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Count Richard Buckner In On This One: Boondocks USA

This week, singer/songwriter Richard Buckner releases Our Blood (Merge), his first new music since 2006’s Meadow. The nine-track LP was recorded by Buckner at his upstate New York home studio with pedal-steel guitarist Buddy Cage (New Riders Of The Purple Sage) and drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth). Buckner kicks off a co-headlining tour with labelmate David Kilgour (the Clean) on August 16 in Los Angeles. In the meantime, Buckner will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Buckner: Boondocks USA is a place to pull over when driving through Iowa. All I’ve used of it is a gas station and a motel/lounge. There is an actual town called Williams around there, but I haven’t seen it. Or maybe I was in it and didn’t realize it. The rooms at the motel are cheap, simple affairs. At each end of the single, long common hallway are two doors. One leads to the outside world. The other leads to a small lounge where, last time I was there, the drinkers were gulping down things they called “slushies” and watching a show on circus mishaps. Also that night, a trucker, a woman somewhere between 35 and 60 years old, recited the rules of the road, then tried to get my travelling partner to leave the lounge and go back to her truck-bunker/sleeper-cab. I encouraged him, but he didn’t follow through.

Video after the jump.