Music Friday: "Gin, Smoke, Lies," "Southeastern Son," & "Old Blue Star"

Today I'm featuring songs from an album that came out Tuesday, Goodbye Normal Street by the Turnpike Troubadours.

This is a band I didn't know much about until this week. Here is how the outfit is described on Last.fm: "The Turnpike Troubadours, whose name is derived from the bumpy Oklahoma toll-roads and their hard lived folk singing heroes, are proof that isolation can be the mother of originality. Cutting their teeth in roadside dance halls and honky-tonks has made a serious impact on the band’s musical style, which walks the line between Woody Guthrie and Waylon Jennings. “Bossier City,” the band’s debut album, is testament to the small towns in which they were raised. It combines Folk, Country, Cajun, and Bluegrass with stories of longing, humor, tragedy, and general life in rural America."

First up is the opening track of the new album--"Gin, Smoke, Lies."

The next two songs from the album provide narratives about veterans.

Music Friday: "Book of Matches"

I recently got introduced to Last.fm, a great site that connects to iTunes or your iPod. The greatest strength of this site is that once you get yourself "scrobbled," the site will suggest artists and bands you might like based on your listening history and artists you've identified as ones you enjoy.

So I've been tooling around on that that for the past few days ~ exploring musicians and artists I've heard of but never listened to (Hayes Carll, Centro-Matic, The Drams, Gillian Welch), or folks I had no clue about until recently (Dexateens, Old 97's, Slaid Cleaves, Glossary, Pieta Brown).

One band I've discovered is Gentleman Auction House, a band out of St. Louis that does some interesting stuff. It's a large band of six people, I think.

I recently downloaded [free!] their four-song set on Daytrotter, and the song provided here is one of their more popular ones it seems.

Click HERE to watch them perform "Book of Matches."

With all these Web-based resources for music, I'm jealous as hell.

Before you buy new music nowadays, you can check out artists on YouTube, get suggestions from Last.fm, download free sessions on Daytrotter, etc. We never had any of this stuff in the late 80s and early 90s when I was checking out new bands all the time. I wasted a lot of money buying music based on reviews in Rolling Stone.