Micah Dalton - Pawnshop
Maybe I’m overstating, but to me, sepia tones in photography tend to point back to a bygone era, before color filled our printed world. While certainly not historic, sepia toned pictures of wagon trains, gun-slingers, or a grandmas in their rocking chairs do preserve the historical. From the era when these originated, there’s certainly something “earthy” or that gets back to the roots of modern life.I’ve been fortunate with CD’s with sepia cover art. Shannon McNally’s “Geronimo” is a treasure, musically, lyrically, and vocally. And more recently, I’ve added Micah Dalton’s “Pawnshop” to the ever-growing collection. While neither has a true sepia treatment to the cover photograph, there are musical similarities as both tell their stories mixing the modern with the equivalent of sepia-music.
First, there’s the basics: acoustic guitar, electric guitar, drums, bass, piano, B3 organ. But then there are the more organic sounds: mandolin, cello, dobro, banjo, hand drum. The mix of these instruments is only occasionally heard in radio-land today and, therefore, likely absent of major commercial intentions.
“Pawnshop” is doubly blessed, which is to say that it is presented in two ways. The first is a booklet that includes a short story based on a man named Pawnshop, complete with sketches. Odd characters come in fast sequence to a drifter’s tale, who stops in a named but nameless crossroads of a town. The story is divided by 12 titles which roughly separate the story into vignettes.
Each of these also corresponds to the name of the songs on the CD. Whereas the story tells a tale ultimately of a man who is an observer of people and their traits,
An irony is that in the mid-1970’s, some of these may have found room on the radio. Today, alt-soul or not, it’s likely never to be heard.
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