Lori Carson-7 albums (Where it Goes, Stars, Everything I Touch, Shelter etc) EAC FLAC

Here are seven albums feature Lori Carson; six of them are solo, while the remaining is an endeavor with The Golden Palominos. Again, these are all disks in my own collection, and are not dumps from elsewhere. The Everything I Touch...album has been autographed (details beneath). All albums contain full scans of artwork and liner notes as well as a .log file showing zero errors with EAC ripping.

Solo albums:

Shelter (1990)
Lori Carson’s songs convey the pain of abandonment and lonely personal struggle in unsparing detail. Her writing is clear and direct, swept to heart by her ability to enter her sad, often luckless characters. That she sings like she’s haunted, even a ghost herself, makes her debut album, Shelter, all the more poignant.
With her whispery chirp of a voice and her acoustic guitar, Carson has been making the rounds of New York’s folk clubs for a couple of years. But she’s also had her eyes on the streets. The title track’s tale of desertion and spoiled innocence floats in on wispy strains of concertina, synthesizer and Morricone guitar, slowly building until its homeless narrator is left riding the subway in the wee hours, consoling her two listless children. “Which Way Be Broadway” is equally devastating: A girl runs away from her Minnesota home to become a dancer and ends up turning tricks from a wintry New York sidewalk, pining for the warmth of the past, yet so gripped by the city’s allure that she can’t turn back.
Not that Carson’s record is utterly joyless. “Stand on Your Own,” with its pedal-steel country setting, is an affirmation of personal resolve; “Imagine Love” is a warmly sentimental ballad to which Gregg Allman lends his growling-bear voice; “Pretty Girls” culminates with its protagonist’s decision to finally leave her philandering lover. There’s also warmth in producer Hal Willner’s arrangements. Willner protects Carson’s fragile voice by drawing on sympathetic players like guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Michael Blair (accomplices of Tom Waits’s and Elvis Costello’s) and lightly coloring her songs with cello, French horn, harp and flute.
Carson does spend much of her time singing of unhappy endings. But if she can continue to create songs as emotionally resonant as those on Shelter, this album may represent a promising new beginning.

Where It Goes (1995)
One of my top five albums from the 1990s. I cannot say how many hundreds of times I may have listened to this in its entirety. If you listen to only one album of this set, make sure it is this one. Here is a RS review.
How can you mend a broken heart?” Who hasn’t asked that question? Opinions vary – booze, drugs, meaningless sex or just shut up and surf out the inevitable post-breakup depression, hoping the spiral ends up in some better place. On the basis of Where It Goes, Lori Carson’s second solo album (and her first since she joined the Golden Palominos), she has tried them all and still hasn’t found the answer. But her search makes for compelling listening.
This is an intimate late-night album of amatory post-mortems, with elegant ballads and art songs surveying the debris with a sharp, unforgiving eye. “I know the odds are against us/We know how to fuck it up/We do it so well,” she sings on “Petal.” Her breathy soprano, cool, throaty and seductive, seems to move back and forth between concrete and air, innocence and knowingness.
Carson’s erotic despair and sophisticated backing (mostly Golden Palomino veterans) call up images of the American Music Club fronted by Joni Mitchell. The arrangements, with their string and ambient guitar ornamentation, and Anton Fier’s atmospheric production cushion the songs in an opiate haze. It’s a lush, sympathetic sound, but it can wear over the course of an entire album. You wish that for at least one song, Carson and the band would break through and clear the air.
But if you are willing to give yourself over to her passionate melancholy, Lori Carson offers a modern take on the singer/songwriter confessional, cloaked in a shroud of mystery. (RS 708)STEVE MIRKIN, Rolling Stone

Everything I Touch Runs Wild (1996)

After I discovered ‘Where It Goes’, I was so moved by this album to try to track down Lori-which back then wasn’t difficult to do. I even ended up with her personal e-mail address and on a couple occasions even swapped a few AOL Instant Messages. At the time she was working on this album, and she was kind enough to send me an autographed, advance copy. I have included scans of her autograph on the liner notes.
Review as follows
Lori recorded “Everything I Touch” in her 11th Street apartment. It made many top ten lists nationally in 1997. “Snow Come Down” was featured in Waking the Dead.
On her third solo effort, Everything I Touch Runs Wild, the underrated singer/songwriter Lori Carson offers her barest, most personal compositions yet. One reason for this direction was due in part to recording the entire album in her own apartment, as well as to Carson producing it herself. By combining her soothing, gentle vocals with an acoustic backing, the results are often both irresistibly sweet and engaging. Her voice can be compared at times to Sarah McLachlan’s, especially on the album’s opener, “Something’s Got Me” (which is also present in an album-closing “original version”). Simplicity and economy are stressed throughout, with the instruments (piano, clean guitar, accordion, etc.) leaving plenty of room to be filled by Carson’s vocals, such as on the track “Make a Little Luck.” The picture of a calm winter landscape is painted convincingly on “Snow Come Down,” while “Fade” creates a feeling of melancholia. Included on initial pressings of Everything I Touch Runs Wild is a bonus second disc of remixes, which contains radical electronic makeovers of “Something’s Got Me” (three separate versions) and “I Saw the Light.” ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide

