Troubadour Blues

I absolutely loved it. I was really surprised at exactly how it affected me. It was very emotional for me to hear these great musicians talking about writing and inspiration and playing and the road. It really made me realize just why I love music so much. My wife watched it with me and she loved it also. It really was an insight to her into the music and I think in some way it seemed to give her a little more insight into why I do what I do, let alone hearing some truly wonderful music. You really created a nice journey with this movie. You did an amazing job with this and I can't wait to see the new one! This film is like one of those rare gems that you stumble across only a few times in your life. This really is one to treasure.

The days of the troubadour may be numbered, but at least we have this fine document of the calling's modern incarnation. This is a tale lovingly and movingly told, with excellent insight into the life of those who follow the troubadour's muse.

For all the talk these days of how hard life is for a musician, how hard it is to make a living at music, one has to wonder the degree to which what is meant by such protestations is that it is hard to make a killing at it. This documentary does a wonderful job of showing how hard some musicians struggle just to get by, but regardless of the difficulty they are compelled to keep traveling, making music, playing in front of audiences, small though the audience numbers may be. In some ways this is a great antidote to commercial notions of stardom. The artists portrayed here are stars in their own right, and bring light and inspiration to others in important, intimate ways that cannot, and perhaps should not, be commercially mediated.

This film is a real treat, and I hope the filmmaker will follow up on it, perhaps even following up with the same artists some years down the road. And let's hope those artists receive enough encouragement, and compensation, to be making music still down that road.

Tom Weber's fine feature-length documentary follows a number of talented traveling songwriters and musical performers who have the gifts and determination to make music their life's work, and even make a living out of it.

Several of the musicians featured here, like Peter Case and Mary Gauthier, were already familiar to me; a few others I was vaguely aware of, but some not at all. At least a couple have had brushes with fame and, having been tossed aside by the majors, are now out on their own. Others have never had their fifteen minutes and probably never will, but even so, they express few regrets. As one of their number, an Irish-born painter and musician named Karl Mullen, quietly insists, "I have succeeded, because I still continue to do this, and do it for the same reason that I started doing it, in that it makes me feel something that's real." Though their lives can be exhausting, consisting mostly of long car trips broken by an hour or two of live performing, they keep at it, and continue to connect with people face to face, one on one, heart to heart, in ways that make it worthwhile for both them and their audiences.

The guitar is pretty much ubiquitous here (what other instrument is so well-adapted to a nomadic life?) but the styles range from delicate acoustic finger-picking to Garrison Starr's sweaty hard rock. One of the highlights is watching one veteran, Dave Alvin, (and how is he not a household name?) start off a song with a few soft phrases chanted into a mic and then rip into a blistering electric guitar solo. (It's refreshing, by the way, in an age of endless inaudible YouTube clips, to see live performances captured with some kind of professional attention to sound and camera angle.) In addition to the music there's plenty of storytelling and a good bit of theater on display in the film. Chris Smither introduces a song by eerily channeling a long-departed New Orleans fruit vendor, and Mary Gauthier prefaces one about a roadside way station by sagely observing that "when the folk singer has the nicest car in the parking lot you do not want to bring your family to this motel." Peter Case, who's featured on camera the most here, serves a bit as the genial philosopher-in-residence for the project, revisiting the town he grew up near Buffalo and taking at length about his background and what motivates him, but the truth is that all of these artists have plenty plenty of accumulated stories and wisdom from the road to share.

So there's no elegy here; even the sections which reflect on the loss of the songwriter Dave Carter, who died of a sudden heart attack while touring, are colored more with the fondness and respect his fellows feel for his memory than with raw grief (the passage of time no doubt helped). A few minutes from the end we learn that Peter Case has had to undergo open-heart surgery, but the film ends with him back on the road and in fine fettle, shifting gears once again to record an album with a harder-edged electric sound than he's done in years. It seems you can't keep a good troubadour down.

I've never met Tom Weber, but if I did I'd give him a big hug...or at least a hearty handshake. He has made a very personal, warm and insightful behind-the-scenes look at the lives of traveling musicians. These artistic road warriors may never find the bright lights and huge paychecks of their arena-rocking counterparts, although they are just as worthy. The musicians profiled are the ones who travel and play for small to medium crowds in backwater towns because the music compels them forward. They have to play, they have to perform.

The film features a fine cast of singer-songwriters: Peter Case, Chris Smithers, Garrison Starr and many others. It is a rare person that can lay open their soul every night through music - regardless of crowd size or venue location or quality of sound system.

This is truly an insider's look at what it means to be included in the Troubadour breed...hopefully not a dying breed.

The face of independent music is very different from the "mainstream," and Tom Weber certainly has captured the essence of what it's like to be one of these performers in the 21st century. The blend of music and storytelling is exquisite in this film, and the subjects (some of the most famous people you've never heard of) are perfectly "cast." Weber has captured their vulnerability ("You're exhausted for a living") without eliciting our pity; rather, the performers come across as true heroes. I mean, how is is possible that Garrison Starr isn't a household name? I love the idea of this project, and I'm crazy about the final product.