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: Most fans of the Incredible String Band can’t be bothered to search out the solo material by its participants, excepting maybe Mike Herron’s first solo album, or perhaps one of those Robin Williamson And His Merry Men albums from the mid-’70s. 2006’s The Iron Stone is recent (what heresy), and in it Williamson recreates some of what made him great, which is to say an improvised surface, and a sense that everyone is involved in co-creating the result. Maybe his voice is not what it was (he has fallen from tenor to baritone), maybe he’s even less rock and folk-oriented than he was back in the day. But he maintains a sure sense of great poetry and of the uncanny material that the folkloric can still summon up in us. This album actually gives me the chills in spots, it’s so possessed of the vanished world and its arcana. Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izAug82fmII
