5. O.V. WrightA Nickel And A Nail And Ace Of Spades
All of his records are sublime. Absolutely sublime. There’s a kind of astonishment to uncovering the music of O.V. Wright. It’s like loosening and turning a stone to see what’s underneath and finding something incredible. I always thought there’s no voice as good as Sam Cooke. I just thought that that was the pinnacle, which is even more incredible because I think he only did one retake in his entire life. It just came out so beautifully. But these records are equal to that. And I like the fact that they’re not as slick and there’s not as much money involved. I’ve said all my life that it’s not the music that makes things successful, the stuff that becomes famous is invariably because of the investment that somebody’s put into telling people about it. And these records kind of lacked that, but the music isn’t failing at all. I don’t know if he’s unheralded but I was thinking about this with James Booker too, and I guess heroin use [by artists] doesn’t exactly lead to great investment [by labels]. I wish I had words to describe that feeling of putting a record on that satisfies on every front, every level, where you can just put it on and it feels like all is okay in the world for at least for 20 minutes. And those records seem to do that. That’s the sort of feeling I get from those records. They go on in the morning and it just feels like everything is right.
