Front Porch Recordings

Bare Knuckles - Root Bound

2009-10-18T00:43:00.000-07:00

New album available at Amazon.com/mp3, eMusic and iTunes.

Available as a CD On Demand from Amazon.com

Album details:

BARE KNUCKLES – ROOT BOUND

Produced by Bare Knuckles

1. Drag A Line – written by Jake Berry

J. J. Burgess – fiddle

Jake Berry – vocals, guitars

Wayne Sides – tub bass, percussion

2. Hide Me – written by Jake Berry

Jake Berry – vocals, banjo

J. J. Burgess – fiddle

Wayne Sides – tub bass

3. Chains From Galilee – written by Maxwell D. Russell

Maxwell D. Russell – vocals, guitar

Jake Berry – lead guitar

Wayne Sides – tub bass

4. Bitter Lovers Wine – written by Maxwell D. Russell

Jake Berry – vocals

Maxwell D. Russell – guitars

Wayne Sides – tub bass

5. Better Than Jesus – written by Jake Berry

Jake Berry – vocals, banjo

J. J. Burgess – fiddle

Wayne Sides – tub bass

6. Harley Horse – written by Wayne Sides

Richard Curtis – vocal

Jake Berry – banjo

J. J. Burgesss – fiddle

Wayne Sides – tub bass

7. When Grandma Speaks – written by Jake Berry

Jake Berry – vocal, banjo

J. J. Burgess – fiddles

Wayne Sides – tub bass

8. You're The Reason – written by Maxwell D. Russell

Maxwell D. Russell – vocals, guitar

Wayne Sides – tub bass

9. Crossroads Revisted – written by Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis – vocal

Jake Berry – guitars

Wayne Sides – tub bass

10. Tuscan Vespa Baby – written by Wayne Sides

Richard Curtis – Vocal

J.J. Burgess – fiddle

Jake Berry – banjo

Wayne Sides – tub bass

11. Bad Weather – written by Maxwell D. Russell and Jake Berry

Jake Berry – vocal, banjos

Maxwell D. Russell – guitars, fiddle

Wayne Sides – tub bass, percussion

12. I've Lived A Country Song – written by Maxwell D. Russell

Maxwell D. Russell – vocal, guitars

Jake Berry – lead guitar, piano, background vocal
Wayne Sides – tub bass

13. Beulah Land – written by Jake Berry and Maxwell D. Russell

Jake Berry – vocals, all instruments

14. Black Hole Train – written by Wayne Sides

Wayne Sides – solo vocal, tub bass

Richard Curtis – vocal

Maxwell D. Russell – banjo

Jake Berry - mandolin

Recorded August 2008, April, July and August, 2009

at 9^th St. Laboratories, Florence, AL

contact: bare.knuckles@live.com

Front Porch Recordings

websites: frontporchrecords.blogspot.com

myspace.com/bareknucklesmusic

2008-07-03T22:44:00.001-07:00

(photograph by Wayne Sides)

Liminal Blue (2008) - Jake Berry - Songs from the periphery, the dark corners, waking dreams, and visionary revels. Ranging from soulful ballads to laments to chamber folk. What at first sounds like a conundrum of scattered lines and musical styles becomes in a little over half an hour a mirror of the fragmented, isolated state of the human soul at the outset of the new century. This is a document of the contemporary landscape as seen from the inside. As with all Berry's albums this one was recorded in a back room in his home he calls 9th Street Laboratories. The first Front Porch recording to be released as an online digital album as well as a CD. Available at: Amazon.com, eMusic, iTunes, Rhapsody and Shockhound.

Jack Random's review at Amazon.com:

The first word that comes to mind in describing Jake Berry's Liminal Blue is Haunting. The second is Illusive. Jake Berry is a poet. He chooses words with care and sensitivity. The word Blue is obvious and inevitable. The mood is melancholy like the burning sunset of a toxic sky. The key word is Liminal and readers will be forgiven if they have to reference its meaning: belonging to the point of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experience or felt.

The word explains the haunting, the sensation of being lost, the foreshadowing of disease that hovers over this collection of poem songs.

Jake Berry is an artist. He paints these songs with a singular brush stroke. Folk and blues the genres chosen, a pleasant voice, a soothing sound but the words are like mystic bullets. They cannot physically harm you but they can scare you, shock you or burrow under your skin and haunt you.

No one has time any more for music with layers of meaning beyond the prosody and tone of the artist. No one has time for poetry but poets. Take the time and get to know an artist of rare and gifted voice...or simply enjoy the sound.