Stars (1999)
Stars was produced in Seattle and New York City with Layng Martine lll and Joe Ferla. It was Lori’s last release for Restless Records. “Take Your Time” was featured in a number of films and TV shows.
Lori Carson’s fourth album Stars may not be as consistently compelling as its immediate predecessor, the sublime Everything I Touch Runs Wild, but that’s not to say that it’s a bad record. It’s quite good, actually, and her songcraft continues to improve; it’s subtle, yet sturdy work. The main problem is that the production doesn’t pull the listener into the album, but Carson’s songs and performance are passionate enough that they become quite gripping once you get past the surface. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

House in the Weeds (2001)
Self-released record of demos. Only two thousand copies were made. The song “Your Side” was featured in the film Blue Car.
Lori Carson has always approached her music from the standpoint of telling the truth as she sees and hears it at the moment. No matter how that music has subsequently been judged either by critics, the public, or the artist herself, this fundamental element has been consistent. Carson has never made music in a vacuum it’s true, but neither has she made music with an ear or an eye for the marketplace. Hers has been the long, lonely road of listening to the human heart as it encounters, accepts, and learns to live from its brokenness; she reflects that in various nuances, styles, and in a singular elegance that is graceful and eloquent no matter how elusive or powerful the emotional, mental, or spiritual state she is trying to give voice to. House in the Weeds is a thoroughly homemade affair; it’s a set of demos and first takes that have become a record that’s not even for sale apart from her website — and may not even be repressed once it has sold out of its initial print run. But Carson’s vision has never been clearer or unfettered in its view that life and love are indeed messy, and that’s why they are so precious. This gorgeous record can be praised in the same way one can praise a razor–or the fineness of its slash. The softness here, the heartbreaking tenderness and acceptance in the grain of her voice are given weight by quietly shimmering guitars and the minimal intrusion of percussion, basslines, or swelling keyboards. This music is imperfectly performed; it was recorded for the sake of the immediacy of emotional and poetic accuracy. It’s wonderfully imbalanced; it doesn’t feel mixed and certainly not mastered. There are ambient sounds that haunt its close spaces: birds, the sound of wood scraping on a floor, perhaps a chair, singing that foregoes any notion but approximate pitch, and the sound of guitar strings squeaking under slippery fingers. On these ten songs, Carson discusses the tentative hope that happiness, a fleeting gamble anyway, may indeed be present every day if only for a few moments. She acknowledges the important part brokenness plays in the making of a life, and especially in the life that makes art and a life with someone. On “Dream of the Oceans” she speaks of dreaming as both an abstract reality and the very thing that is missing, the thing that informs the subtler actions in life and the very thing that allows people to risk their hearts on the long shot. There is no point in discussing the music here, or the kinds of songs that appear here. These are all love songs, they are all heart songs, if fact, these songs are more like kisses, brief as snapshots: they’re eternal, but barely there. Their fragile beauty is nonetheless tensile, marvelous, full of the wonder of looking through the window and knowing that the world is still there, waiting for everyone to get up and take it in. On the last track the most profound truth is spoken, though it may have passed Carson by in the recording process. In the refrain of the last track, she sings repeatedly, “I’m always on your side.” But it isn’t her voice or the voice of the song’s protagonist (who may be one and the same, but the jury’s out there) that is speaking. The voice that speaks though Carson’s instrument is that of the heart speaking back to Carson, echoing its sentiment as if in prayer. The music here on House in the Weeds, simple as it is, defies categorization; it isn’t any specific kind of music as in rock or folk or pop, but is a music made up of all of those and more, and exists as none of them in any given moment. It is one that instructs morally, emotionally, and spiritually, simply because it doesn’t desire to, it just reports — it takes things in and allows them the freedom of a poetic, gentle utterance that carries in its subtle colors, textures, and happenstance atmospherics the transference of feeling and psychological notions so big, so vast, and so sensual in what they communicate that all they can do is whisper. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

