Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Outsider Blues” by Wooden Wand:

“Outsider Blues” is from Wooden Wand’s excellent 2012 album, Blood Oaths of the New Blues. It’s a really good example of a difficult genre or mode: the storytelling song.  Bob Dylan is probably the master of this form (genre? mode?), or Woody Guthrie before him, and of course the blues songwriters and performers like Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, or Lightnin’ Hopkins, to name only a few.  The key here is a musical arrangement that both gives a foundation for, and yields ground to, the lyrics.  That your story and lyrics have to be good enough goes without saying.  Often when I listen to this song, I think it’s the percussion that’s the real triumph: a simple and effective pattern that mimics the passing rhythms of the road and underpins the song just the right amount. But really, after you’ve listened to this song whole, you can listen again and again and again, isolating individual parts, listening to the interplay between two of them, or just listening to the words, and it keeps repaying your sustained and varied attentions.