Artist:   Ramsay Midwood
Song:   "Planet Nixon"
Album: Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Cows
Label:   Farmwire
Year:    2006

If The Band had been Levon Helm and four of his Arkansas first cousins instead of all those moody Canadians, they might have sounded something like Ramsay Midwood. He appears full-blown out of a backwoods gully, untamed by the parameters of traditional musical convention. Plucked banjos, crying accordions, blaring baritone horns and a few other otherworldly instruments join the regular guitar-bass-drums amalgamation to portray a place where only a very few people get to go. There aren’t any bookkeepers looking over his shoulder, that’s for sure. Midwood’s voice is also its own boss. It does what it wants and never asks for favors, not unlike that other appealing modern adventurer Watermelon Slim. Song-wise, the man doesn’t really worry about making sense to anyone but himself, and therein lies the real wonder: “My two teeth are all I need to chew my food/and all the ladies there will be nude.” So true.  If William Burroughs had never left St. Louis and discovered heroin, there’s a good chance he would have written words like this. They magnify the smallest things in life, like aiming a telescope on an ant, turning them into everything. Glowingly produced by drummer Don Heffington, who proves once and for all that drummers do make great producers, Popular Delusions & The Madness Of Cows didn’t make even a ripple when it was released two years ago. That’s okay. Some music exists beyond the clutch of popular taste, but in a hundred years someone will discover these songs and dream about the brave old world that allowed them to be created, and where o’ where it went. High sighs for all.