Where to begin, this ending?
With the thing that has always mattered most: The music.
In the spring of 1998, the fourteenth edition of this magazine proclaimed Alejandro Escovedo to be Artist Of The Decade. It was a puckish thing to have done, set off by the live More Miles Than Money album, which reprised but did not quite extend the grandeur of his decade’s work. We feared, not without reason, that one of America’s singular artists was close to disappearing from its stage. And we believed — then and now — in the power and importance of his work. In its passion and variety.
We believed in the music.
Alejandro gratified our faith by not disappearing. By making more terrific albums. By gracing the covers of other magazines. By continuing to tour his vital, constantly evolving music, despite well-publicized health troubles. It matters not at all whether that one issue of our immodest little magazine made any difference, but he has been kind enough to say that it did.
It is not a stunt, naming Buddy Miller artist of this frenzied decade of two zeros in this, our seventy-fifth and final magazine. It is a summation. The last, best thing we believed possible to do.
Buddy will probably disagree with our choice, because he is a modest man accustomed to working among giants.
And because he does not see that they all stand in his shadow, as much as he does in theirs.
This is simple. Buddy Miller embodies everything I have wanted this magazine to stand for, even before I began lurking in an AOL folder called “No Depression”, even before I dared seriously suggest to Peter Blackstock that we really could and should start a magazine. The quality and variety of Buddy’s work, his grace and kindness, his deep knowledge about and unabated passion for music: That’s what we stand for. His commitment to making and improving his art well past the easy victories of youth.
He is a good man, Buddy Miller is. And an extraordinary artist: musician, producer, vocalist, songwriter. His career is almost without precedent, for I can think of no other figure who has managed simultaneously to play a supporting role behind so many others and to thrive as the leader of his own band, as a performer in his own right.
(Perhaps his friend T Bone Burnett comes closest. Perhaps. But Burnett’s solo music has never touched my soul.)
A good and decent man, and an extraordinary artist.
The rarest of combinations.
A treasure.
Buddy Miller is 55 years old. This is an age at which some lucky and accursed few retire from their life’s work, to do god only knows what. Swing at golf balls and waitresses?
Buddy is just now doing the best work of his career, the work his entire life has prepared him for.
This work: In Austin, during SXSW 2008, he shared stages with Bonnie Bramlett and Johnny Rivers, then caught a plane to Los Angeles to play with Emmylou Harris before taking the redeye back to Nashville to record — in his home, as always — his seventh solo album (not counting his collaborations with his wife, Julie, which also number seven). His schedule was tightened considerably by upcoming rehearsals for the tour with which Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will follow up the release of their collaboration Raising Sand, which went to #2 on the Billboard charts.
In this decade he has produced Allison Moorer’s Mockingbird and Solomon Burke’s Nashville, co-produced Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s One Endless Night, and did the digital editing and restoration on Willie Nelson’s Crazy: The Demo Sessions. He has performed (one way or another) on albums by Levon Helm, Miranda Lambert, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Kasey Chambers, Frank Black, Jim Lauderdale, Albert Lee, Lee Ann Womack, Rodney Crowell, Lori McKenna, the Chieftains, Vigilantes Of Love, and Trisha Yearwood.
His songs…their songs (it is difficult to know where Buddy’s work begins and Julie’s leaves off)…have been cut by, well, a lot of people, including the Dixie Chicks (“Hole In My Head”, co-written with Jim Lauderdale), Lee Ann Womack (“Does My Ring Burn Your Finger”), and Hank Williams III (“Lonesome For You”). And Brooks & Dunn (“My Love Will Follow You”), which, at least, pays for his guitar collection.
And then his own work for the century so far: the long-awaited formal collaboration Buddy & Julie Miller (2001), Midnight And Lonesome (2002), and Universal United House Of Prayer (2004). And the one he’s making now, even as I type.
That is not a complete list.
Nor is it the point.
This is: Close your eyes and stand, almost touching tired strangers, stand next to me (and do not talk; please do not talk) on the wooden floor of the Mercy Lounge in Nashville and listen…listen to Buddy sing Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side” in the newness of our now five-year-old war. Just listen.
