Musing

David Ford's Charge Editor's Note: This is the 7th in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2013. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! I don't think any other album in the top ten has such a powerful four song start. "Pour A Little Poison" is a harmonica-drenched invitation to clap as if you have rhythm for almost three minutes (which is probably about as far as I can fake rhythm anyhow). "The Ballad of Miss Lily" is less about Lily and more about the guys that wile away their time and money on shallow dreams of shallow women, set ironically to a modern tango. "Isn't It Strange?" is just another one of those simple Ford tunes that make you think "Surely he couldn't write another song in this vein again that's this good." But you'd be wrong. And "Let It ...

David Ford's Let The Hard Times Roll Editor's Note: This is the 6th in a weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2010. New reviews go up every weekend through the end of the year. Ah, the top five. That secretive brotherhood of albums that shares "inherent awesomeness" as a tag if nothing else. Now it starts getting difficult to pick the albums apart; not impossible - there are no ties, and my decisions haven't changed since I first wrote out the list in October. So, why LTHTR? On his third full length effort, Ford struck a perfect balance between the gritty lyrics of his debut album with the instrumental prowess that marked his second. There's a track for every emotion here, yet they all still manage to swim together in the same school. "Surfin' Guantanamo Bay" is as righteously indignant as "State of the Union," but a listener would have a hard time guessing that both songs were written by the same man withou...