Van Eaton's response:

Yes!!!!! Jack hit the mark here, and what is also amazing to me is that with all the intelligent lyrics, these songs and tunes are extremely accessible , regardless of a persons chosen genre this is a great listen!

If you want to dig into poetry and don't have time for the written word, plug this album in and you have the best of 2 worlds ..written poetry and great music. This is an amazing set!

Hank Lazer's response:

jake's new cd is elusive and liminal. expect to listen to it several times as you attune yourself to its haunting tunes. bravo!

2008-07-03T22:18:00.000-07:00

Naked as rain and the animal beneath (2007) - Jake Berry - A concept album of sorts composed interwoven themes. Making use of digital recording and editing for the first time, Berry began with basic guitar and voice or piano and voice demos, added tracks with virtually ever instrument he could lay his hands on and brought in his brother Jeff Berry to add electric guitar on several tracks. Then the deconstruction began. The result is an album that retains its connections to folk, blues and alternative music, but is neither of these. The themes combine to tell of a culture perilously close to collapse. What began as a dream of prosperity and freedom after the second World War gradually became a nightmare of empire building, greed, and a culture of self-absorption. Naked as rain charts the course of the shift through character studies, songs of social upheaval and scatological disintegration. To download "Ash on the Roses" click here.

2008-07-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

Slow Motion Town (2006) – Jake Berry – Having grown up in a small town, this set is a homage to the locales and people who inhabit the often overlooked and forgotten places whether they are rural or small neighborhoods hidden in large cities. This is also an unflinching series of observations and narratives about the heartland, the kind of work we do and the lives we live when the old traditions of family, steady jobs and friendly neighborhoods have vanished. At times nostalgic for a more rugged but reliable past, at times finding unlikely heroes and sympathetic anti-heroes in the most mundane places (department stores, all night dinners, and liquor stores), Slow Motion Town is a questing, earnest attempt to reckon with modern realities set to country waltzes, acoustic blues and contemporary ballads. To download “A Taste of Poison,” “One Sweet Night,” and “Black Cat Stomp” click here.

2008-07-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

Strange Parlors (2005) – Jake Berry – A radical departure from Berry’s previous songwriting, Strange Parlors expands on what is possible in folk music. From a review by Jack Foley: “These lyrics are the result of a genuine but ‘alternate’ religious sensibility, in which Western religion is simultaneously a source of immense personal pain and, at times, a profound judgment upon others. The words ‘deep’ and ‘dark’ repeat.… But the main point is the music.… it is music as deep atmosphere. The music is like the score to a wonderful, surrealistic film noir: in a certain sense it is ‘background,’ pure atmosphere, bringing us not only into an alternate understanding of harmonic relationships but into, as Berry puts it in a lyric, ‘some other time.’ It is deeply mysterious, surprising, at times ‘wrong’ in its rightness.… His active imagination and his extraordinary willingness to experiment bring him into territory which is far ‘stranger’ than either fiction or science fiction: ‘it all comes down,’ he writes in a song titled from Ecclesiastes, ‘to a single motion / that takes your breath away.’” To download the tracks “Dark Water,” “Four Ways Round,” and “Vanities” click here.

2008-07-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

(photograph by Wayne Sides)

Doppelganger Blues (2005) – Bare Knuckles – After more than a year of conflicting schedules and false starts Bare Knuckles reassembled to record their third CD continuing with the expanded group from Alabama Dust except for the departure of Penny Qubeck and the addition of Jeff Berry on acoustic guitar. For the first time the groups primary songwriters, Jake Berry and Wayne Sides, wrote songs specifically for the project rather than drawing from previously written work. The result is a spontaneous, earthy set that draws even more deeply on the foundations of American music. There are tracks here that would not seem out of place on field recordings from the first half of the 20th century. But those roots are also enhanced on tracks like “Prison Bell” and “Hitch Yr Pony” to include electric instruments. Doppelganger Blues is an example of where folk music originates and what it has become. It never departs from the old themes of betrayed lovers, murder ballads and ghostly dirges, and demonstrates how timeless these themes remain. To download “Doppelganger Blues,” “NYC Walking Blues,” “Help Me Jonah,” “The Night Before Tupelo,” and “Cruel Bands of Angels” click here.

