From Texas Standard:
In the 1970s, Lubbock-born singer-songwriter and conceptual artist Terry Allen turned conventional country music on its head. Albums like Juarez and Lubbock (on Everything) featured wry, dry, satirical lyrics. Critics called the albums contemporary classics.
Last week, seven years after his last record, Allen released a collection of songs that's already being celebrated as the spiritual successor to his earlier standouts. It’s an album with a curious title: Just like Moby Dick.
Allen says he had a working title for the album, but then he was recording “Sailin' on Through” and ad-libbed “just like Moby Dick” at the end of the song.
“That resonated, I think, with the whole record,” Allen says. “I changed the sequences of the songs and it built a throughline and it became one thing, which is what I always try to get a record to do.”
Allen is an artist in many senses of the word. In addition to being a musician, he is also a sculptor. Before his death in 2016, fellow songwriter Guy Clark asked Allen to use his ashes in a piece.
Before he died, Allen says, this friend became obsessed with a crow’s nest made of barbed wire he had seen at the American Windmill Museum in Lubbock.
“Every time I talked to him the last three or four years of his life, he would bring up that nest,” Allen says. “It seemed to me he was talking about a lot more than these crows. What he was talking about really was what was happening to him, and so I just felt the need to make a big bronze crow. When the bronze was [in a] molten state, I poured some of the ashes in it. So the whole body is made out of ashes, and I opened it up and put the rest inside and sealed it.”
Allen donated the sculpture to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos.
Written by Morgan Kuehler.
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