a little geographic place close to where I grew up
and did a lot of illicit activities,” White continues, embellishing as he goes,
while his partner dissolves into helpless laughter. “I have a soft spot for that
place.” Maybe the transporting Williams talks about has worked its magic on her
partner, too.

Comments

Someone requested a non-FLAC version of this album, so here it is. Enjoy it :-)
Good quality torrent. thanks for posting.
Great Music, great torrent. Thank you for taking the trouble.