Well this week has turned folksy in a hurry. But that’s the way things play out sometimes. It took me a couple of weeks to get permission to share this song from Drew Nelson since he was on tour in UK. But I’m glad I finally did. In a number of ways this song, “Grandmother Moon”, reminds me of Greg Brown. The ending chorus when Drew repeats the phases “Shine a little brighter now” and “Just a little bit, just a little bit of moonshine” is right out of the Greg Brown playbook, as is the theme of small town life altered for eternity by large corporations (most notably in Drew’s lyric “the empty shell of what used to be our neighborhood hardware store”). This is all a good thing (the comparison to Greg Brown that is) since I think Greg Brown has lost some of his lyrical thunder of late and we need younger singer-songwriters to step up.
Drew’s new record is called Dusty Road To Beulah Land and is available now on the Chicago based folk label Waterbug Records (here).
Drew and friends covers “I’m a Little Catfish”