#3: “Hometown Again” by Jason Eklund
I struggled a bit trying to pick song number three, the only one of the five that I wasn’t sure of. Ultimately I discarded several that I love, or that are really important to me, because I thought that too many people might know them. I might do a part six with a few of the songs that didn’t make the cut.
Anyway, I decided to dip back into my alt-country ’90s and pull out a song from one of the few albums from my old radio show that I still listen to regularly, Jason Eklund’s Lost Causeway from 1995. Eklund’s a guy from Texas Indiana1 who decided to live a true troubadour life and tool around the country busking and writing songs about what he saw. Eventually one of the owners of the defunct folk label Flying Fish heard him on the street somewhere and signed him to a deal. Lost Causeway was Jason’s second album, and the only one I’ve heard. It came into my mailbox at WNYU; I fell in love with it for reasons I don’t particularly understand; and for reasons I understand only a little bit better it’s stuck with me since then.
This track “Hometown Again,” is somewhat atypical for the album, more singer-songwritery than the rest of the CD’s crinkly, alterna-oldtimey stuff. But it shows off Jason’s unique lyrical eye, and it stands as one of the truest pictures of small-town/rural life during a couple of decades of an economy that’s slowly abandoning it.2
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Buy It:
I’m happy that Rounder Records, which bought Flying Fish, has kept Lost Causeway in print all this time. You can buy/download it from their site. Jason Ecklund finally reemerged with a web site in 2003, which hasn’t been updated since. But his MySpace page is more up to date–apparently he played a show in Denver last month. It also includes some of his newer music, which admittedly doesn’t particularly excite me.
(No bonus track this time. I don’t want to give away music that you can readily buy in a way that might actually end up with the artist making some money.)
<< Part 2: Stan Freberg | Part 4: Devin Davis >>
----- Corrected [↩]
- I just realized that there have been no jokes on this page. Sorry. Here, you can have this tweet I wrote while riding a bus through Slovenia in 2009 that I couldn’t get down to 140 characters: “Here in the forests of Slovenia you measure a man’s worth by the size of his wood pile. You measure the size of his wood pile with his Maxima K-7H laser wood pile measurer.” [↩]
