We last featured Wes Tirey on these pages back in 2016 when we offered a taster of Black Wind (Scissor Tail Records), an album that “opens out like Terence Malick meditating on prairie grass.” We were first introduced to his music three years prior via his five-track EP I Stood Among Trees. “The songs juxtapose the cultures and landscapes that inspired Tirey. The contrast of his Rust-belt roots to the north, twinned with the religious connotations of the Bible-belt to the South, serves an extremely appealing and refreshing perspective to American folk music.”
The songs on his latest album dig far deeper than those descriptions maybe hint at, seeping into the dust clogged pores of real life. It came as no surprise to read that the short story writer Raymond Carver plays an influence. A complex man, Carver’s razor-sharp unflinching pen lifted the roofs of diners and motels to reveal desperate blue-collar lives – the waitresses, mechanics, and door-to-door salesmen.
Tirey told Laura Barton that his latest double album and 10th release, The Midwest Book of the Dead, is somewhat indebted to Raymond Carver, a writer he has been “reading and re-reading since I was 21 years old.” She states, “Carver’s influence is there in the unflinching simplicity of Tirey’s lyrics…”
She later adds: “…it tells of silos like chapels, spiders in the cane, of drunkards and saints and fugitives; it speaks of wild geese, and the good life, rhinestone suits, Coca Colas, and dishes drying on the rack. That sincerity and melodrama resides in the candor and weight of these songs — its playing and arrangements, rich but unfettered, and Tirey’s voice grown several feet deeper and more sonorous. It is a sublime expansion of a trademark style he has come to call ‘rustic minimalism’.”
Released last spring on Dear Life Records, next month, The Midwest Book of the Dead is getting a vinyl re-release on Mapache Records (June 18th) – pre-order now.
To mark the occasion, we have an exclusive premiere of the accompanying lyric video to the opening track, Red Corn, Yellow Corn.
Wes: Red Corn, Yellow Corn is the opening track to the album, and it sets the scene and landscape — “the lay of the land” — for the characters that populate the songs. I think it can be understood as a mantra, as well — a kind of incantation to the land I’m attached to, no matter how far away I can get from it.
Featuring archival footage, the video was edited by Jason Scott Furr.
The Midwest Book of the Dead is released as a double vinyl album on Mapache Records (June 18th) – pre-order now.
The album is also available on Digital/CD/Cassette – https://westirey.bandcamp.com/album/the-midwest-book-of-the-dead
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