Today’s Short Takes come care of the Reverend Chad Wells.  He is in many ways a polymath — songwriter, artist, musician, tattoo artist, business owner, reverend and more. Chad is an accomplished musician with his band Cricketbows, as a duo with Aarika Watson (Wells & Watson) and as a solo artist. During the current Coronavirus challenge, he has been live streaming every day at 4pm on Facebook to share thoughts, reflections, live music and his honest concerns about the world around him. Part meditation, part emotional inventory, part agent provocateur, these videos have become widely viewed on Facebook.

Reaching out to Chad to ask if he would give us a few ‘Short Takes’ of music that he is listening to lately was an easy call for us to make here at YTAA. Take a few minutes and review his excellent recommendations!

 

Alice Cooper – Love It To Death: This album is sheer perfection. It is a meticulously crafted Rock And Roll car crash. This is what I secretly wish Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album sounded like (and I love that album).

 

 

 

The Be Good Tanyas – Blue Horse: This album is like an amazing, fluffy, warm, cozy blanket that’s riddled with a subdued and subtly related – but vast, and epically varied – array of threads that run through it’s landscape. This should be positioned somewhere near The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions…

 

And On That note… Cowboy Junkies: The Trinity Session. In 1988 the Canadian band Cowboy Junkies released the most truly beautiful sounding and heart-string pulling album that ever was. Just a greatly matched bunch of musicians in a historic old church standing around one microphone playing the songs live. They play their instruments, they play the room, they play off of each other in the most beautiful, natural and liquid way. A desert island recording for me.

And on an entirely unrelated but equally masterful note: Wall of Voodoo: Call Of The West. This album gets zero love. Because of their quirky style and their outlandish music video hit “Mexican Radio“, the band was dismissed as a novelty by most critics. But this album is just pure hot fire. Spaghetti western New Wave turns into wasteland noise-scapes and emotional electronic dirges flow into weird-pop masterpieces.

 

Many Thanks to Chad for sharing the music that he is listening to right now!