Word: oldham
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...recordings for a more expansive, upbeat sound. It kicks off to a country-western start with the jangly “Beware Your Only Friend,” featuring fiddles, percussion, and a full gospel choir. “I want to be your only friend,” Oldham croons, echoed by a bevy of perky female vocalists singing, “Is that scary?” By the end of the song, Oldham’s voice strains as he attempts to raise it over a rising cacophony of accordions, guitars, and additional back-up vocals...
...facile lyrics like “You say you like my eyes or just the way I giggle / sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles / but you don’t love me / that’s alright.” Most of the Oldham repertoire features unpredictable chord changes, but here the carnival atmosphere melts into stale poppy hooks, adorned by an occasional Nashville flourish pulled from the shelf...
It’s difficult to determine if these missteps are intended to be humorous or ironic, as their lyrics suggest—if they are, they certainly miss the mark. Luckily, the album’s silliest songs are front-loaded; Oldham regains his footing in the second half of the album. “You Are Lost” strips away the backup vocalists, replacing them with a lush wall of strings to accompany the words, “You are lost inside the sound.” “I Don’t Belong...
...many ways the culmination of Oldham’s career trajectory; his sound has gradually moved away from the spare stylings of albums like “I See A Darkness” (which Johnny Cash liked so much he later recorded his own version with Oldham on backup) toward more polished studio trimmings. But in pulling in all the extra instruments (marimba, flute, tenor saxophone, and accordian, to name a few) it loses something of the stark devastation that gave voice to America’s stranger corners of existence. The album’s title should...
...state where they can be readily accessed and distributed throughout the Harvard community is one of the Center’s primary aims. “This is all about access; it is not about making things beautiful and hoarding them,” says Jan Merrill-Oldham, Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian. “Its about finding ways to get this material to people. A very common scenario is for us to assess objects, to treat them, for cataloguers to improve bibliographic records so that those objects can be found by researches and then to digitize them...