With old time elements penetrating many of these tracks, this album is evidence that the foundations laid down by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family are still being built on to this day in the most stunning way possible.

Bringing you their second album, this Californian-based duo have released what I consider to be the purest form of music; tracks you can sit around in a room or campfire together with some buddies where everybody can join in. Don’t get me wrong, this is no Boy Scout album, but material which I reckon even Roy Acuff wouldn’t have minded having a go at singing.

With a slow harmonica/guitar beginning to Summer’s Gone Again, this sombre yet attentive track seems perfect to be played when the summer season actually does end. The vocals act as the human equivalent of the instrumentals, with the background harmonies certainly matching Fur that, at times, surpasses her efforts as lead vocalist. With a hoedown beginning to it, Friends Around the Fire does exactly what it says on the tin; it allows buddies to sing this together as well as having a good old dance whilst doing so. This is a perfect tune for the Saturday Grand Ole Opry due to its traditional-sounding elements. A peach of a track which is so good that I suspect it might change the minds of those who despise country music to listening to other songs similar to this. The opening to Scars may be a slow affair, but the vocals are certainly worth waiting for. Steve’s vocals sound like a wise old man in a dusty small-town telling the younger residents not to repeat his mistakes. Accompanied by Fur intermittently, this is a track which Nashville ought to take notice of as it demonstrates that you do not have to layer tracks with untold numbers of instruments to make it commercially viable.

Such albums like this one should be in people’s top 10 of all time, let along 2009. I personally cannot see this situation ever changing for a band which must be one heck of a treat to see live. RH


www.maverick-country.com ..  
24 Bray Gardens, Maidstone, Kent, ME15 9TR UK

ARTIST: FUR DIXON AND STEVE WERNER

TITLE: TRAVELERS

LABEL: GRASS AND GRAVEL RECORDS

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 1, 2009

By Carl Gage


From the opening, Journey to Another Side, imaginatively set in a Mexican cantina, to the closing, Friends Around the Fire, singing under the moonlight with good friends, this is the album that we expected from the venerable down-home Van Nuys duo. It's imaginative, entertaining, melodic, beautiful and humorous; and it's a cover-to-cover sing-along, my favorite kind of musical entertainment.

Similar to their first collection, The Pearl and the Swine, the selections alternate between those written by Fur and those by Steve, except that this time two of Fur's were very effectively co-written by Ric Taylor. And it's also similar to the first CD, in that the ones about asphalt, dirt, engines and campfires are Steve's, while the pretty song department is well covered by Fur with If I Was Free (with Ric), My Blue Yodel and the gorgeous Summer's Gone Again.

As expected, Travelers is definitely about traveling. Several of the numbers are legitimate road songs and each one makes you think more about grabbing your hat and hitting the highway. Steve's Road Outside My Door, Homesick for the Highway Blues, Scars and Friends Around the Fire address that area well, as do Fur and Ric's Journey To Another Side and the one Steve and Fur collaboration, Ghost of a Traveling Man.

It should be noted however that this album is more than a collection of road songs. While being happy and fun to listen to, it occasionally delivers a serious message, as exemplified in Travelers, a wake-up call for a planet facing a potential eco-disaster. It's also about love, and lost love, as heard in Fur's captivatingly melodic numbers mentioned above.
With their wonderfully blended harmonies, Fur and Steve have a way of drawing you into a song, either singing along and harmonizing with them; trying your hand (or tonsils) at yodeling; or just closing your eyes and picturing the images that the songs deliver. However you listen, their music consistently provides a highly enjoyable experience and this album more than lives up to that expectation.

Beautifully produced by Dennis Moody and mastered by John Golden, the listenability is first-rate. Every note you want to hear from every instrument or voice is right there. Those instruments this time around include the elegant tones of Brantley Kearns' fiddle joining Paul Marshall on bass, Cliff Wagner on banjo and John McDuffie on Dobro and pedal steel, an excellent ensemble indeed.

This is one that you need to have in your acoustic music collection and you will find yourself playing it or mixing the tunes into your playlists more and more. My congratulations to Fur, Steve and their team for a job well done.

Carl Gage is a singer-songwriter, musician and writer based in Simi Valley, CA. He is active in the acoustic music community serving on theboards of the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest and Songmakers, Inc., managing web sites for the FAR-West FolkAlliance, Songmakers and Topanga, emceeing on the main stage at Topanga andother musical events throughout the year, and writing occasional articles for FolkWorks, The Bard Chord and other publications. http://carlgage.com

"Travelers" is here! I've been listening to songs from this release by Fur Dixon and Steve Werner at most of their shows I've been to lately, and I was hungry to get them home! And now I can, and you can, too.

