Because why not eight?

8. The Lone Bellow — Then Came the Morning. My favorite moment on Cayamo this year was watching this band launch into “Heaven Don’t Call Me Home” at their first show in a crowded room. You literally could see the sweat flying off of them. That’s not typical Lone Bellow stuff, but it does illustrate the range of this band. I thought this was a significant step up over their first already-great album, and you really do have to see this band perform live.

 

7. The Black Lillies — Hard to Please. Here’s another band you need to see live to appreciate, but this studio album does a good job of broadcasting that live energy. A minor knock: I suspect some of the songs were written under a heavy deadline, and there were a few cliched lines (including almost all of the song “Dancin'”) that made me groan because they compared so poorly to the album’s best efforts. But this is just grumpy whining on my part. This is a band that still is growing; I’m proud to say I helped crowdfund this album (along with several others that didn’t make my list).

 

6. JD McPherson — Let the Good Times Roll. It’d be easy to shove McPherson into the rockabilly box and keep him there, but he’s far more than some mere nostalgia revivalist. Listen to “Bossy” — simple in its construction, elegant in its execution — and you get at McPherson’s talents. And I love his voice. And he kills it live.

 

5. The Watkins Family Hour — Yes, this is an album of covers by a group of musicians fully capable of producing wonderful original music. But reinterpreting covers is half the fun of this side-project band for Sean and Sara Watkins, and their band on this gig also includes Fiona Apple, of all people (and she’s really great). They also put on a tremendous live show when I saw them this year.

 

4. The Mavericks — Mono. I’m not thrilled about the fact that they actually recorded this album in mono, but here we have a group of veteran musicians who still crank it with an energy and feeling that is hard to match. And really, is there anyone anywhere who can sing better than Raul Malo? Their show at the State Theater a few months ago was my favorite show of the year.

 

3. The Decemberists — What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. I worry that the band occasionally drifts into pretentiousness, the kind that might deserve a little mocking (see “The Singer Addresses His Audience,” which opens this album) but they are just so powerful and their best lyrics are a cut above everyone else in the pool. There are also a hefty 14 songs on here, and “Till the Water’s All Long Gone” is one of my favorite songs of the year.

 

2. Jason Isbell — Something More Than Free. I honestly don’t know how Isbell could have written another album that reaches the level of “Southeastern,” and yet he’s done it. It’s hard to pick out a favorite cut in this effort because they are all so strong, and they show even more maturity than Southeastern’s offerings.

 

This album would have been my favorite in almost any other year (and I might be grading this below what it deserves because “Southeastern” is my favorite album of the decade so far), but in 2015, my favorite is:

1. James McMurtry — Complicated Game. It’s great to see McMurtry come out with another studio album after too many years. In many ways, I think of his cuts as short stories accompanied by music — but he’s such a powerful instrumentalist that this description sells him short. He keeps down the instrumental gymnastics on this mostly-acoustic effort, and it’s his ability to write so insightfully about such a broad spectrum of characters that really makes you stop and listen. And he’s stretching his voice on this album; I didn’t know he had this kind of range in him. Buy this already. Also: Best line to open an album ever (“Honey, don’t you be yellin’ at me while I’m cleaning my gun.”)

Until last week, I hadn’t been home in more than six years, and I hadn’t been there for a big holiday since my father died in 2004. With my parents gone and most of my siblings having multi-generational families of their own now, I didn’t feel the holidays were the best time to actually see my brother and sisters.

But a year and a half had passed since I last had been with most of them, and everyone was going to be together this Thanksgiving, so I decided to make the trip home. I hauled with me a bunch of work responsibilities and decided to get a hotel room so I could work and have some quiet time/space, so I questioned how much quality time I would get to spend with my family at all.

Those fears were unfounded. It turned out to be a wonderful trip. I’m from a family of seven kids, and my five sisters all have adult children now, and almost all of the married ones of that generation now have kids of their own. Put them in a room together — in reality, a near-impossibility because someone’s always got a conflicting duty — and it’s more than 40 people.

Nearly all of them rotated through town on the long Thanksgiving weekend, and it had been years since I had seen most of my nieces and nephews (not to mention the grand-nieces and grand-nephews). My oldest sister also celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary that weekend, so I met a whole wave of old friends and in-laws that I had not seen in decades in some cases. And it all felt like home.

Thanksgiving morning was beautiful, and my wife and I dropped by the cemetery to visit the graves of my parents. I often wonder what they think of this giant wave of family they created. I know that I’m so glad they’re in my life.

So I have suffered from MAS (Mandolin Acquisition Syndrome) for a while now, even though I’m really not much of a player. I have a reasonably priced F-style mandolin that I like, but the tone of an oval hole (more sustain and bass, less percussive), better fits a lot of the music I play. I’ve been getting by on this front (and gigging) with a Washburn M1SDLTR, a surprisingly nice, inexpensive oval hole, but I’ve been looking for something better.

Behold the Morris flat-top oval hole:

It doesn’t have a model number because it didn’t come from a factory. It was built by a luthier in Oregon, who’s put together a few hundred mandolins of various styles and has sold them at prices far below a lot of similar handmade instruments.

This is the cheapest Morris model — the simple design, flat top (doesn’t require the painstaking carving of a chunk of wood into an arch like most mandolins), oval hole (easier to cut than F-holes) and lack of binding all help reduce costs. But it’s still a $650 mandolin new; I paid considerably less than that used even though it is only a few months old. (I bought it from a banjo player who wanted to learn mandolin but gave it up, which is too bad because that means he still plays banjo.)

This is my first American-made, small-batch mandolin. Mandolin people are even crazier than harmonica people, and they assign all sorts of debatable mojo qualities to American small-batch mandos — even though there are really good mandos coming out of China for a fraction of the price. But the quality of this particular mandolin shines through, from the finish to the fretwork to the wood itself. The sides and back are maple, a very common choice for mandolins and guitars, but the top is red cedar — rare, in part because it’s considered a ‘softer’ wood that could be susceptible to denting. In reality, a lot of that depends on the quality, not the type, of wood.

In this case, as soon as I started installing an acoustic pickup in the mandolin, I knew that the maker had taken care about the wood he had chosen.

I decided to put the pickup jack through the endpin, a common and neat procedure that also lets the jack double as a strap holder. I wanted to be careful about the finish on such a nice mandolin (with the cheap Washburn, I more or less just attacked the endpin hole with a drill), so I picked up a manual wood reamer to cut out the hole. But I had a terrible time opening up the hole through the tailpiece and the end block — because the maple top-notch quality and really dense/hard, making it a pain to work with by hand. I eventually used a nice, sharp step bit on an electric drill to finish the work and even then, the wood smoked a little as I cut it.

The Morris has a much more balanced tone than the Washburn, which has a shorter fretboard and bigger body. This gives the Washburn has a distinctively ‘tubby’ tone, similar to (but not as complex as) the Gibson oval holes of 100 years ago (many of which are still in circulation). The Morris is much louder overall even though its body is smaller than the Washburn.

I’ll keep the Washburn as a ‘campfire’ mandolin, and I’ll still play my Loar LM-520 when I want that F-hole sound, but the Morris will be my gigging machine going forward. I love it.