He's Famous If Ya Know Him: Richard Buckner

Richard Buckner is not obscure, exactly, but he's one of those artists of whom I own several albums, but no one else I know seems to know him.

Richard Buckner's voice is a bit of an acquired taste. Perhaps it's the fact that his vocal warble makes him sound like he was born with a rare neurological disorder that continues to baffle all of Western science and medicine. I think it was Jackie Mason who once said that no one ever called a potato chip an "acquired taste," but brie is. I think that's supposed to mean that something being an acquired taste means that viscerally it's just not very good. I don't happen to agree, which is unrelated to the fact that Jackie Mason is a right wing psychopath, although I felt like mentioning that anyway.

Okay, so I suppose Richard Buckner has generally fallen under the umbrella of "alt-country." Incidentally, it's funny they call it that, considering it sounds a hell of a lot more like traditional country than the stuff on CMT. I think Toby Keith & Reba are probably closer to being an alternative to real country music, but whatever.

I like Richard Buckner, although I neither own nor have ever heard his first 4 albums, which I recognize is pretty lame.

The first selection is "Julia Miller" off 2000's The Hill, which is kind of like the Winesburg, Ohio (by Sherwood "I influenced Ernest Hemingway, apparently" Anderson) of albums. Or, alternatively, the Our Town of stuff that doesn't bore the shit out of me. It's mostly short biographical sketches of characters from some little town. "Julia Miller," for some reason, has always stuck with me as one of the saddest songs I've ever heard. The full effect requires the music, of course, but the lyrics speak for themselves:

We quarreled that morning
For he was 65
And I was 30 and I was nervous
And heavy with a child
Whose birth I dreaded

I thought over the last letter written me
By that estranged young soul whose betrayal
I had concealed
By marrying the old man

Then I took the morphine
And sat down to read
Across the blackness that came over my eyes
I see the flickering light of these words even now
“And Jesus said unto him, ‘verily I say unto thee: today thou shalt be with me in paradise…’”

Now that I'm in a wonderful mood, the next selection is "Were You Tried And Not As Tough" off 2002's Impasse. This is my favorite Richard Buckner song, and a decent example of his later less purely acoustic material. I love the guitar on this track. This song, as far as I can tell, does not involve the suicide of any pregnant women betrayed by her lover and stuck with a cruel older man in order to protect the lover. Unless it's all in the subtext.

Next up, we have "Invitation" off 2004's Dents & Shells. As someone who only got into Richard Buckner during that year, this is the first of his albums that I ever bought and this was the first track that really stuck out to me. As I always like to say, this track makes Donovan sound like fucking Megadeth.

And lastly, off 2006's Meadow we have "Canyon." What a mid-tempo rock(lite) song! The tempo's right in the middle, that's for sure. And it reminds me of something called rock but only--how to put this--li(gh)ter? Even so, I still like it.

So that's Richard Buckner fer ya. I hope you like it. I'll put up some more varied tracks later in the week.

Tracks 33-36 on yonder player.