The Hill

Richard Buckner's earthen voice and rustic country-folk guitar playing have always evoked a vaguely early American sense of wistfulness and longing, as if his oaken vocal strength and equally age-worn storytelling were haunted by ghosts much older than his fickle alt-country affiliation would suggest. On The Hill, Buckner takes the lives of those very spirits -- as described in E.L. Masters' classic 1915 poetry narrative Spoon River Anthology -- and inhabits them in one bleak, sometimes harrowing song cycle. Masters' small-town characters speak plainly and honestly from beyond the grave of their town's dark secrets, and Buckner, with some backing help from Calexico's Joey Burns and John Convertino, translates 18 of these into miniature first-person song-portraits interconnected by vocal-less snippets of acoustic strumming and picking. The overall effect is a kind of Americana musical, one that explores not only our country's rich musical history but also its emotional one. --CMJ