Red House Painters Tonight

I’m listening to Red House Painters Retrospective. It’s a great album—actually it’s a double disc collection; the second disc is filled with various demos and rare takes.

And yet as I sit here listening to the music I wonder if the Retrospective is really quite as good as their 1993 self-titled album Red House Painters. It always seemed to me that the 14 tracks on this CD were along a story arc. The songs hung together well, and together were greater than the individual parts. Red House Painters are something of a guilty pleasure for me. I usually don’t play their music when other people are around—they’re a little bit too much down the road of introspection for the pleasure of company in my opinion. It’s the kind of music I listen to on my own, when I’m in the house alone. There are many, many great songs on that album, but I think if I had to chose a favorite I would go with either “Down Through” or maybe “Rollercoaster” even though that’s one of their more played songs. This line in “Down Through” always gets me: We’ll have a house/on the shore/that showers my soul./Washes away the violence/that runs in my blood.