Here’s a little taste of all the bands that will be performing tonight at the Echoplex for The New Los Angeles Folk Festival’s MURDER BALLADS Halloween bonanza. Arrive at 8 pm tonight so you don’t miss anything. These bands will each perform a couple classic murder ballads in celebration of dark tradition.

Frank Fairfield “Nine Pound Hammer”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lefJBwJhQ6E

Simon Stokes
“Big City Blues”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2H5dWqEkEk

Boy Scout Jamboree (Spindrift acoustic)
“Conversations With A Gun” from The Legend Of God’s Gun

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WYBgd59Wbw

Triple Chicken Foot
Triple Chicken Foot live

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFNkmyrGJtM

Vaud & The Villains
“John Henry” live

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfwD2UvmNJM

Amanda Jo Williams, Horse Thieves, and Olentangy John will perform as one band.

Amanda Jo Williams
“Sick & Dying” live featuring Feather’s grandma

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDpnBUMfsYs

Horse Thieves
Live at Echo Country Outpost

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkLaSmOYFYI

Olentangy John
“Oh! Be Joyful!”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqxaYTkS92w

Driftwood Singers
“Sweetly & Softly” live

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aok69PuBYa0

Julia Holter
“Fur Felix”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShDUaoJ9Lc

RT N’ The 44’s
“Long Gone” live at Echo Country Outpost

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey1cElnK3W8

Emily Lacy & Henry Wolfe will do a song together. Emily will also perform a song with Julia Holter.

Emily Lacy
live at LACMA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=__2OKBvJbfQ

Henry Wolfe
live at Echo Country Outpost

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WnoVoQnSws

and special guest Tommy Santee Klaws
“Dead Leaves & Bumblebees” live at Echo Country Outpost

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzPiZF8KOaw

The lineup for the Murder Ballads event organized by LA RECORD’s Daiana Feuer and James Cartwright (aka The New Los Angeles Folk Festival) has been announced.

Taking the stage on Oct 26 with their renditions of old murder ballads will be: Frank Fairfield, Simon Stokes, Boy Scout Jamboree (Spindrift acoustic), Vaud & The Villains, Amanda Jo Williams with Olentangy John and Horse Thieves, Triple Chicken Foot, Driftwood Singers, RT N’ The 44‘s, Julia Holter, Emily Lacy and Henry Wolfe

October 26, 2010, 8:00pm, $8. 
Echoplex
, 1154 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026, (213) 413-820o. http://www.attheecho.com

Frank Fairfield
video: “Nine Pound Hammer”

Simon Stokes
video: “Big City Blues”

Boy Scout Jamboree (Spindrift acoustic)
video: “Conversations With A Gun” from The Legend Of God’s Gun

Triple Chicken Foot
video: Triple Chicken Foot live

Vaud & The Villains
video: “John Henry” live

Amanda Jo Williams with Olentangy John and Horse Thieves supergroup:
Amanda Jo Williams
video: “Sick & Dying” live featuring Feather’s grandma
Horse Thieves
video: Live at Echo Country Outpost
Olentangy John
video: “Oh! Be Joyful!”

Driftwood Singers
video: “Sweetly & Softly” live

Julia Holter
video: “Fur Felix”

RT N’ The 44’s
video: “Long Gone” live at Echo Country Outpost

Emily Lacy & Henry Wolfe
Emily Lacy & Henry Wolfe will do a song together. Emily will also perform a song with friend Julia Holter.
Emily Lacy
video: “Poison” live at the Hobby Shop
Henry Wolfe
video: “Someone Else”

And on Oct 23, they’re doing a free pre-show at Stories with Tommy Santee Klaws and Happy Campers in 3D (Hi Ho Silver Ohs doing Friday the 13th songs). Free beer. 7:30pm, Free beer. Stories, 1716 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026, (213) 413-3733

The Last Shout of Yet Another Rock Band: The surrounding mallspace changes with the commercial fortunes of Hollywood Blvd., but the Knitting Factory continues to take on a fine patina of rockist grunge. The Tinseltown Knit is the last great Boulevard rock joint and if Hollywood itself faded into a John Carpenter movie hellhole, this place would be its Al’s Bar. Subdivided by genre, the main room boomed with club kids while about a dozen bits of hipster jetsam crammed the tiny AlterKnit Lounge for the reputed last-ever show by the Horse Thieves. Lead guitarist Alex Maslansky confirmed the terminal status by mumbling something about “the last temptation of the Horse Thieves” before his band twinkletoed off into a twee-country that might be called “cowpop.” Their MySpace page shows them fairly deft hands at Cali country vaudeville in the ironic-distance mode. At this transit lounge for distracted hipsters, the trio sped through despite complaints about the sound and an audience standing around in the usual flat affect. Even at the clipped length of sets at the AlterKnit, the end couldn’t come soon enough, so I left as the last song came loading into the chute, with Maslansky’s elegant hawgleg grunt receding as I zigzagged down the corridor.

