“We just play rock’n’roll,” Eaglesmith asserts.
Seven Shells.."all rhythm, slow, insistent & creepingly malevolent".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CeGU6NQz4s
Stuart's Opera House welcomes back acclaimed singer, songwriter and bandleader Fred Eaglesmith to Nelsonville. Fred is a genuine iconoclast and true original and one of our favorites. It’s the natural result of following the cue of his musical career and now 19 albums with the January 2012 release of 6 Volts. The result is one of the most fascinating and musically rewarding careers in contemporary music. As he has doggedly gone his own way as an independent musical artist.
6 Volts is yet another landmark on a journey.
The album takes its title from the battery that powered the game-changing transistor radio – introduced in 1954, the same year that rock’n’roll emerged into popular consciousness – and embodies the notion of back to the future. Captured live in the studio with one microphone onto a one-track reel to reel recorder like so many enduring classics, 6 Volts also bristles with contemporary urgency. By bringing the recording process all the way back home to its technologically basic origins, Eaglesmith succeeds in creating authentic and meaningful music. “There’s still a certain love to it that’s better than multitracking,” he observes. Music doesn’t get any more real than when you can’t overdub, autotune, or fix it in the mix. 6 Volts opens with the memerizing life affirming track “Cemetery Road,” the tragic yet loving “Katie,” and the sparse and meditative “Been a Long Time.” It channels the raw rock’n’roll musical truths of his youth while offering a nod of homage to his country music inspiration on “Johnny Cash.” “My Dad had an old console radio on top of the clothes dryer, and when Johnny Cash came on, he would put one hand on each side of the radio and really listen to that song. It really meant that much to him,” notes Eaglesmith.
Throughout the years since his first album in 1980, Eaglesmith has usefully managed to both transcend and blend such genres and categories as rock’n’roll, country, folk, singer-songwriter, Americana, blues and bluegrass to fashion his own distinctive brand of literate, melodic and rhythmic rocking elecro-acoustic North American music. Along the way he has gathered a unique set of accomplishments: a Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album, had his music used in films by Martin Scorsese, James Caan and Toby Keith, wrote a hit #1 on the bluegrass charts (“Thirty Years of Farming,” recorded by James King), wowing David Letterman in his U.S. network debut in 2010, and finding his songs included in the curriculum at two colleges.
His followers are so devoted that he is the host and centerpiece of a number of music festivals in the U.S. and Canada. He also inspired the Roots on the Rails rolling music fests and hosts its excursions on scenic railways as well as, last year, at sea. When not writing recording and performing music, Eaglesmith creates visual art that is exhibited in commercial galleries and museums.
In the final analysis, it’s a simple equation. “We just play rock’n’roll,” Eaglesmith asserts. And in the process deliver music based on passion and truth, with an emotional union and a shared sense of fun. “The root of it all is my little bit of creativity, that little ball of fire inside me. I just do what feels like the truth to me. And when it feels like the truth it’s really not that hard to do or hard to listen to.
Eaglesmith concludes. So he’s happily left with a decision made long ago that he continues to follow that delivers essential affirmation with every step of life he takes. “I’m gonna play good, sing good, write good and act good.”
-Stuart's Opera House
Before Lipstick Lies & Gasoline, Canadian singer/songwriter Fred Eaglesmith had been something of a folkie, but on Lipstick, Lies & Gasoline, he rocks out, making most cuts as much about rhythm as anything else. The opening "Seven Shells" is almost all rhythm--slow, insistent and creepingly malevolent. Whether singing about relationships that either fade away (the pathetic "Drinking Too Much") or explode into violence, Eaglesmith's typically dark themes are well suited by these new arrangements, so even when his character studies are too broad to be revealing ("Time To Get A Gun"), or when his insights are banal ("Alcohol and Pills"), their pulsing musical settings still compel. --David Cantwell
Frederick John Elgersma (born July 9, 1957), known by the stage name Fred Eaglesmith, is a Canadian alternative country singer-songwriter, one of nine children raised by a farming family in rural Southern Ontario.
As a teenager Eaglesmith hopped a freight train out to Western Canada, and began writing songs and performing. He is known for writing songs about machines or vehicles, including songs about trains, tractors, trucks, cars, and engines. Rural life, dogs, guns, drinking and farming/ranching are other common themes. Many of his songs are about failing farms and small businesses. Down and out characters dealing with loss of love or livelihood, and quirky rural folk also populate his songs. His songwriting uses many of the techniques of short story writing, including unreliable narrators, surprise endings, and plot twists.
Eaglesmith's band is known both as The Flying Squirrels or The Flathead Noodlers, switching the name to represent different styles of music. The Flathead Noodlers play bluegrass, while the Flying Squirrels play more folk and rock. An early incarnation of the band was known as The Smokin' Losers. A typical Fred Eaglesmith show includes his music set between several lengthy between-song comic monologues by Eaglesmith. Topics in the past have included stories about crossing the U.S./Canada border, Newfoundlanders, and some friends from an Indian reserve.
His fans are known as "Fredheads", a nod to Deadheads, who followed The Grateful Dead. He is known to tour extensively throughout Canada and the U.S.
When Eaglesmith does solo appearances he bills himself as Fred J. Eaglesmith. In addition to his own albums, he frequently collaborated with the late Willie P. Bennett, a former member of Eaglesmith's band who stepped down after a heart attack in early 2007. He appeared in a 2001 television movie titled The Gift.
Eaglesmith publishes his own records.
In 2010, Eaglesmith was featured on the Late Show with David Letterman as the musical guest. He performed "Careless" from the album Cha Cha Cha.
Albums
* Fred Eaglesmith (1980)
* The Boy That Just Went Wrong (1983)
* Indiana Road (1987)
* There Ain't No Easy Road (1991)
* Things Is Changin' (1993)
* Paradise Motel (1994)
* Drive-In Movie (1995)
* Lipstick, Lies and Gasoline (1997)
* 50 Odd Dollars (1999)
* Live: Ralph's Last Show (2001)
* Falling Stars and Broken Hearts (2002)
* The Official Bootleg Series, Vol. 1' (2002)
* Balin (2003)
* The Official Bootleg Series, Vol. 2' (2004)
* Dusty (2004)
* Milly's Cafe (2006)
* Tinderbox (2008)
* Cha Cha Cha (2010)
* 6 Volts (2011)
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"If you have any interest at all in Folk, Country, or Rock music you need to hear this CD.” -Dan Wasson
“Fred plays a Canadian cowboy-country-style music that's easy listening, but provocative and profound at the same time.” -Allister D. Macdonald
“He also cracks you up with his twisted sense of humor and he certainly has a way with words.” Bt
Crowds..one of my favorites by Fred
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duujLDq9oIs
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WHITE TRASH...so funny, lovin' this track!
"When essactly did we become white trash
How come we got seven dogs
& who burned down the gradge
When essactly did we become white trash"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt10yp5dqVI
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Gone Too Long...smooth bluesy southern rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj6DBRy ... 9AE87A3914
Water In The Fuel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF-83t5Wr_I
I Would
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8BJvXtk8s4
CRASHIN' & Burnin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrsFhxVS9A
Things Is Changin'..just achingly beautiful storytelling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li0jGqZckgE
Run-A-Way Lane...pure Americana
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lbS_Xq ... sults_main