The Finest Thing (2004)
First released by Meta Records in 2004, The Finest Thing was re-released in late 2005 by One Little Indian. It was featured by NPR in 2006. The song “She Can’t Decide” appeared in the film Childless in 2007.
The Finest Thing is Lori Carson’s first new recording in three years. This marks the first time Carson has written an album as a series of connected songs, or, as she calls them, “meditations.” One can sense the interior yet open focuses of the music on the sleeve by conceptual artist Russell Mills. Blues and earth tones hover in a faded landscape underscored by lovers kissing in repose on the front cover, with a solitary figure reclining in the sheets on the back. These sonic, song-form meditations are imagistic, full of limpid, languid recollections from life that are etched deeply into emotional memory, but are reportable in only the most poetic of observational terms because of the limitations of words. Carson uses prominent acoustic and spare electric guitars, shimmering keyboards, a muted trumpet, and layers of voices (her own and those of Ayako Hirakata). Some of these voices impart words, some wordlessly impart the pervasive sense of contemplative traveling through love, memory, people, places, things, events, landmarks — both spiritual and physical — and time itself as an elemental and subjective construct in space that breathes, opens, dissolves, and re-emerges as transformation. On the title track, Carson sketches the feeling of being washed clean by the lover’s presence: “When I saw my love, not long ago/It was like breathing air/After being without it, it was like breathing/After being so long without it.” Scott Tweedie’s reedy, rounded trumpet enters amid the piano and guitars, winding its way through the next few lines: “Quick as you wish you could make it last/It goes that fast/You can’t stop it, you can’t even slow it down. Being in his arms is the finest thing/Being in his arms, in his company/was the finest thing.” As the next verse flutters down into the softness, the notion of passage becomes more pronounced: “You hold on to summer, how quickly it goes/The sweet and salty air, everything about it/The sweet and salty air, you love everything about it/Quick as you wish you could make it last, it goes that fast….” As the instruments begin to commingle and entwine in the center of the mix, Carson’s small truth becomes a looming one: that love, like summer, passes and what’s left is the memory — physical, emotional, spiritual — of the “finest thing.” This could be a devastating truth if it weren’t so tender and willing, offered without bitterness or regret. The next two pieces, “She Can’t Decide,” and the beginning of “Long Walk” become jump-off points for the rest of the set. These pieces offer deeper, moodier reflections but are carried by voices offering impressions rather than words, they croon “la la la” with grace in the center of a lush yet spare mix that brings the listener down into the silence where the heart speaks in untranslatable syllables. “Hold Onto the Sun,” is rootsier, simpler, held fast by guitars and keyboards, in staccato phrasing, a notion of being in flux without giving in to the temptation to escape. This is a testament of brokenness that desires to hang on to what is fleeting: wholeness, safety, and certainty. Rather than delving into the harrowing feelings themselves, it’s an admonition and affirmation of acceptance and the willingness to embrace what comes next even if its face cannot yet be glimpsed. As two longish pieces of hovering voices slip through the skeletal instrumentation on “Glimmer” and “Grey World,” the listener embraces the solitude of formlessness and waiting before tentatively emerging on the beautifully vulnerable “Coney Island Ride,” accompanied by a 12-string and ghostly sounds that could be the traces of a past lived through, a present not quite revealed, or a foreseeable future whispering intentions difficult to discern. What emerges on the return of “Long Walk” is an unspecific, nearly formless presence that moves up ghost-like from the well of silence and into the heart of the listener. This is subtle yet gorgeous work by an artist who has continually charted the depths and emerges as an instructive, affirmative font of gentleness, compassion, and even wisdom, in allowing the past’s pains and pleasures to open onto the wondrous quiet of the present. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

With the Golden Palominos

Pure (1994)
If you live in New York, then chances are good that either you or someone you know has once been the Golden Palominos' singer. With Pure it was Lori Carson's turn, and she was just what this occasionally brilliant but frequently unfocused band needed. This is probably the Palominos' first great album (unless you count the group's brilliantly abrasive debut). What's the difference this time? Easy: focus, cogency, and discipline. Also funky, up-to-the-minute beats percolating under Carson's diaphanous vocals and supporting her intelligent (if sometimes overly precious) lyrics. Notice how her unbelievably sexy whisper on "Heaven" rubs up against Bill Laswell's ironclad bass; try not to notice the lyrics on "No Skin" ("This dark and secret crime/Cruelty masked as something kind"), and instead luxuriate in the dark and lovely atmospherics. Very, very nice.