Castellari vs. Tarantino: From there, I felt like a bit of regenerative ultraviolence, so I legged toking over to one of the last screenings of Inglourious Basterds during its long stay at the Arclight. I was way behind seeing this partially because I wanted to screen the 1978 Enzo Castellari original first, a full-tilt basher that never played the Southern drive-in circuit or much of anywhere else in North America. Basterd kin to The Dirty Dozen, Cross of Iron and Kelly’s Heroes and chock with affectionate shoutouts to all three, Inglorious Bastards treats American participation in WW II like a big-budget proto-Burning Man party, complete with hippies, guns, designer explosions, naked Nazi chicks, rockin’ individualized uniforms and more fuck-you attitude than a fistful of middle fingers. This is very likely the only punk-sensible WW II movie, as almost all the characters are in cheerful rebellion against everything but dismantling the Third Reich, itself a kind of ultimate in bummer Authority. This sensibility resurfaces in Quentin Tarantino’s epic in Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee hillbilly whose unstated-but-sufficient reason for hating Nazis is they’re such obvious and insufferable pricks. Basterds rebukes an entire substratum of WW II cinema of the 1950s-1970s that tended for Cold War reasons to “humanize” servants of the Third Reich; even Patton managed to make the Red Army look a lot less savory than the generic-looking Good Germans George C. Scott spent most of its runtime jawboning to death. The takeaway serves Q’s trademark sense of justice well—history too often fails to mark survivors with anywhere near the right degree of thoroughness.

Brief Dream of Decom: My experience of this 6th installment of Burning Man’s annual L.A. afterparty was short and full of wonder. A lady named Gypsy Goddess was visiting me that weekend and we took up where we left off when parting at Burning Man 2009. Consequently, we didn’t get out to the Cornfield (what the rest of the world calls Los Angeles State Historic Park in otherwise nondescript Naud Junction) on Saturday, until the hour was already well advanced. Decom has gone from a big outdoor art-party in the Warehouse District to a mini-BRC, with exhibits Patrick Shearn’s and Cynthia Washburn’s Holding Flame seeming to have the dust still on them. All the pals we saw looked to be recuperating, minds still blown and reeling from what everyone swears was a miraculous uber-Burn—seven days of bliss difficult to absorb even by the breakneck hedonics of the L.A. underground party set. I was informed my presence was required back in bed so we headed there, walking all the way back to Union Station as hippies and party folk streamed past us, their great glad Fellini smiles smearing the night like glowsticks. We were high by the time we passed through Olvera Street.

