Ryan Gustafson wrote these songs during quick spans scattered between various tours of the last two years—as a supporting guitarist for his kindred North Carolina spirits Hiss Golden Messenger and Phil Cook’s Guitarheels and as the leader of his own long-evolving vehicle for a beautifully fractured vision of folk, country, blues, and cosmic American rock, The Dead Tongues. Gustafson’s third and best album under that name, Unsung Passage is a first-person reckoning with the things Gustafson, a chronically peripatetic adventurer, has seen enough to sing about. There are meditations on mortality and devotion (the flute-laced dream “My Other/Little Birdie”), on money and temporality (the banjo trot “The Giver”), and on impermanence and acceptance (the achingly gorgeous “Pale November Dew.”). “When I’m traveling, it’s like walking into these different windows…The people you meet, the way the landscape speaks to you, how a desert is different than a mountain: It has the potential to bring out something you didn’t know was there.” These ten songs are snapshots in time–glimpses at the sorts of emotional upheavals and adjustments we’re all forced to face as we move from day to day and, as in Gustafson’s way, place to place.
Lou Hazel
Lou Hazel was born in the town of Olean, New York to a family of northeastern wiseacres.
Not one to commit, he skirted the compulsive hunting and fishing tradition held close to his father’s heart - instead cultivating a sensitivity more suited to artists and vagabonds. As a result, his travels brought him across the country and eventually through debilitating depression before coming to rest with a sense of personal peace and positivity in Durham, NC.
Yet, Lou’s brain is still a bat cave. Mostly, he wakes up with no idea what he’s going to do next, then finds himself there. In songwriting, he pulls from this cave rambling, heartfelt tales flowing through unselfconscious truth. In illustrations, he swirls and meanders towards an eventual finish only understood upon completion – as in his music. And in his photography and design work, he renders the essence of fellow musicians into expressive, personalized works of art.
Today, Louie continues crafting genuine folk tales of honest longing, disquieting loss, and nostalgia through a brilliant sheen of fresh insight with humble humor. Grabbing us by the ears in a new-age, Prine-like grip. Transforming the minutiae of everyday life into ever more evocative music. And surprising us all, including himself, with where we emerge.
In other words, Lou Hazel is coming out of this unbearable, unbelievably tragic, disconcerting year like a damn newborn moth with jet engine wings aimed toward a totally full super-moon. And it is good.
