Shaw, Virgil

Shaw, Virgil

At The Time I Didn't Care

Rocks In Your Head

Beginning his career as a member of the high-energy, speed-pop band Brent's T.V. (who recorded two albums for Lookout Records), he later moved to San Francisco where he was a founding member of the band Dieselhed (Bongload Records) from 1992-2000. From there is work as a solo artist became laded with rich, evocative imagery, gothic storytelling and painterly detail. Recorded in San Francisco and the headlands north of the city, Virgil's new album captures the songwriter in a self-reflective awareness, touching on topics from dead and gone love to an absorbing recount of a feveristic dream. It features Henry Nagle (guitar/petal steel), Rusty Miller (drums/guitar/bass), Atom Ellis (vocals/bass), Danny Heifetz (vibraphones), and Whitney Shaw (vocals).  Virgil's arc angel yodelistic soul-singing can sound like a cross between Gram Parsons and Jimmie Rogers, and beneath that the band plays anything from the laid-back downer country of Kris Kristofferson or Fred Neil to a psychedelic ethereal dreamscape country sound as in the first single "Sharon", out today.  The album criss crosses to a lonesome one man and his guitar wail on "Black Helicopter," which cracks like a distant cousin to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, to the dark humor of Randy Newman in "Dancin Poodle," and even darker knife gut humor in a Jim Thomson-meets-Earnest Tubb song "Nightclub Killer”. “New Mid County Fair” is inspired by a silver 1940s bus Virgil once saw abandoned in an empty field during his school days in Humboldt County, whereas “The Valley” captures the feeling of a...