All Night Horrorthon: When the all-night horror marathon became part of U.S. culture, I don’t know, but the practice was already venerable and going full-blast in the South and Midwest of my youth. The surplus gross tonnage of horror/SF/giant-bug cinema produced from the sound-era on had already taken over Friday and Saturday night TV in most regions, with vintage flicker featuring Boris, Bela and Vincent buttressing the surreal slasher/cannibal/lesbian-vampire fests then unspooling at drive-ins. One of the best things about L.A. is that it hosts several such dead man’s parties every October, with the bill at the Aero on Halloween Night looking like prime slime for fans of Reagan/Bush I-era High Cheese. The New Beverly’s seven-feature hoedown on Oct. 10 showed the finicky hands of true gutbucket connoisseurs. Dog Soldiers (2002) is a nice U.K. howler about how well an out-on-maneuvers platoon of Her Majesty’s Own serve up as werewolf-feed. About a reel into The Burning (1981) came realization I’d seen this Friday the 13th knockoff back when it came out, but I stayed for every hack and gouge anyway. Future master-thespians Jason Alexander (sporting a riot of hair on his skull) and a pre-mummification Holly Hunter keep things moving, treating the between-slaughter bits as Catskills cabaret. This superior genre entry represents the first nickel Miramax’s Bob & Harvey Weinstein made in the biz and well-earned it was. After such slick popcult, nothing less than the high art of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (1981) would do. Among the most delirious of the late maestro’s films, the only difference between this and any academically recognized surrealist “transgressive” or avant-art masterpiece is the near-incidental horror claptrap of what passes for the plot. Few Ken Russell movies ever made the grindhouse/arthouse jump, but the ones that did (The Devils, Tommy, Altered States) all recall the balls-out gonzo Fulci applies here to the art of the body count. It ended with a flash of maggoty poetics well past the midnight hour and house lights went up on an almost-full room. The “surprise” movie turned out to be rare episodes of Tales from the Crypt, so I took a long, quiet walk around Hancock Park, toked up a monsteroso indica buzz and settled back in time for opening credits of Superstition (1982). A little-screened modern-witchcraft wheeze with many longueurs, a few interesting arty pretensions and scads of stylish murders, end credits flapped at about 4:30 a.m. and Fight for Your Life (1977) cranked up moments after. I’d read of this storied shock-morality fable and theatre management warned us of it in vague but emphatic terms many hours before. Nearly everyone around me was gently snoring when this worn print of the event’s oldest, cheapest movie started clattering. Its plot details an interval of rape and brutalization inflicted in the far suburbs on a peace-loving African American family by three maniacs—all gross racial stereotypes including an indolent Latin, a rape-crazy Asian and a windy, psychotic Southern redneck. The latter is a tour-de-force acting job by none other than William Sanderson, the backwoods idiot on Newhart with the two brothers Darryl. Nearly everyone in the movie is a voluble bigot and all own their hatreds lovingly at top volume, spacing bouts of low-budget Salo-like sadism with a kind of verbal violence that tends to make Angelenos of all ethnicities exceedingly nervous. The adenoidal sawing in the seats abruptly choked off and tight uneasy laughter welled up as one over-the-top offense to human decency chased another in a movie perhaps best described as a Last House on the Left for racists. Worse, as very likely the only authentic hillbilly in the house, I got a sudden, immersive sense-memory (total props to the brilliant Sanderson) of what old-school rednecks were like back in that long-gone day. The recollections thus let loose sent several nightmares back-projecting in my own mind, pulling me home to Gothic Dixie as the film clattered on in front of me. The abused family was about to take revenge and, from the far back, I could see heads beginning to sink and disappear below seat level when my (muted) cell throbbed and I bolted outside. At the other end was a tiny, tender voice calling from Caracas, where it was already mid-morning and all she wanted was for me to be careful going home tonight in crazy L.A. Thanks, baby. I incinerated the last shavings in my weed pipe before finally resorting to shrooms, the preliminary buzz of which hit sometime in the second reel of Galaxy of Terror (1981), last in the marathon. As pretty much your basic early-1980s Roger Corman B-movie, this welter of space-opera clichés sports nothing worse than a woman being raped to death by a giant slug. Sick. Featuring astoundingly weird acting (from Sid Haig, Ray Walston, Robert “Freddy Kreuger” Englund, Joanie from Happy Days and the stickwood son of Oliver from Green Acres) and dialogue even H. Beam Piper would reject as too unlike human speech, it was the kind of flick a roomful of semi-strangers could bond over and did. There was a Tom & Jerry cartoon afterwards, followed by an old TV sign-off message as a Soviet-looking ordnance parade rolled by to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” As I slipped out the lobby for home, there was still a swarm of dazed and happy folks on the pavement outside, all of them wisely unwilling to leave this 12-hour temporary community for the slate-grey of another midtown Sunday morning.

