It’ll be a full two-hour show, so expect … well, a two-hour show. See you there, 7.30pm.

On Tuesday, 26th June we’ll be hosting some of our nearest and dearest – friends, collaborators and those who made the album possible – at Birmingham’s very fine Warehouse Cafe. The guys and gals at Watehouse have been amazing in helping us organise this fiesta, and we’re salivating at the very thought of the food that will be the main part of the celebrations. Oh, and we’ll play a set at the end as a kind of second dessert.

Our second cafe of the week comes in the shape of Balsall Heath’s mighty Ort, where the equal formidable Grandma Chic will be hosting a retrotastic fashion show with live music from ourselves, some jokers called the Mellow Peaches, our regular showmates Abie’s Miracle Tonic and the splendiferous Little Sister. It’s possible that Doc DW may well also be compering, so expect plenty of snake oil in addition to garments of the highest possible style.

We round off the week in Cheltenham on Friday, 29th June with a show at The Vine, as part of the annual charity festival Vinestock. Chock-full of talent each and every year, we’re really looking forward to our first Spa town show, and believe we’re sharing the bill with the moderately interesting Dan Hartland.

Ready? Go.

We first spotted this photo doing the rounds in Sean Wilentz’s fabulous Bob Dylan in America. (Sean absolutely positively appeared on 50 Miles of Elbow Room once, reading an extract from the book relating how the Delta bluesman might have felt about being told what to play by white guys with microphones.) It’s a snap of Dylan at a wedding in 1962 (the groom, Gil Turner, is the one wearing the buttonhole). Asleep at the left of the picture is the Reverend Gary Davis, ‘rediscovered’ by the folk boomers of the early 1960s and one of the finest blues pickers of all time.

Dylan – not just his person, but his music – connects us still to the roots embodied in a player like the Revered Gary Davis. That’s why we need to celebrate every birthday, every year. Here’s to Bobby.

We should all put our guitars away, and take up knitting. Or baking.

A Wasteland Companion comes festooned with a sticker announcing that M. Ward’s latest record features members of She & Him. That there’s only one member of that duo who isn’t already M. Ward doesn’t seem to have struck the label’s PR team, but the trumpeting of Zooey Deschanel’s appearance on this soothing, syrupy record is a good sign of how strange Matthew Stephen Ward’s career has become.

His has turned out to be a portfolio career – first as a raw, even grungy kind of alt.country troubador, latterly as a kind of elder statesman in both She & Him and Monsters of Folk. He’s an enigmatic chap, our M., and perhaps this is the only way can go from one to the other role in little more than 10 years. A Wasteland Companion is an understated record, perhaps not quite so immediate as its predecessor, Hold Time – in fact, it works as a kind of contemplative correlative to that record – but it has its own kind of lovely heft.

There’s a Daniel Johnstone cover here – the Deschanel-heavy ‘Sweetheart’ – and a song about Big Star’s lead singer. In some ways, the record feels like a collection of things Ward likes, rather than anything approaching a coherent statement – some rockabilly here, some dustbowl folk there – but in another way this is what makes a Ward record so interesting. Come the autumn, you’ll be listening to this as the nights draw in …

Photo by Pixie 'Pics' Perry

The Nursery Tavern in Coventry is a beautiful place: a knowledgeable, respectful crowd and a promoter/curator who lines up the very finest bills every single month. It’s one of our favourite places to play, so going there to play our first gig since the release of our new CD made perfect sense. It was a fantastic night – thanks to everyone who attended! We’ll see you elsewhere soon, we should hope …

Watch this space!

One of my first posts on this, the most intermittent of blogs on the internet, was about Punch Brothers’ quirkily creative album, Antifogmatic. Here’s what I said about it:

Familiar filling riffs bend and squeeze themselves into new shapes, but more than that: here’s a banjo played as if it’s in a contemporary jazz band, or a mandolin performing startling percussive duties; here’s a song whose structure and lyrics just shouldn’t work, and yet one which is executed as catchily as any three-chord strum.

A number of tunes on that record – ‘You Are’, ‘Alex’, ‘Rye Whiskey’, and ‘Next To The Trash’ – have stayed with me. When Queasy Joe told me he’d been listening to the band’s follow-up, Who’s Feeling Young Now?, and that it was better than its predecessor, I was therefore pretty darned excited.

I should have known better. [/obligatory Nickel Creek reference]

QJ was never as big a fan of Antifogmatic as I was – for him, it crossed over into the borderlands of pretension once too often (he and I place that boundary at different places on the map – mine is way further east). For me, Who’s Feeling Young Now? seems like a step down in terms of invention. I’m happy to accept this may simply be because Jacquire King’s production isn’t as expert as Jon Brion’s, but the record feels flatter regardless. On the other hand, flatter means more consistent, so I can see where my banjo-pickin’ compadre is comming from.

But that doesn’t make him right.

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