“Blue and Wonder” - performed live by Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard (Richard Buckner cover)
Gibbard’s lovely cover of this fantastic song by Richard Buckner makes me want to check out more of Buckner’s catalog.
Merge Records has just reissued three of Buckner’s early albums, which were out of print. You can stream the albums at Merge, and listen to Buckner’s version of “Blue and Wonder” off his acclaimed debut album “Bloomed” here.
“Bloomed was recorded in Lubbock, TX with Lloyd Maines. Spin Magazine described Buckner as “equal parts Bay Area bohemian and dust bowl traditionalist” and named Bloomed one of their best albums of 1995.” -Merge Records
“In 1994, Buckner made his solo debut as a mysteriously bent country musician. At the time, he was living in San Francisco and getting nowhere with his band, the Doubters. He decamped for Lubbock, Tex., to record Bloomed with Lloyd Maines. A sense of urgency simply to get the songs out attends the album’s loose, impassioned performances and pithy arrangements— most highlight vocals and acoustic guitar, sometimes with minimal percussion, electric guitar, or strings. In some ways, it’s a traditional outsider-country record in the lineage of Townes Van Zandt. Buckner’s voice is all honey and oak, his guitar style elaborately twanging, his constant subject matter heartache. The past tense of the title is not rhetorical: He spins webs of memories, confessions, and creeds around the moment the bloom came off.
But already, there are signs that Buckner is not your average country singer. His phrasing is distinctly off-kilter, speeding up and slowing down, getting louder and softer, pinching and soaring according to the cadence of inspiration.” -P4K
Richard Buckner on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” (2007)
