Treat Her Right
Tied To The Tracks

Summer nights always seem longer than those of other seasons; the heat is relentless, and solitude and insomnia prevent you from sleeping as you wish.
Yet there is something that troubles these early summer vigils even more: it's the suspicion of having irretrievably lost something; it's the fear that by closing your eyes for just a moment, you might wake up in mid-autumn, with a handful of dry leaves in hand instead of a green meadow under your feet.

Well, I like to imagine that "Marie," the masterpiece of this wonderful album, was conceived on a day like this and that Mark Sandman, already known for being the leader of Morphine, dedicated it not so much to a lost love as to regret itself.

Tied to the Tracks (1989, RCA) is the second work of this blues–swamp–rock band from Massachusetts, which counts among its members – besides the aforementioned Sandman, here in guitar and voice version – the alleged leader David Champagne (guitar and voice), Billy Conway (drums, also a future Morphine member), and Jim Fitting (harmonica and voice).
Sandman and Champagne alternate on vocals, leaving the more committed (and probably better) tracks to the former and the more lively ones to the latter.
The group manages – also thanks to fabulous harmonica insertions, excellent country-blues phrasings, and never banal lyrics – to grind out a particular sound as in "King of Beers," another splendid ballad about regret, or in "Big Medicine," a bouncy blues to get lost in the night with.

In short: an album to be discovered, just like the entire discography of Sandman, a noble soul of modern music, would be.