As the title suggests, these are songs about the love of the road. Ten new jewels of Americana/Cowboy Folk original songwriting from these two (with help from Ric Taylor) sparkle out at you from this album, ranging from the love of freedom and fireside friendship, wide open-space sadness and heartbreak, to the down-and-out joy of "being exactly who I am." Man, it doesn't get any better than this. These folks are so downright lovely honest that it makes you weep! Their work is so stylistically consistent that you know you've found a real authentic treasure. The cowboy/Americana sound in this day and age just begs for Fur and Steve to sing and play and write just as they do. I just want to sit at their feet and sing along for pure love and longing and happiness. When I hear them, I somehow know I've been told exactly how it is.

Fur has collaborated with Ric Taylor on the song "Journey to Another Side" which opens the album. It's a perfect duo with number two, Steve's "Road Outside My Door." They seem to be saying the same things from slightly different points of view, but then you know that Steve and Fur agree that they want to get going. Fur writes sweetly in "Summer's Gone Again" and with Ric Taylor writes the poignant "If I Was Free," both songs of loss in different scenes. The melodies are rich and beautiful and can sometimes surprise you with their complexity when you think you have these two all figured out.

Steve and Fur have this really wonderful way of writing natural sing-alongs that actually contain real messages, and the fourth cut is the perfect "Homesick for the Highway Blues" from Steve Werner that absolutely puts me in mind of Hank Williams, and not just for the use of the word "homesick"-- it's just a great old-fashioned way of constructing classic cowboy songs. It's as simple and pure, funny, sweet and easy as you could get, and you'll be singing before the second chorus gets started. Steve is impressive as a writer for the way he can marry humor and pathos, put them right up together, side by side (just like life), and you find yourself laughing and crying and singing all at the same time. However, one offering on this album is just way above and beyond: the powerfully classic "Scars" is the big, big Kahuna on this CD. It's a song that everyone over the age of whatever should hear and memorize. Anyone who can look back will feel the power of its naked intimacy, and weep for the pure fact of pain and experience. Then by the end you feel damned proud of yourself. He sings of memory and hurt, the scars visible and not, he sings, “I can’t bury them so I carry them and I wear them like a crown" And if you feel it, you realize that you do, too. He likens each scar to a "crooked little roadmap of the life that I have led" Isn't that just right? This song will haunt me and stay with me for a long time, and I'm glad.

Other players on this record are great and add a lot, especially Brantley Kearns on fiddle, playing tastily on several cuts. The others are Cliff Wagner on banjo, George Pandis on trumpet, Gary Johnson on accordian, John McDuffie on pedal steel and dobro and Paul Marshall on bass. The real core, though is Steve and Fur playing their songs and singing their great harmonies. The purity and charm of their full sweet guitars is a perfect match for what they sing about: the grace and yearning and beauty of our lives lived in the joy of simple harmony.

The title cut is by Fur and, as always she is right on top of it with her theme of change is coming, and she couldn't be more right. And glory hallelujah, we have it to look forward to! and in the meantime, we can sing. Sing along with Fur and Steve and feel happy in the midst of the sadness, joy an d laughter. At the end, Steve's "Friends Around the Fire" makes you feel that everything's going to be alright – the human spirit is alive and well and thriving, and for that, I would put my money down."
Susie Glaze

Fur Dixon and Steve Werner CD Review June 2006

Folkworks Magazine

BY LARRY WINES


With lively melodies, marvelous harmonies, great hooks, downhome sensibilities and deft playing of their six strings, Fur Dixon and Steve Werner are a hot act. They bring high-energy old-time style with modern lyrical sensibilities and a lively bluegrass feel.

Their CD is titled, The Pearl and the Swine. It strings together luminous examples of the former and none of the latter.

The album features some of the duo's accomplished musician pals who are just as likely to be playing some honky-tonk with them. Paul Marshall, from the band, I See Hawks In L.A. (and way back when, the Strawberry Alarm Clock) plays bass and autoharp. Cliff Wagner, of Cliff Wagner and the Old Number 7, contributes banjo and fiddle, while John "Groover" McDuffie is aboard on pedal steel. Mike Stinson, one of L.A.s most successful alt-country songwriters, plays drums, and Scarlet Rivera, whos performed with Bob Dylan, contributes her fiddle on the catchy Back Roads and Blue Skies, a Fur and Steve co-write.

But co-writes are the exception. Fur and Steve are both formidable songwriters, and they balance their gigs with an equal number of originals by each. They keep track, and they let you know it.

