2. Hank Williams – The Complete Hank Williams
It’s a bit of a liberty actually, The Complete Hank Williams, because there’s eight CDs in a box set! It’s pretty much everything he ever recorded, and all the TV shows and radio shows and stuff, and really I was only introduced to Hank three or four years ago by a friend of mine here in Brazil who’s a huge fan. Obviously I’d heard of Hank Williams, and some of the songs, some of the bigger hits, but I’d never immersed myself in it. So I bought the box set and I was just amazed at how rich the songwriting was. For somebody that was probably largely uneducated he was very articulate in his songwriting. How he could be so concise in the songs he wrote, and I was just amazed at how good the songs were. And the stuff I really, really like of his is actually the stuff with just him and an acoustic guitar. Things like ‘Angel Of Death’ and ‘Alone And Forsaken’, Those songs alone are a blueprint for Goth! They’re really dark songs, and his whole life, the tragedy and the death; it all makes a great myth. And there was no fat on any of those songs; there was no fat on any of those recordings. It’s very lean and mean and hard and not sentimental, even though a lot of people have covered the songs and made them sentimental. There’s a thin line that Hank walked, and he walked it well.
