Cry Love features the redoubtable WPA Ballclub and was produced by PB with upright bassist Dennis Crouch and multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin. Recorded live to tape in Music City USA. Currently the LP is USA shipping only.
CRY LOVE Paul Burch's Cry Love was produced with GRAMMY winners Dennis Crouch (Blind Boys of Alabama, Ringo Starr) and Fats Kaplin (Mitski, Jack White, John Prine), founding members of Burch’s redoubtable band, the WPA Ballclub. Cry Love is Burch’s most sonically and lyrically uplifting work yet in a critically acclaimed career cited by Pop Matters as “one of the finest contemporary roots performers, and one of the best damn songwriters, operating today."
In addition, Burch’s debut novel, Meridian Rising (University of Georgia Press) is out now. Meridian Rising is a fictional memoir of legend Jimmie Rodgers, whose meteoric career in the 1930s inspired artists from Howling Wolf and Robert Johnson to Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan. Famed music critic Greil Marcus (Mystery Train) hails the novel as “a book of wonders.”
Cry Love was inspired by the WPABs pop-up residencies in small clubs around Nashville where they perform without a setlist welcoming guests like guitarists William Tyler and Eddie Angel of Los Straightjackets.
At the heart of Cry Love is the longtime musical partnership of Burch and co-producers Dennis Crouch and Fats Kaplin who helped form the WPAB in the 90s during their now mythic all-night residency at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the Hank Williams-era honky tonk that sparked the band’s vast repertoire and free form performance style. And like their lives shows, Cry Love ranges from rockers ‘One If By Land’ and ‘Radio Gal’ to the finger poppin’ soul of ‘Rice Pudding.’
“We’ve come to the half-way point in a decade that turned out to be a turning point in my life and my fellow bandmates. We’re fated to be Americans. That’s our spiritual address, what drives the pen.” Burch writes in the liner notes that his lifelong work as a DJ continues to inspire, thanks in part to the late BBC DJ John Peel. “I met John through Laura Cantrell. We all shared a deep love of rock & roll." Catch Burch on wxnafm.org Wed. 12-1 p.m. CST.
For nearly three decades, Burch's unmistakably modern yet instantly classic songs have attracted fans from Rock to Bluegrass. His albums have earned 4+ star reviews and features inNY Times, American Songwriter, NPR, The London Guardian, and All Music, and includes alliances with artists across styles and generations including Mark Knopfler, Lambchop, R&B hero Candi Staton, and Ralph Stanley. Burch’s studio has served as an oasis for colleagues like Robyn Hitchcock, E-Street bassist Garry Tallent, and the late David Berman (Silver Jews).
Noted music writer Peter Guralnick writes: “I'm a Paul Burch fan. How could I not be? How many other contemporary artists have forged a body of work of such careful craftsmanship and white-hot heat? It never fails to achieve what Sun Records founder Sam Phillips has deemed the unequivocal purpose of every kind of music: to lift up, to deepen, to intensify the spirit of audience and musicians alike."
PRESS
Nashville Scene Paul Burch Is On the Right Path--His Own “Funky places like Tootsies Orchid Lounge and Brown's Diner is where you can be creative.” This kind of funky cognitive space is where Burch found the seeds for the aforementioned Meridian Rising, his debut novel based on the life of early country star Jimmie Rodgers imagined through the lens of a music lifer. (The WPA Ballclub as an entity is only a few years younger than Rodgers was when he died in 1933.) Burch employs narrative devices like fictional interviews to create a very lived-in world, with a warmth and an empathy that doesn’t always come through in nonfiction music writing. The book began life as a collection of songs, and through the pressure cooker that was the pandemic lockdown, it became a diamond of a story. The end result is as lyrical and charming as anything Burch has committed to tape. That includes Cry Love, which adds just enough ’60s soul-schooled pop shimmy to Burch’s deep-rooted understanding of classic country and the foundations of rock to make it all feel undeniably fresh.
No Depression Paul Burch’s new album Cry Love carries its listeners on a rambunctious, slip-sliding hip shaking tour of the back roads and highways of Americana music.
Flyin' Shoes His ever fresh great-to-be-alive surges of energy tempered by deft reflections have seen him remain on top of his game for 30 years. Like with most of Burch’s albums, the feeling I obtained on hearing Cry Love was, (like those of famed writer Peter Guralnick) this could be his best yet!
LINER NOTES Around the time I was forming my band the WPA Ballclub, I met BBC DJ John Peel at his home in the English countryside he called Peel Acres. I was the guest of my friend and songwriter Laura Cantrell, who was sessioning (as Jimmie Rodgers liked to say) for Peel in the remote broadcast studio set up just off his kitchen. He later led me through his record library, organized by year, where he pulled out his first Eddie Cochran 45.
“I saw Eddie in 1960 at the Liverpool Empire with Gene Vincent.” Peel recalled. (John Lennon, George Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe--already a band but not yet The Beatles--were in the audience, too.) “When the spotlight came on, Eddie had his back to the audience. He played the opening lick to “Milkcow Blues,” then he spun around in a silver vest and black leather pants, and that orange Gretsch. I felt the breath go out of me. I thought ‘This is the coolest fucking thing I’ll ever see.’ And it was. ‘Til the Sex Pistols.”
