Country Music For People Who Hate Country Music Part 8/10: That Good Spooky Shit, Which I accidentally skipped last time…

At the end of part six I said part seven was going to be ghost stories…and then skipped ahead to the wistful love songs. Oops. Well, the post was a day late anyway, and the love songs post was so short I was already considering a double feature, so we’re going to loop back to ghost time now instead of waiting until next time.

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I had too many ghost stories for Story Time, so they got their own post. Some of these don’t necessarily tell a story per se, at least not an especially clear one. They do however have that little touch of gothic romanticism that I go utterly bananas for regardless of the media type. This segment is here for the vibes only. Again, it was Halloween season when I started the original list, and while I could blame that, I will not. I love this stuff year-round.

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Far From Any Road by The Handsome Family

            This is The Handsome Family’s best known song, largely because it was used as the title theme for a show called True Detective, which I have not seen and do not care about. It doesn’t have quite the story strength of Hotel California, but it has a similar vibe—it leaves you kind of wondering what actually happened here.  Beautiful William and Fallen Peaches by the same band have that going on as well. I have no earthly idea what is going on in these songs, but it’s spooky and I like it. After We Shot The Grizzly and The Bottomless Hole are sillier, and deeply fucking weird. Their unsettling nature in the latter two cases comes from the sheer weight of their absurdity more than anything else.

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Sleeping On The Blacktop by Coulter Wall

I have to gush for a minute here. In terms of sound, Colter Wall is, without a doubt, the closest thing to Johnny Cash we have living on this earth today. That voice is incredible. I narrowly missed seeing him in concert recently and I’m a little bit salty about it. Listen to the album this is from, Imaginary Appalachia. It will take you less than 30 minutes. That is all.

 This song is ambiguous and weirdly ominous. The story is unclear, but it invokes a vivid sense of place throughout. The narrator seems hunted by something, and we never really find out what it is.

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John the Revelator by Curtis Stigers & the Forest Rangers

This is another one I didn’t immediately realize was from a TV show—this time Sons of Anarchy. The apostle of the title is typically considered to be the writer of the Book of Revelation in the Bible.  The song, a little delirious, baking in the sun, stumbles between the gospels and the Revelation, growling its prophecies. This deserved to be on TV for sure.

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Thunder and Lightning by Brown Bird

This song takes a turn halfway through that feels like stepping off a marked trail and finding yourself in the middle of song kind of faerie bacchanal, but in like, Wyoming. For a sound halfway between that and the bluegrass section up above, Fingers to the Bone is a good choice from Brown Bird. The first Brown Bird song I heard was the grittier and slightly nautical Bilgewater, which is no longer my favorite of theirs, but certainly deserves its place as well.

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Out With The Crow by The Haunted Windchimes

A song in the same vein as St James. The ominous motif of the crows already make this a good spooky pick, but that’s not my angle for it. This song reminds me of werewolves for some reason. I mean, there is a line about howling at the moon, but I was getting that vibe long before that part of the song.

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Next Time: The Songs A Lot Of People Yelled About, for real this time.