Confessions of a Fanboy

I’ve been an unabashedly enthusiastic supporter of Barrett Martin’s music as well as the work he’s been doing with his Fast Horse Recordings label so I’ve never really needed an excuse to enthuse about his music but if the NY Times wants to give me one, I’ll play along.

Martin tunrs 41 today, so COAF wishes him a very happy birthday. To celebrate, I’m going to revisit a few of my favorite songs from his two solo records.

• Muhammad Ali: This song has more celebratory energy than I do today, but this is the first song from his first solo record- a good place to start.

• Afterlife Architecture: The first song I fell in love with from The Painted Desert.
• A Rumor of Rain - I hear the rain in the percussion of this song.
• Survival Portuguese - I wrote about the soothing, healing prperties of this work a couple weeks back.
• A Waltz Under the Stars/The Diamond Path - These two close out The Painted Desert and I rarely listen to one without the other because they seem so well fitted to one another, much like “Midnight” and “Echo” from Joe Satriani’s Surfing With the Alien.
• Agbadza - The great opener to Earthspeaker, this rivals “Afterlife Architecture” as my favorite Barrett Martin composition.
• Pattern Recognition - I’ll spare us all the ridiculous wordplay made possible by the title and say simply that I like this one.
• The Conjuror - A mysterious title, well suited for the composition it adorns.
• A Line in the Sand - A great title for my day today. I love the upright bass and the way the various instruments are mixed and blended.
• El Barrio - This one has a dark groove. The groove keeps it from sounding hopeless and bleak, but there is still a mysterious undercurrent to this one.
• Deus Ex Machina - “The Ghost in the Machine.” The ghost in the machine always seems to be working against me, but in spite of that this is a great closer for Earthspeaker.

Filed under: Tags: Barrett Martin