2008-07-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

Days Beneath The Sun (War Songs) (2004) – Jake Berry – With the onset of multiple wars Berry wrote and recorded these overtly political songs to accompany a set of “War Poems” at the suggestion of his brother the poet and philosopher Jon Berry. The CD was released a month before the elections. With the addition of drums and a preponderance of electric guitars most of these songs are as much rock as they are folk with long guitar solos and edgy vocals. In opposition to the abuse of power in all it manifestations, Days is an anti-authoritarian manifesto that laments the cost of war and decries the people that plan and execute death in the name of God and country. To download the tracks “Nero’s Fiddle” and “God’s Left Hand” click here.

The Breaking Room - Jake Berry

2008-07-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

The Breaking Room (2003) – Jake Berry – Berry spent the first two years of the new century working on his poetry, including the book of photographs and poems Silence and the Hammer with Wayne Sides, and recording and performing with the ambient-experimental ensemble The Ascension Brothers. He recorded and released The Breaking Room in January of 2003 returning to traditional forms for songs that were written during a long illness and in the wake of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. Berry’s songs have always been socially aware but these songs bring the awareness down to the personal level of memories of lost friends, failed dreams and bittersweet love. Perhaps his most intimate CD to date, these songs are primarily voice and acoustic guitar recorded direct to two track tape over a three day period. To download the tracks “Gone” and “Long Ago Among the Innocents”
click here.

2008-07-03T22:02:00.001-07:00

(photograph by Wayne Sides)

Roses On The Threshold (2000) – Jake Berry – On his second solo CD Berry began to expand his sonic palate with alternate tunings and unconventional chord progressions. Though there are a number of songs here that fall easily within the area of folk singer-songwriter, Berry’s poetry begins to integrate with his lyrics on Roses and his life long love of jazz becomes an influence as well. The songs “Standing In The Doorway,” “Old Man Crow” and “After The Storm” in particular display his movement toward more open song forms. Roses also contains the haunting meditation “Death Is A Woman.” To download “Old Man Crow” and “Death Is A Woman” click here.

2008-07-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

(photograph by Wayne Sides)

Alabama Dust (1999) – Bare Knuckles – After a year of traveling the countryside performing, Sides and Berry composed a new set of songs drawn from their experiences and from the stories of the people they met along the way. For this recording they expanded the band to include Max Russell on electric, slide and steel guitars, Penny Qubeck on mandolin, J. J. Fago on piano, Keith Henry on electric guitar and backing vocals, Chris Mansell on percussion and Richard Curtis returned to deliver more of his unique brand of scat singing. The CD begins and ends with Wayne Sides singing of ancient wandering and calamity. In between the band covers an American landscape where every joy is a cause for celebration and no sin goes unpunished. This is the sound of contemporary folk music with no ambition beyond expressing the natural truth of the human condition. To download the tracks “Alabama Dust” and “Protection” click here.

Trouble In Your House - Bare Knuckles

2008-07-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

(cover image by Wayne Sides)

Trouble In Your House (1998) – Bare Knuckles – Following the release of Shadow Resolve Jake Berry joined with Wayne Sides, the award winning visual artist and musician, to perform original songs as well as old country blues and mountain folk music in coffee houses, restaurants, and other small venues. Sides sings some of his own compositions and plays tub bass, bass kalimba, and percussion. They quickly assembled a set of songs based on the roots of the older music. The title cut, written by Sides, is a study is dark foreboding and the rest of the CD covers themes familiar to fans of American folk music – love and loss, tragedy and jubilation, dissolution and redemption. The songs were usually recorded in a single take with guest musicians often setting in. Jim Wisniewski’s haunting flute solo on “Sweet Misery” and Richard Curtis’s soulful scat singing on “Daddy Rabbit” augment the spare arrangements with originality and passion. To download the tracks “Daddy Rabbit” and “Sweet Misery” click here.

Shadow Resolve - Jake Berry

2008-07-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

(photograph by Wayne Sides)

Shadow Resolve (1997) – Jake Berry – The first Front Porch CD and the impetus behind the founding of the label. Berry had circulated the songs recorded on a four-track cassette tape recorder among friends and associates. They encouraged him to release the songs as they were instead of recording them in a professional studio. Amy Trussell offered to back the expense of mastering and disk duplication. With some reluctance Berry agreed and the Front Porch label was born. Berry was already widely known as a poet with several books to his credit and had always written songs as another form of poetry, but this set generated enough enthusiasm to prompt him to go public as a singer-songwriter as well. Berry plays guitar and sings, occasionally dubbing a second guitar, harmonica or backing vocal. The tracks bare the mark of the original cassette tapes including tape hiss, but their sincerity and authenticity established the distinguishing feature of the Front Porch sound. To download the track “Walking” click here.