Dickison started playing guitar when he was 13, and in highschool, he starred with the local bands Edward Bugg and The Cubes.  “Every time we played a show I felt like Jimmy Page,” Dickison remembers, “I’d say, more than anything, those bands made me realize how much fun it was to play music that people enjoyed and would come to hear.”  Dickison, now a sophomore at New St. Andrew’s, says that “right now, I’d like to just continue writing songs and playing them for and with my friends in Moscow and this area. We’ll see what happens after college, but right now I just want to keep playing locally.”  Dickison is playing tonight with Richard Buckner  at Mikey’s Gyros at 9 p.m. and you should definitely be there for the friendly vibe.  

Dickison’s roles as musician and writer, he says, are “definitely intertwined;” as such, we’ll let him speak for himself. 

Do you think of yourself as a musician or a writer first?

“I just read about these trees today that live in the rainforest and eat other trees. The seeds start high up in a bigger tree and send down little roots to the ground. Then the seed sends more roots up to where the sunlight is. Eventually, the big tree is completely covered in roots that are running up and down its trunk. The roots get bigger and bigger, and eventually form a trunk around the first tree. The first tree is strangled to death and rots inside the trunk of the new one. It’s the same way with music and writing.”

Hmm, any comments on Billy Collins?

“He’s been my favorite poet for a long time. I think he’s one of those people that is really interested in life and the world around him. He can see connections between things that have always been there, but once he points it out you see the world in a totally new light.  He’s the best.”

Who is your hero?

“Josh Ritter has definitely inspired me more than any other songwriter, and more recently, Super XX Man. I think [that] both of them, in different ways, realize the importance and power that lyrics and poetry wield. They’re both poets in their own right.  Ritter, especially, has a gift with words that I haven’t seen in a lot of other writers.  I feel like I can read his lyrics on their own and they still convey a ton of meaning even apart from the rest of the song.”

What are you trying to accomplish with your music?

“A lot of things, but probably the biggest one is that I want people to become more interested in everything after hearing one of my songs. I think that music is one of the most powerful tools for communicating that we have, and I think that the world and the stories it contains are so incredible that anything that is really good and beautiful should just inspire us to want to know more about creation, and, ultimately, about God.  Everything is connected, and so a good song should be able to bring up images and connotations and stories from a bunch of different places- people that you love, other songs, beautiful places, good books, good food, good smells. Music is so fundamental to humanity that I feel like a good song can communicate and bring together all the different blessings that a human can enjoy. There’s alot more to that, but I’ll stick with that answer for now.” 

Oooh, Moscow adventures – anything to say about MOSCOW?  

“Hahaha. I think in a small town you’re forced to be a lot more creative about having fun.  It’s funny how many things there are to climb here, too. I’m convinced [that] I found Josh Ritter’s initials spray painted on an old building here in town. I think he and his friends did a lot of the same things my friends do, only before us.  There’s definitely been some songs inspired by silos.” 

So, hopes, dreams?

“Definitely.  Lots of both.  I’m planning on traveling to as many places as I can, guitar in tow if possible. That’s a big hope. I want to meet a lot of the musicians that I love- Josh Ritter, Super XX Man, M. Ward, etc., and I’d like to see all of the places that I’ve read about, ever.

Kicking off Stereopathic’s busy week, tonight at Mikey’s we present the brilliant and intense Richard Buckner, touring in support of Merge’s recent digital reissues of three of his fine and criminally out-of-print records: Bloomed, The Hill, and Impasse. Sam Dickison and a few friends will open; door at 9, and ten American dollars gets you in.

”
Richard Buckner: Polly Waltz (from 1997′s Devotion + Doubt) . . .

Then, Friday at the American Legion Cabin, Seattle’s Sera Cahoone will bring us her elegant and beautifully-arranged country-folk-rock, playing songs off her self-released, eponymous debut record from 2006 and 2008′s superb Only as the Day is Long. Spokane’s Karli Fairbanks and Bluesy Betsy Olson opens; door at 8, eight dollars gets you in, and three dollars puts a pint of Mirror Pond Ale in your hand.

”
Sera Cahoone: You Might As Well (from 2008′s Only as the Day is Long) . . .

Capping off the week, this Saturday back at Mikey’s, Portland’s Weinland bring their ornate and melancholic indie folk to Moscow, touring in support of their brand-new (as of April 21st) record Breaks in the Sun, an album “committed to 2” tape amidst sleep deprivation, whiskey consumption, and trust” and released by Portland’s Badman records. Adam Shearer and company will be playing songs from Breaks and last year’s La Lamentor, and will be joined by Leonard Mynx and Audie Darling. Door at9, and eight green dollars lets you in.

”
Weinland: The Letters II (from 2009′s Breaks in the Sun) . . .

The song goes away as quickly as it arrives, like something glimpsed off the highway from the window of a bus.

Richard Buckner will be coming through town on April 28th, playing a set at Mikey’s at 8 PM with Sam Dickison opening. He’s touring in support of the digital re-issue of three fine records on Merge. Plan on being there.

Richard Buckner: Ariel Ramirez (from 1998′s Since)

Brendan really goes for the sad Americana, but has no idea how to convince you all to go for it, too. These posts are proof of that, especially the ‘no idea’ part.

Some 80 years later, Richard Buckner, as he puts it, “drove east from Bakersfield and ended up near the mouth of Death Valley at a place called The Ranch Olancha Motel  . . . traveling with a guitar, a four-track recorder and a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.” He “spent the week doodling with the poems onto a cassette” and then stuck the tape into his glove compartment, forgetting about it for several years until he came across the cassette during a bout with writer’s block. “After listening to it again, [I] thought that maybe it was the distraction I was looking for . . .  a few months later I drove back to Tucson to re-record about half of the songs in a real recording studio with Joey Burns and Johnny Convertino [of Calexico] . . . the result was The Hill. I originally released it in 2000 as a one-track recording of eighteen songs smeared into one another.”

The Hill wasn’t a massive commercial success — “half-hour song cycles based on 100-year-old poems generally don’t breach the top 40 niche” — but it was nonetheless an excellent record. Buckner’s voice and instrumentation give 18 of Masters’ epitaphs stirring and compelling settings, his longtime steeping in American folk music and his own innate personal restlessness bringing the song(s) across with a deeply sensitive and understanding performance. Half of Buckner’s selections are wordless — we hear of “Emily Sparks,” the lonely and pining schoolteacher, through an instrumental passage of guitar, fiddle, and cello; the drunken “Oscar Hummel” and the cuckolded “Tom Merritt,” on the other hand, speak to us through Buckner’s emotive and dusty baritone, his voice investing longing and desperation in the cries that brought both men to their deaths. The Hill doesn’t just find Buckner singing someone else’s poetry; this is a record of someone going deep into his source material and unearthing a new way to understand it.

The Hill has been out-of-print for many years, but Merge Records has just digitally re-issued it, with two of Buckner’s other records (1994′s Bloomed and 2002′s Impasse). Merge has made them available as high-quality (320 kbps) MP3 downloads, and at about $9 apiece, they’re more than worth the money. Speaking of worth the money, Richard Buckner is coming to Moscow touring in support of the re-issues, playing a set at Mikey’s on April 28th, 8PM.

Brendan occasionally guests on Stereopathic Sessions with Larson and Josh, and is staggered at how inarticulate his words are about the things he loves the most. He doesn’t blog, and doesn’t want to.