Cali Countryfolk and Woes of a Cub Rockcrit: Outgoing L.A. RECORD photog and writer Scott Schultz says I’m “an L.A. institution” and I hope that’s not one of the reasons he’s off to photograph rock bands in China for a year. He cites the rotten economy and that’s certainly plainly visible in the local scene, as veterans like Scott are vanishing in favor of kids who’d be making bones elsewhere in the literary underground had not 1) the L.A. music scene blown up as it has in the past half-decade and 2) the economy hadn’t (symmetrically) imploded, making the reaches of urban deep-innerspace suddenly attractive as a Subject. Most of the local music writers around when I got my first rockcrit job a decade ago couldn’t be bothered with live music and almost all are now gone, replaced by striplings doing something remarkably close to what I did when starting out. A scheduling bump with the RECORD struck my name from the list at the “secret” Flaming Lips-o-palooza at the Montalban last Thursday, Oct. 15th, so Scott got to cover that and I wound up at the Echoplex instead, getting the joy of seeing one of L.A.’s wondrous little surprises, He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister. Cali country is something I love with the fervor of a late convert, since even Buck Owens was little more than some jackass on TV until I moved my Dixie-fried ears out here for an accidental steeping in the Bakersfield Sound and its many variants. Robert Kolar and Felipe Ceballos from tough indie wide-boys Lemon Sun contribute heavily to Brother/Sister, with the whole, shifting, multi-piece concatenation in the great line of Gram Rabbit and the Parson Red Heads in the insistence on coupling the High with the Lonesome. The Lemon Sun songcraft is certainly there, with harmonies and filigree from Rachel Kolar, Lauren Brown, Robby Delosier, Molly Collins and more making the crowd-lonely poetics of the genre sound fresh, even sociable. I snagged one of their 3-song EPs outside as fellow RECORD scribe Steve Slaughter from Cigarette Bums unloaded upon my geezer’s shoulders a doleful and familiar blues—bumped off guest lists, girlfriend logistics, erratic hours; the usual sleepless days and wasted nights. Steve, who made notes of everything and had even brought a tape recorder (something I’d quit doing years ago), longed for an exclusive on Devil Makes Three, and got one by my simple expedient of slowly walking out the door into the Echo Park night. He was happily interviewing one of the members of Brother/Sister as I went back inside for a linger before Old Man Markley. This passel of root-tooters were fresh from a gig at Brick by Brick, an oldtime San Diego dive I’m overjoyed to hear is still open. This unsigned gang of owlhoots packs a heavy reliance on trad instrumentation (banjo, kazoo, washboard) along with trainwhistle harmonies and a hellcat’s freight of regret. The place was full of tattooed girls and urbane cowboys already, like some peyote dream of Hoot Gibson, who used to shoot movies about four miles from here in some other America altogether.

—Ron Garmon

Daiana Feuer

Country-clad strangers huddled around the bar and red-lit couches, holding beers and cookies rather than guns. The DJ played Hank Williams between bands until they ran out of his material, then Loretta Lynn took over. Chilling on the tiered seating beneath The Cowboy Show’s intimate vibe, the audience sat rapt, almost hypnotized, every time a band took stage.

Amanda Jo Williams traveled west from middle of nowhere, Georgia. She is that small town girl chasing untamable lovers. Her squeaky voice reaches as high as she is tall, with an accent that washes her in the purity of cartoons.  A gently strange man called “5” wearing velour pants, long hair and big sunglasses, accompanied her on electric guitar, as if picking flowers or painting with watercolors. Lauren Brown, of He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister, added tap-dancing on a large box. The rhythm she created for “Nickel On My Back” almost turned the song into a hip hop remix. ONE heckler in the crowd felt the need to repeatedly hoot at Lauren. It can’t be helped. She is a babe. There’s got to be a rowdy cowboy in the bunch.—He’s lucky he didn’t get jumped by banditos.

Horse Thieves opened The Show with tales of raucous forms. Alex Maslansky works at Stories by day, but at night he dons a big jacket, swaggers in with a deep tone, and shakes his hand across his guitar as if it were the rolling hip of Elvis. The bleach-blond Brie Turner O’Banion on piano creates accompaniment for a brawl at the card table while adding poker-faced vocals to Maslanky’s lead. This Bonnie & Clyde had a third but essential wheel, drummer of drummers Nick Murray sat in with the band, contributing his finesse to a magical set.

When Crooked Cowboy & Freshwater Indians closed the night, the room transported to a hallucinated otherland, zenned out on the yelping coyotes of its imagination. Crooked Cowboy has got some soul. His two accompanying lady singers “doo doo doo” more meaningfully than a reverb-laden word or two could possibly equal. The tall one (name could not be found!) grabs her own throat and rattles her esophagus. When with tambourine in hand, her entire body jolted and bounced as powerfully as a wound-up toy. It was a thing of sheer beauty. Crooked Cowboy himself is one of a kind, bobbing his head surrounded by machinery, dueling basses, and a sensibility that’s spooky as a glimmering cobweb in a ghost town.

If only The Cowboy Show lived in a box you could open and partake when needed. These bands fit well together. An essence felt nourished by their crossing. In the saloon of dreams, it was a lovely night.

