Judee Sill - "There's a Rugged Road"

Judee Sill, in her spoken introduction to the California-folk ballad "There's a Rugged Road," offers this explanation for her song: "It's about everyone individually on their climb up, you know?" I'm reminded of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's spoken introduction to his album Inside Straight, in which he claims that he gave the album that particular title because "that's where I'm at, philosophically speaking, you know?" Obviously both introductions are unhelpful and somewhat annoying in that they both seek complicity, you know?, when, because of their obscurity, none can be given. In fact, the prologues are superfluous - Sill and Adderley are both much more articulate in their work than they are about it. Everything we need to know about Sill's song is contained therein: "There's a Rugged Road" is not, as the literal among you might think, the most general existential claim about a particular kind of road, but a study of one's struggle to stay righteous, despite the trials and temptations of life. A religious woman and a heroin addict (dead of an overdose at 35), Sill sings clearly and easily about a thing muddy and difficult: her climb up a short and rugged road to where? [Buy]

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The Dirty Projectors - "What I See"

Ostensibly a cover of Black Flag's 1981 album, Damaged, the Dirty Projectors' latest record, Rise Above, sounds more like Prince playing Prokofiev with a juju orchestra than like the hardcore opus it's supposed to emulate (and, to be fair, it sounds only vaguely like Prince playing Prokofiev with a juju orchestra). What we hear in "What I See" is Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth's ability to seamlessly fuse seemingly irreconcilable musical influences (see the grasping, ultimately rejected description above) and to successfully plumb the ugly and the unintuitive for their latent beauty. Nat Baldwin, who once played contrabass in The DPs, and whose new album, Most Valuable Player, is a masterpiece, proves with his less difficult, more tender take on Longstreth's Melismatic beltings, that the Dirty Projectors' innovations are not just valuable in themselves, but serve as fruitful inspiration, too. [Buy]