Video Premiere: Wes Tirey – Work 5

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“…Lost cowboy psych folk, maybe. Concrete cowboy poetry with a tinge of old weird Americana. Ominous lo fi 70s Western soundtrack.”

Today, American songwriter, guitarist and poet Wes Tirey releases his new album, Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid, on the excellent Sun Cru label (Order here). Described in these pages as an underground cult artist working within the realm of Americana, for his latest offering, Tirey set to music poems from literary icon Michael Ondaatje’s experimental 1970 novel in verse, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. To celebrate, we have a new video from Tirey for ‘Work 5’, for which he shared the following poem:

Us southpaws never asked for a blessing or a curse, 

we just settled right in—

Sometimes an older man has to tell a younger man’s story;

since I’m in the middle I get to sing the song—

Some things roll off the tongue in a cowboy kind of way: catching flies with my left hand, Jack of Diamonds was a hard card to play, Death don’t have no mercy in this land—

—WMT—

As well as being available digitally, the album is also being released on Sand Gold 160-gram vinyl, a limited edition of 250. It spins at 45 RPM for maximum fidelity, preserving the distinct “past era” sound achieved by Wes Tirey when recording directly to tape. The vinyl jacket is full-color 24 pt. high-quality SBS board. Nathaniel Russell did the artwork for the cover and the hand lettering on the jacket and centre labels. Read the notes and insights from musician Blaine Todd and Sun Cru’s Josh Collins below.

“We still can’t seem to agree on ‘the Kid.’ Was he deserving of our sympathy? An iconoclastic rascal bucking the system on behalf of you and me? Or rather, a ruthless opportunist whose outsized ego demanded such accommodation as only the West could provide. While folklorists and historians debate over how to faithfully reassemble the shards of that mirror, some — Michael Ondaatje namely — prefer the shivered banquet peppering the dust like buckshot.

“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid — Ondaatje’s experimental novel of 1970 — reflects in poem, prose, and photographs such fragments passed down and disfigured through our collective memory and desire. And now these left-handed poems have reached the left-handed guitar of songwriter Wes Tirey, whose unadorned treatment of Ondaatje’s work adds even greater dimension to the antihero of our fevered dreams.

“How does it begin, Wes? Fittingly, with an inventory of the dead. From that sum, a cherry-picked succession of pointillistic poems reveal little of the complete picture lest you step back. Tirey’s world-weary voice is a grit and gravel foil for affecting six-string legerdemain. He lopes and canters across Ondaatje’s mercurial landscape like a cloud across the sun. A little rain and the brilliance that follows.

“There is cinema in this music: Leonard Cohen announcing McCabe’s entrance to the town of Presbyterian Church, say — but time has obfuscated character and setting and so, unsure, we project back onto the mirror in search of detail. Wes, content, approaches without such need. What he sees there in the dust is beautiful and violent. And like Ondaatje, he revels in that sublimity without further need for answers. Best let the pieces lie for us seekers searching in the dust for clues.”

— Blaine Todd

“There’s a special dynamic about Wes Tirey Sings Selected Works of Billy the Kid. In one bold gesture, it features songs, spoken word, and instrumentals. The texture of the sound seems transported from another era. Any song here could be planted right in the middle of the Harry Smith Anthology and no one would bat an eye. Or if they did bat an eye, their ears would perk with joy. How to categorize this? Lost cowboy psych folk, maybe. Concrete cowboy poetry with a tinge of old weird Americana. Ominous lo fi 70s Western soundtrack. Wes Tirey knows his way around these parts. The histories and characters. The raw materials of poetry and how to tell a story. All of which is probably why he was drawn to Michael Ondaatje’s book in the first place. And to give Ondaatje’s language this specific musical treatment, in our humble opinion, is visionary. We are honored to present this strange and beautiful melding of arts.”

— Josh Collins / Sun Cru