—Georgia Dorge

Download: Amanda Jo Williams “The Bear Eats Me”

(from the self-released The Bear Eats Me out soon)

L.A. RECORD likes fresh and spicy meat. We couldn’t wait for Amanda Jo Williams to wipe the dust gathered on her Jumbo Western in the long cross-country trek. Her quirky country style lets her be as comfortable strumming songs about sex as she (and her twins) are rhyming about poop. Right now she’s handing out CDs burnt on her computer, leaving them on benches and releasing them in baskets into the L.A. river. If fate will have it, those 24 peanuts of wisdom will wind up on a barstool near you. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

How many songs have you written in one stretch?
A lot. I go through spurts. I’d say one spurt will make twenty to forty songs maybe. But usually I’ll have someone that inspires me. Most of the time, it’s about saving the world. But recently I had a muse, so it made a different type of songs.
Who was your muse?
It was a sexy man.
I like the song about shopping cart sex.
That’s about the sexy man.
Where are you from?
Hogansville, Georgia. It’s close to La Grange. La Grange is a little bigger—that’s why I sometimes tell people La Grange. Hogansville is really small. It’s like an hour and a half south of Atlanta. It’s in the country. Very in the country. Yeah. Like Family Dollar. Horses. Fences. Broken fences.
Did you have horses?
I did. My horse Bobo, he was born there on the property. I saw him being born­—his feet were sticking out. That’s how it happened. Anyways, he was like fifteen, and then two or three years ago he escaped and got hit on the road, like a deer. A woman in her Cadillac—she waited too late to sue my mama. I mean, I’m glad she waited too late to sue.
You can sue someone for hitting their horse?
Yeah, ‘cause it’s not a deer—it’s not wild animals.
Can you talk about the poop song?
My twins, Ginger and Hominy—hominy like grits or corn—we did that together. It’s just like improv. They’re seven. They’re with their father now in Woodstock, New York. It wasn’t too long ago. I knew I was moving out so I created this Myspace page and it has the poop song and stuff that we did together, and videos. They have a really good sense of humor. They’re old souls. Go to their Myspace—it’s called Little Feet Learning Center. It’s my first friend on Myspace, and you can see tons that you wouldn’t believe. I started strumming and we started singing. The melody just came out. Kids that age—they like to talk about poop a lot.
Why did you move to L.A.?
For the music. I came out here in August and I played a show or two and I knew that my music would do well out here and just my personality. I wanted to stay. I’ve played in New York City and it’s just not the same. But out here something just clicked with my soul and my heart. I’m looking for a record label so I can start touring. I think it’s going to happen this year. I can see it. I can. I can kind of see things. I was thinking of burning a bunch of CDs and throwing them, and random people will pick them up—because if you believe in fate and destiny, it will land in the right hands.
What do you mean ‘you see things?’
I’ll ask myself a question about something or someone and I’ll say, ‘Oh, can I see myself doing this or being with this person or so and so?’ And if I can see it right away or if it feels right, I know it’ll come to pass.
What do you plan to do in the springtime?
What goes on in the spring? I think people get horny.
If you were a shelf in a record store, what albums would you want to hold up?
Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson when he sings—well, he can be there anytime because he’s kind of sexy. I guess Gene Wilder if he sang. Do you know the guy that played Ernest played old country songs—Jim Varney? So him—singing bootlegs. I guess Bob Dylan. I like Bob Dylan. Bette Midler singing ‘The Rose.’ George Jones singing ‘She’s My Rock.’ There’d probably be a kid’s song or something.
What imaginary place would you play a show in?
Ooh. Have you heard of the Land of Pan? I think maybe Edgar Cayce says it’s Atlantis…I don’t know if this all the same thing…and then my friend says there’s this place called Lemuria, today. It’s this place, maybe Lord of the Rings-like, you know, with fairies and all these other creatures. And there’s magic. And the waters are really blue and the grass is really green and the sky is very blue. It would be outside. And I would play when it was daylight and then a lot of people would play and it would become nighttime and then the magic stuff really gets intense.
What would it smell like?
Pine needles. Pine straw. Do you know what pine straw is? If you grow up in the South and you don’t have snow, you can slide on pine straw. It’s needles that fall from pine trees and they turn brown. You can slide. They’re really slick. So it smells like that. And all the things that smell good.
All of them?
