In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashvillle. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the flooded Mississippi stretching away from the edge of the road to the horizon: a new inland sea for the beleaguered American South.
Looming deadlines mean my blogging has been sketchy this week, but I have at least kept a longer-than-usual log of the records played in the past few days. As you’ll see, a good few interesting new arrivals here, too.
In his book Hotel California, Barney Hoskyns describes Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, in the 1970s as “A funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views of LA’s sprawling basin.”