Ah the joys of spring.  Rain, sun, hot, cold, more rain, and then some.  It gives us a lot of time to listen to our records, when we're not GTA/IronMan/Harold/Kumar/MarioKarting.  So then, here we go, more things we like:

1. Masters of Reality: Sunrise on the Sufferbus--Chris Goss, who is basically MoR, did a lot of production work for Kyuss, which we now know of as Queens of the Stone Age.  But the Sunrise on the Sufferbus is really different--not the least because Ginger Baker plays drums on it.  In some ways it's blues minimalized and modernized, but it's also of itself, a brilliant song album.  Plus it's so cool and clean and hypnotic.

2. George Van Eps - We loves George.  The reason John started fingerpicking is because he kept losing picks, but the reason he kept doing it was because of  Chet Atkins, Mark Knopfler, and GVE.  Lots of guitarists can play really fast up and down the neck, but few can make the guitar sound so smart and so much more than a violin with frets.  Youngsters like Charlie Hunter and Ben Monder owe a lot to the last generation of brilliant chordal guitarists, like Joe Pass, Lenny Breau, Tal Farlow, and Howard Alden.  George played this famous style of fingerpicked, chordal jazz guitar that makes one guitar sound like three, or maybe four, sometimes.  Beautiful swing, beautiful sounds, and he can totally shred.  But what makes this harder is you're thinking like a pianist, melody, harmony, counterpoint, but on 6 or 7 strings!  Crazy!

3. Dwight Yoakum - His odd acting aside, Dwight Yoakum and Peter Anderson, his trusty producer, set the standard for the modern old retrocountry thing.  Sure he doesn't have the deep steady authenticity, maybe, of a Randy or a Lyle, but he's got his own thing going.  Particularly the album Gone, which foreshadowed the Brill/Phil/MuscleShoals sound of the now country-esque acts, like Shelby Lynne.  And he's from California!   Guess hene the Bakersfield sound moniker.

4. Richard Thompson - Were there enough words to describe the talent of RT.  The improbably deep voice, the amazingly wiry and pushing fingerpicked guitar solos, but most of all, the incredible songwriting.  Not experts, but we imagine that his is the marriage of traditions with the newness of pop, of the hooks and the choruses, but also of smart words.  He's been covered by everyone, it seems, and also had the opportunity of working with so many greats, not to mention singing with Linda Thompson.  So great, so sad.  So brilliant.

5. Tears for Fears - It seems like every 80's band has a weird backstory, or front story, or whatever.  TFF, aside from the naming origin story, may not be one of them--however, they did write brilliant songs, over and over again.  And for us, suckers of the Beatles lineage, Roland Orzabal's songwriting, and, as it turns out, nice production skills, makes TFF a repeating play.  The Seeds of Love was an ambitious, sprawling Beatles/operatic/RnB album, one wonders what would've been if grunge hadn't come along.  We can remember the first time hearing Nirvana, kind of the way it must've felt to hear the Beatles, especially after the hair bands and everything (Nirvana, of course, not the Beatles.) But TFF, you had us at "Shout."