Yeah, pure things that smell good. What do you mean all of them? No fake colognes or perfumes. That’s sort of scary. You know how you see someone and you pass by ‘em and they have this sort of smell. Because perfume is sort of not natural in a way. Maybe some is—fancy perfume—but it becomes very enclosing. Like a box.
What bathroom accessory do you think you’d be if you were a bathroom thing or hygienic product?
Shampoo, because you go in the hair, but then you get rinsed out, but the smell lingers, so you don’t have to be committed to the person, but they still want you and your essence is still there.
What do you think about the apocalypse?
There is something coming, but for me it’s like the end of something and the beginning of something new. Something incredible. You know how the ‘60s never really took off? People didn’t get out of it what they wanted to get out of it? I think this time people are going to get out what they want. You know about the law of attraction? I mean, feelings and your thoughts really do make your reality. And I’ve noticed in L.A., that it’s very magical here. Manifestations and things happen a lot quicker. There’s something magical about it. And this town is called ‘the angels.’ So, I think there’s a lot of angels here—maybe broken-down ones and sad ones.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Believe in ‘em? They just are. They’re hanging around. And if you can see…Your brain only lets you see certain things. Like your eyes can see a ghost, but your brain just won’t allow you to see the ghost because it would mess up everything you’ve ever believed in. Because someone always said there’s no such thing as ghosts. Because you wouldn’t want to go crazy all of a sudden. So your eyes can see it but your brain won’t let you.
What can you tell me about planets?
Well, you start talking about your signs and the planets and you have people that start saying they don’t believe in that. And I think sometimes people don’t want to believe that the planets have influence over us because they don’t like the idea of being controlled by anything because it’s a free-will universe. It’s like—you’re born at a certain time. You are who you are, so when you’re born, the planets represent who you are. If you get lost about yourself, you can look at your chart. For example, Venus is in my 12th house and that’s not good because it means I have a lot of secret relationships. And I do have secret relationships. And my very first boyfriend—he was a school teacher, when I was a student. Do you ever feel like you’re playing a role, like you’re kind of magical? Like Venus. I’m just using Venus as an example. Or I would say, like, the wise old magician guy. The wizard. You know, the shamans around the world—and then, you know, you ever meet those people that are kind of this ‘older man’? They seem to be alone, but you just know they’re wise and you want to learn from them? There’s different versions of them everywhere.
Have you encountered one recently?
The father of my twins—he’s kind of like that. He’s kind of wizardy. The way he looks. He’s a very good musician. He’s the one that taught me guitar.
What was your first guitar?
I played his. But my Jumbo Western. It’s not fancy—it’s cheap. My friend Ed Mack got this for me before I could play and he got burned up in a fire. It’s funny. My grandmama, she fell in a fire when I was a kid. She was drunk and we had this big hole—she used to put trash in there and burn it. And she was drunk, poking the trash down, and she fell in the fire. But anyway, Ed used to take care of her after she got burned and then he ended up— he had a few strokes, he was skinny—and he ended up with a fire in his house. Sorry. I have these weird stories.
If you had to give up your eyes or your ears, what would you choose?
Ears. ‘Cause hearing runs really bad in my family. We all wear hearing aids. Some of my cousins—who are younger than me—they wear hearing aids. So I think it would be an easy adjustment. If you couldn’t see, you could get hit by a car. If you couldn’t see, how would you know that someone was handsome and you wanted to marry him?
Maybe it would be how their body felt.
Yeah, that’s more important, ain’t it? You ever heard about astral projection? It’s the state between sleeping and waking. You can see through your eyelids. You’d be able to see an astral realm, even if you couldn’t see in this physical plane. You could probably hear though, too. Maybe it’s a question that doesn’t need an answer. I used to ask my mama which of us kids she loved the best. It was something in me that needed to be loved the most out of all of them. But as I got older, I realized it was a stupid question.
Do you see yourself going back to Georgia one day?
I see myself being here. It feels more like home than anyplace. I have to get a job. I love Georgia and I do have to go back there to refresh. It’s just slow and it’s pure.

AMANDA JO WILLIAMS WITH HORSE THIEVES AND CROOKED COWBOY AND FRESHWATER FRIENDS ON FRI., AUG. 14, AT THE COWBOY SHOW AT THE UNKNOWN THEATER, 1110 SEWARD ST., LOS ANGELES. 10 PM / $5 / 18+. KARAOKEFEVER.COM. VISIT AMANDA JO WILLIAMS AT MYSPACE.COM/AMANDAJOWILLIAMSMUSIC.