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| Terry Allen at Plaza Bandstand, Aug. 19, 2009 |
Artist, musician and Santa Fe resident Terry Allen was honored this week when NPR featured one of his tunes on the Songs We Love segment.
The song is "Cortez Sails" from Terry's 1975 debut album Juarez. Jewly Hight of NPR writes:
The album's longest track and gravitational center, "Cortez Sail" is a rickety waltz which pivots between whimsical road ballad and ominous war song, between Jabo's keenness to get back across the border into Mexico (homesick and ducking a double murder he'd committed in Cortez, Colorado) and 16th century conquistador Hernan Cortes's drive to brutally colonize the Aztecs. It's a dialogue between the freedom to move, to flee, to choose one's destination, and the power to dominate — or the powerlessness of being dominated.
I never can get the dadgum NPR embeds to work on this blog, so I'll just post a Youtube of the song:
No denying the majesty of "Cortez Sail." But if I were choosing the song that I love most from Juarez, it would have been this one:
Juarez is being re-released again in May, this time on a label called Paradise of Bachelors. You can pre-order HERE. The label also plans to re-release Terry's second album, Lubbock (On Everything).
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