Gwen’s been a fan of Freakwater for some time—a couple of women belting out country music with warped lyrics. Last night they played at the Cactus Cafe, along with a drummer/clarinetist/keyboardist, pedal steel guitar/mandola player, and bass player ripped straight out of the Rockabilly Book of Stereotypes, with an ugly old turned-around Rickenbacker and a black cowboy shirt with pearl snaps and embroidering. It was a good show. Two encores. The Zincs (well, the Zinc, since there’s only one) opened, and he was good too.
As a side note, it is interesting that Freakwater posts fan transcriptions of their lyrics on their website. After the recent flap over lyrics posted online, this is refreshing.
And as an update to this side note, it’s doubly interesting that Google’s new music search takes you directly to a lyrics search link.
Back around 1992 or so one of the first grassroots uses of Gopher and WAIS (those near-miss precursors of the Web) was for publishing song lyrics. I was surprised at the time that music publishers didn’t come down hard on them. Now that particular cat has been out of the bag for so long that I’m surprised any music publishers would bother.