The day that this latest session from Truth and Salvage Co. taped was on a regular, old weekday here in Rock Island, but their old California buddy - Lissie - who calls our town her childhood home and it's where her family still resides, was here dropping off a dog before a long tour. It was a wonderfully serendipitous moment that couldn't have happened 12 hours earlier or 12 hours later. She was planning on doing some home-cooking for the boys that day, having them over to mom and dad's house for a hot kitchen of great smells, hugs, laughter and couch time.
With a shortage of time and a plane to pack for and then catch directly from the studio, they opted for pasta and pizza at the parlor below the studio. What this combination of great chance and coincidence meant was a gathering of like-minded souls - both spiritually and musically - and a chance to hear what people sound like when they're at home. Where they all spend most of their time together, sounds in passing stories, to be as earthy as they are, as genuine and binding as any place could be.
It's a place that speaks to the barkers and the colored balloons - or the sentiment of them - in the Neil Young song, "Sugar Mountain," that they all chose to perform together here. While they were singing it - running through it a number of times to get it to their satisfaction - the place we were in didn't feel like Rock Island anymore. They'd turned here into where they're most comfortable, bringing to life many of the things that they love about where they live. It's a song full of sounds that remind you of the way that the wind bends, rarely in your favor. It reminds you of all the people that you've left behind, all of the people that you miss and all of the people who want you back so badly. Then there are all the people that you want back so badly. Some of them are the same ones who would like you back so badly and some are not.
Lissie and Truth and Salvage Co.'s main vocalists/harmony players, Tim Jones, Walker Young, Scott Kinnebrew and Bill Smith, have this amazing way of stoking us on the qualities that we hold deep down inside, on the places that we hold - or should hold - most dear. They bring us back to them and force us to address them, to lie with them again. We reacquaint and we embrace. We take their advice to get there, when they sing, "Hold on people cause it's almost summertime/Hold on people cause it's almost summertime again."