Warren Zevon - The Barricades of Heaven

When I look back onto the musicians and bands that made the biggest impressions on me in my childhood, Warren Zevon undoubtedly takes the top spot. I remember sitting in my father’s pickup truck playing “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” over and over on the cassette player (if he got tired of hearing it, he never told me). The story of a Thompson submachine gun-wielding Norwegian soldier carrying on his crusade even after being beheaded really captured my imagination. When I got a little older, I began to appreciate Zevon’s caustic wit and lyrical prowess, well beyond his interesting subject matter. His songs were ones that told stories, confined to 3-4 minutes but never lacking in breadth. If there is anyone to attribute my longstanding appreciation and preoccupation with the lyrical content of songs, it was Warren Zevon. By the time I learned of his diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer in 2003, I was listening to him virtually to the exclusion of anything else. And while his eventual passing that year was a terrible thing to bear, I am grateful for the vast musical legacy he left, one that acted as the catalyst for my fascination and love of music as a whole.

Drag The River – Garage Rock (2009)

Growing up, I basically wrote off country music as a genre that I would never enjoy. While I had not realized it at the time, most of the country music I had heard was just pop music meagerly disguised with acoustic guitars. It was not until my later years in college that I learned that there was a whole other side to country music, quite unlike what I grew up hearing on the radio. One of the first bands to help me realize this was Armchair Martian, a relatively unknown punk rock band from Ft. Collins, Colorado. While they were not a country band, the band’s vocalist, Jon Snodgrass, had a noticeable country twang to his voice, which was something I was not accustomed to hearing in rock music. I quickly fell in love with the band, and eagerly acquired all of their releases.  Throughout Armchair Martian’s career, they slowly began to adopt more of a country flare. In fact, once they called it a day, Jon Snodgrass went on to form a country rock band called Drag the River with Chad Price of the punk band ALL.