Fur and Steve launched as a pairing in 2003. Before that, each had piled-up plenty of credits. He opened for Bob Dylan. She toured with Rosie Flores.

He's been bandleader for still-at-it 50s rockabilly stars, including Glen Glenn, Ray Campi (who still climbs his stand-up bass like Hillary on Everest), Johnny Legend, Sonny Burgess and Tommy Sands. She made her name in the 80s roots/punk scene, with the Hollywood Hillbillies and the Cramps, yet she cites Gillian Welch, June and Mother Maybelle Carter, Hazel Dickens and Johnny Cash as her strongest influences.

She's lived and been part of the music scene in New York and Austin. He made an album called Biker Campfire thats a staple in the road-trip motorcycle world.

Her witty writing includes hilarious prose, like that on their myspace page (www.myspace.com/furandsteve). Hes played Europe and Japan, and had hits across European radio that he penned for expatriate American rocker John Whiteleather, now a resident of Sweden.

As formidable as the two halves, the sum is much greater. Their harmonies are incredible. Someone said, When they sing harmony, it'll raise the hair on your arms. In case youre worried, you can forget Steves biker world. Their songs let you generate the propulsion of your choice, from horseback to shoe leather, or anything with an engine attached. And they make you want to hit the open road to the first off-ramp that becomes a winding back road.

Their pickin' is first rate, and their songs are very California, glimpsing the ocean from Furs Mulholland Highway, crossing the Ventura County Line with her (en-route to who-knows-where) or rolling across the Mojave with Steve's Brother Tumbleweed. Its the spirit of the early surf songs, carefree discovery with one you love or want to, though instrumentally like an old timey string band. It harkens to the early days of The Dirt Band, or today's Old Crow Medicine Show, or acoustic Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. And its just as much the musical sensibilities of their long list of heroes, including Doc Watson, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Townes Van Zandt, Jimmie Rogers, Willie Nelson, the Yonder Mountain String Band and more.

These two pay attention. They seek and embrace the influences, and theyll tell you things, like Furs reverent observation, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings changed everything in acoustic music. And Steve's, "Back in the real day, folk singing was a hardcore deal. In the '30s and '40s, it was playing in rough bars all across the country, and the guys that came out of that were rough, tough guys."

Lyrically, that homage is present, as in Steve's Reputation of a Rambler (with Cliff Wagner on banjo and Paul Marshall on bass). Steve's song, When My Face Is Covered Over can stand alongside any Appalachian paen to death. His very playful Right On Time, Buddy contrasts nicely with her introspective When Will My Wandering End? and her mea culpa song, If I Wake Up Tomorrow.

But the album's 12 tracks deliver plenty of dance-in-the-aisles, crank-it-up-on-the-open-road kinda music. When Fur melodically asks Where Are We Going? Steve responds with Every Day a Different Journey, occasioning more fine harmonies.

It's all first-rate, and this CD was chosen as a member premium (alongside Kris Kristofferson's new CD) in the Spring 2006 KCSN pledge drive.

T'was something of a surprise and an honour to receive a message from Fur Dixon recently. Since then Ive become acquainted with her most recent music project but lets not get ahead of ourselves here. A recap for those who might not know, prior to her becoming the rather striking Mohican bass player with The Cramps, Fur had always dabbled in the art of country music. Way before the advent of those new country or Americana pigeonholes, she was in the Screamin Sirens (with Rosie Flores) and then The Hollywood Hillbillys. Someone should release their album.

Anyway, were down the road apiece now. She hid her light under a bushel during that time with Lux, Ivy and Nick. She has a fabulous warble of a voice which is perfect for the smokin folky bluegrass that is The Pearl and the Swine. Fur's companion is a guy by the name of Steve Werner and together they've crafted a beautiful set of travelling songs and there are 12 of on the album. Its unashamedly good natured and the two trade off one another effortlessly. The perfect soundtrack to ride a station (or any other kind of) wagon through yer actual and metaphorical desert landscape. They're hauling plenty of liquid to keep you hydrated.

Where Are We Going? asks track 8, well hopefully in the direction of Europe at some point. Check out some of their songs at the FUR and STEVE website. Its addictive stuff. Steve Werner's voice compliments his female accomplice perfectly and the music they make is utterly uncomplicated and all the better for it. If you like pickin that'll make you grin then stop off in these folks company for a while. They appear to exist in a world that revolves at a different pace. I for one chums, am down with that!
Lindsay Hutton, editor http://nextbigthing.blogspot.com