Music of Interest

This album is an amazing treasure trove of material, documenting 70 pre-WWII songs of death and disaster from the US. It comes highly recommended, and is almost the perfect companion piece to the opening chapter of Reno, which examines the way early British folk music and later American folk music dealt with death, and the influence - narrow but profound - that these songs had on what we now understand as popular music. In the liner notes, Tom Waits reckons these are 'tragic chronicles of the perils of being human'. I think we could do with more of them in 2008. A lot more.