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Waking up to cassette tapes and ashtrays all filled up from the night before

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“Some days I know that if I let my brain fully understand what my gut was propelling me into, it'd chuck itself out my ear.”

~Spider Jerusalem

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Wow the second post in as many days! Aren’t you all impressed as hell right now? Yeah…I didn’t think so. Anyway I got to thinking about all of the music I discovered either directly through Lucero or indirectly by hanging out on the message board and how many of my friends haven’t heard any of it but what I played at them. So I decided that once or twice a week I’ll toss up an intro of sorts to a different artist that is somehow related. So here we go, spinning off into musical oblivion, hang on because I have no idea how down this rabbit hole goes.

Today’s compilation is titled Meet Mr. Branan and it is just what the title says: and introduction to Cory Branan. In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that Cory is a friend of mine and not just an artist whose music I dig. However I had never met him or even heard of him until I got turned on to Lucero and heard their song “Tears Don’t Matter Much”. I was singing along one day and all of a sudden I had to find out who could “…play those wild ass shows, …and sing so sweet” and that was the day I discovered Cory Branan.

The first time I saw Cory play was at the Dickson Street Theatre in Fayetteville, AR when we bailed out of Houston to run from a storm that didn’t even knock out our power. Needless to say we had a great vacation in Fayetteville, you see I have family there, and I got to go out on the town a couple of the nights we were there. Dave ‘Tato’ Morris introduced me to Cory before the show and we tossed back a couple of Jaeger shots. I am pretty sure that’s when it started going downhill, but in a good way, and we ended up at Maxine’s drinking $ 0.50  Schlitz until the wee hours. Well enough of my ruminatin’ on the past let’s talk about this here music.

• Tracks  1-6 come from two different versions of Cory’s first CD “The Hell You Say”. The first pressing, commonly known as the “Memphis” version contained Pale Moon on Paper Town, One Of Theirs, and Green Street Lullaby (Dark Sad Song). Those tree songs were replaced with Skateland South and American Dream at the second pressing. Until very recently copies of this version were very rare indeed. To be sure they are still rare but if you trek out to see Cory live, and you damn well should, you just might find a copy on the merch table for the price of every other CD there. This is an album owning Two Copies of.
• Tracks 7-9 hail from “12 Songs” and it has the disctintion of being Cory’s last album on the label we won’t mention here. This is the album where you can see how fast of friends Cory and Lucero are as Ben sings and plays on this one along with Roy Berry. I miss the Roy Ninja. (You’ll have to google that cause I am not sharing any more) With four years between albums Cory’s songwriting style stayed the same. That is to say he remains spastic and a little schizoprhenic but all in a damn good way. My favorite track on this album is Love Song 12.
• Tracks 10-13 come from Cory’s session at Ardent Studios. You can check out the videos of that session or grab the tracks, cut up by yours truly, here. There are some songs here that will make an appearance on his album that is due out later this year and some that you will only get to hear bootlegged or if you drag yourself by your worthless collar out to a show. When I tracked this up from the mp3 on the ardent page I left in the banter because you really don’t get a feel for Cory without his banter. Make no mistake: Cory is a dork but he’s a dork with a guitar and songs that will make boys drink until they forget their name and a voice that makes girls clothes fall right off…
• Tracks 14-19 are from Nights Like These, a bootleg, of a show Cory played with ben Nichols. They played “buddy rock” and while it’s not tracked perfectly I didn’t edit them so you may need to go track down a copy, it’s not hard, so you can figure out what Cory and Ben are on about in the some of the interludes that got left in. This one also has some songs that will probably never make it onto wax, like The KISS Song, and not sound like a broken record that you can only truly appreciate live.
• Track 20 is the first song of Cory’s I ever download. I can’t convice the bastard to play it live for me but I giggle at his response every time someone asks. It is a party song for sure and it’s a damn fine one. But I guess we all grow out some things.

To be sure Cory is an amazing artist and a great friend. Here are some links as well as the track archive for the above tape:

Cory Merch
Cory’s Website
Cory’s Myspace (I can’t believe I am posting a MySpace link)
Last Chance Diner (Cory’s fansite with a woefully outdated theme. It’s all my fault and I need to fix since I manage the damn site after all)
Cory’s Ardent Session Audio
Cory’s Ardent Session Video
Track Archive for Meet Mr. Branan

And last but not least the embed code so that you can go forth and share the Branan love (he might kill me for that line):

This is sort of a Lucero primer. I have made many Lucero CDs over the years to turn people on to their music. Today I decided that I would be lazy and simply make three one hour playlists and post them here. Now I can simply give people a URL instead of spending time making plastic discs that people just rip and file away somewhere. Three one hour playlists turned into four playlists as I decided to toss in some of Ben Nichols’ solo work as well as some tracks from his prior band Red 40. I enjoyed putting these together and I hope you will enjoy listening to them. You can get all of the music here, on the original discs, from the Lucero Store. In fact you should pop over and order everything while you listen. I tried, and most likely failed, to put the tracks in order of their original release so that as you listen you can see how the band grew and how their style became what it is today. Enough rambling, on to the music…

I chose “Cowboy Emo” as the name of this compilation due to a rumor of the conversation between Ben and Brian that laid the groundwork for Lucero. I won’t bore you with the whole story but rumor has it that Brian described the music he wanted to play as “Cowboy Emo” during that conversation. I don’t think there’s much emo and not much cowboy in the music but it’s a fitting title nonetheless. The track archives have proper id3 tags and even some horrible cover art I threw together so they should drop nicely into iTunes or whatever you use. There’s even a code snippet you can use to embed these tapes on your own blog if you want!

This first tape has songs from the first four Lucero albums:

• Tracks 1-3 are from the Attic Tapes which was recorded prior to the release of their first album. I have heard this was around 1999 but that could be wrong.
• Tracks 4-7 are from the boys self-titled release on Madjack from 2001.
• Tracks 8-13 are from Tennessee released in 2002. Coincidently the first Lucero song I ever heard “Sweet Little Thing” was from this album.
• Tracks 14-17 hail from That Much Further West which was described by Rolling Stone as “The country album Paul Westerberg never wrote…”. This album was released in 2004.

Tape 1 Track Archive

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