The name Rick Moody will be familiar to anyone who keeps current with American writing. He’s the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and his lauded 1994 novel The Ice Storm was filmed by director Ang Lee. Moody is hanging around the MAGNET shop this week mostly because of his side job as one-quarter of the Wingdale Community Singers, a remarkable collection of writers, musicians and artists of varying stripes. Once pegged as an “urban folk” group that wrote old-timey songs about modern topics such as cross-dressers and funky Brooklyn culture, the Wingdales just released their second album, Spirit Duplicator, on the Scarlet Shame label. In addition to his writing and recording projects, Moody is guest editing magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our Q&A with him.
Moody: There are many Skip James “albums” these days, though he never really made such a thing himself. This is a 2005 anthology of his very early recordings both on guitar and piano. To my way of thinking, he is the finest guitar player who ever lived, and one of the most affecting singers, too. James leaves the blue in the blues. Whereas a lot of acoustic blues traffics in the idiom but is indirect about summoning the despair, James is all about the despair. When he says hard time, he means hard time. When he says killin’ floor, he means killin’ floor. Video after the jump.
