'Tis the day of the dead - who's grateful?

Phew. It's hard work to do theme work on time, however useless it may be. Halloween's gone, All Hallows has come and gone as well. In Spanish-speaking countries, it is of course dia de muertos, the day of the dead. And...wouldn't you know it...that does ring a bell...don't I have just the thing to go with that, even if it is a day or two later. 

An interesting trend in the music market of the last years was the way artists and record companies were going gargantuan with their music offerings. Generally speaking of course, not many folks buy music in a physical form anymore, so the few that do are targeted for all that they're worth. Before a special edition of an album meant a couple of bonus tracks added to the end, or maybe a bonus disc. Now, anniversary or special editions of albums often come as albums of four or six discs or more. And who can forget the ultimate collector's edition with the rare vinyl single and the coffee table book weighing four pounds that come with it. If the music market can not make money by volume, they try to make it by few items for lots of money. 

Interestingly, the trend of "more is more" has also carried over to independent record companies and their projects. In the old days, a tribute sampler celebrating an artist was just that. You got a dozen or so artists, they all picked a song they liked and wanted to cover and that was that. When I was young, I liked various artist tribute albums, as it was often a good way to get a bunch of high-profile artists together. Not all of my purchases worked (buying a Jimmy Rogers tribute album solely for the participating artists might have been an error of judgment if one isn't particularly a fan of Jimmy Rogers and his style), but generally I more often than not ended up with enough songs that made the album worthwhile. Recent tribute albums (or rather:album sets) have also gone gargantuan. Where before an artist had to struggle to decide on a song, today the compilers might just say "you know what, take both. Ah, what the hell, if you want a third one we can maybe find a spot for it". And so tribute albums that first morphed into double discs have now become triple or even quadruple albums. 

One such project is Day Of The Dead - A Tribute To The Grateful Dead, an AIDS charity project curated by The National's Bryce and Aaron Dessner. The whole thing ballooned to 59 songs (!) running almost six hours (!!). It's probably fitting that the subject of the set are The Grateful Dead, they of the ultra-long concerts and triple or quadruple albums. Still, sometimes too much of a good thing is too much, and not all the things on that good thing are equally good. One of the things I will post here at One Buck Records at semi-regular intervals will be slimmed-down volumes of such gargantuan projects, because I prefer to have a really good time with two and a half hours of music rather than having to sit through a bunch of dead spots for six. Obviously, the new set list will reflect my taste and preferences, though if this makes you want to check out the whole thing, all the better. 

My version of Day Of The Dead is a much easier to digest two (long) discs (for those that still count in discs), with some songs slightly edited for length or otherwise reworked in a way I liked. For example, I split up Bryce Dessner's long instrumental "Garcia Counterpoint" into three, so on the second disc it would function as kind of a prologue, interlude and epilogue). As usual with 4AD the line-up is hipster heaven, plus a bunch of old heroes like Lucinda Williams (who seems to be on every single tribute album ever recorded), Will Oldham a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy (who gets three tracks - and they're all excellent, so they're all present and accounted for) or one-time band member Bruce Hornsby. I was also happy to discover artists previously unknown to me like The Lone Bellow, Hiss Golden Messenger or Phosphorecent as well as international artists like the Orchestra Baobab from Senegal. 

So, who's grateful for this Day Of The Dead? Hopefully it's you, dear reader, because there is some fine music contained within...