Records can transport memory much like a photograph. I hope this LP might do so for you one day. I’ve been a DJ nearly as long as I’ve been a musician. I started in college at Purdue for WCCR and as I write today, I broadcast weekly on WXNA in Nashville. I’m still bewitched when I see DJs in action, especially musicians. I have ringing memories of watching Ira and Georgia of Yo La Tengo or Jon Langford at turntables and how inspired I felt for weeks afterwards. I always heard something new to me. Once during an interview with Jon on WXRT in Chicago, we were interrupted by a back door knock, a young lady with a new song she hoped we could play. Naturally, we put it on the air.
DJing and bandleading go together. “Breaking” new songs on the air and on stage is always a thrill. The sound of the WPA Ballclub is a Pan American mix of rhythm & blues, calypso, honky tonk, Black gospel, string band blues, Irish ballads, Hawaiian lullabies, western swing, New Orleans jazz, and the rock & roll I heard on local radio in my hometown of Washington D.C. Supersonic sounding artists like Evan Johns & the H-Bombs, Tex Rubinowitz & the Bad Boys (featuring my future pal Eddie Angel), and the King of Cool, Link Wray & His Raymen, who my grandmother knew from her days as a program director for WWDC. (“Tell him Sissy said hi!” she called as I headed out to see Link with Robert Gordon). On weekends I’d hear 78 collector Joe Bussard spinning dozens of mystery artists like the Nu Grape Twins, Charley Patton, and the Beale Street Sheiks.
When I came to Nashville in 1994, I lucked into a residency at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge performing long nights on a plywood stage in an unfinished add-on brick room with no roof. In the back alley, I found the spot where Jason Ringenberg and his Nashville Scorchers stood for their debut cover shot and where Jimmy Martin auditioned to be one of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys with “Poor Ellen Smith.” The Ryman Auditorium, right behind Tootsie’s, loomed over us.
Like Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” Tootsie’s was a ragged beer room where PBR drinkers keyed their names on the wall between the fading black and white promo photos of Music City hopefuls who came seeking fortune but never got airborne or crashed coming home.
At Tootsie’s, Willie Nelson kissed Faron Young on the lips after Faron’s version of Willie’s “Hello Walls” topped the charts. In the private upstairs bar once reserved for Grand Ole Opry performers (our stage was in the back), Hank Williams liked to stand uncomfortably close to his fellow artists and pitch them a new ballad--perhaps “Cold, Cold, Heart” or “You Win Again”—and declare: “Ain’t that the saddest song you’ve ever heard? It’s too good for you. I think Ol’ Hank’ll keep it for myself.”
Though I was writing all the time, I rarely played my own songs back then. Instead, I sang honky tonk, post-World War II (and pre-Elvis) country songs written by wartime’s scarred survivors, the back-alley poets, bar brawlers, and lonely wives who had spent life’s one and only spring in blood battles on Pacific islands, African deserts, Belgian forests, and the shrapnel’d streets where Rimbaud once walked. Now, dizzy on Benzedrine and white lightning, their siren songs lured the good and bad alike to crash their ships on the rocks of life with titles like “This Cold War With You,” “One Way Down,” and “My Wasted Past.” There were no factories in the south. So, if you didn’t move north for work, you stayed home to haul cotton, sell insurance, tar roof tops, change tires, or work for the city. Why there goes young Elvis now driving for Crown Electric.
Radio doused a million dry imaginations, and the flowers and weeds grew wild all over. The musicians in the WPA Ballclub come from Woodbury, Tennessee and Strawberry, Arkansas, Memphis and Boston, New York City, Arizona, and Virginia. Some have been in the band for all its 30 years. The newest member a decade. We still perform much as we did on that plywood stage. Set lists, made occasionally, are seldom followed. We still cut records to tape huddled close together, no headphones, eyeball to eyeball. You can hear the room in this music. We leave the door open for Elijah to join in.
Making records is my life’s pursuit, as writing the great American novel once was. Cry Love was created in a confounding fervor of profound loss and found strength. Is that all there is? We were fated to be born American. That is the return spiritual address of our life’s envelope as we ride the moon’s waves, like Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat.”
I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!
Is it any wonder that young man gave up poetry to sell coffee and occasionally old rifles? Today we are closer to remembering who we were than being who we are. And who we are ain’t gonna last near as long as who we were. Cluck ole hen, cluck and sing, fall and spring and fall again. The bell’ll toll on, when we’re long gone. So, here today, cry love.-Paul Burch
CRY LOVE Credits Produced by Paul Burch with Dennis Crouch and Fats Kaplin Recorded and Balanced by PB at Pan American Sound Studio B, Nashville, TN Mastered by Eric Conn, Independent Mastering
Paul Burch, guitars, voice, electric piano melody, Rice Pudding, drums The Fat Man with the WPA Ballclub Justin Amaral, drums, percussion Dennis Crouch, upright bass Jim Gray, electric bass Fats Kaplin, fiddle, electric Hawaiian steel and pedal steel guitar, electric guitar on Braggin’ and I Won’t Miss My Baby, hotel concierge and tenor banjo on The Fat Man Heather Moulder, piano, electric piano, organ, harmony, Close to Love
with Richard Bennett, 6-string bass One If By Land, solo Close to Love George Bradfute, electric guitar, Braggin’ Chloe Feoranzo, tenor sax, Rice Pudding, Close to Love Graham Gray, harmony, Glencoe Jen Gunderman, electric piano, harmony, Chemistry, rhythm Wurlitzer, Rice Pudding Tommy Perkinson, drums, Rice Pudding, Radio Gal
