Now it’s a quiet campfire contemplation, no longer meant to sweep you up but to drift alongside you. Originally based on works of Bach, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in Reeder’s hands is far removed from the church-organ sound of Procul Harum, and even the lyrics sound less disoriented. Lots of YouTube folks have covered Reeder’s songs he’s not done so many himself, but the ones he’s done, like his originals, deserve to be heard. But as he also said, “there are some things you can’t paint,” and when he felt the need to express those things, he did so through song. Indeed he is, his art appearing in galleries in his home country of Germany and around the world. Reeder’s only made three albums, mostly because it’s not his primary vocation: “I’m not a musician I’m a painter,” he explained. As NPR said, “you’ll want to play it because it’ll ring true inside you, not because it’s gratuitously vulgar.” It was the (NSFW) “Work Song” that made me a fan for life it’s a song with one line repeated over and over, to perfection and beyond. The songs are brief, thoughtful, humorous, and direct – profanity is sprinkled throughout in a way that somehow manages to be organic and not crude. His first album, Dan Reeder, was as one-man-show and homemade as you can get – he wrote it, played it, recorded and engineered it, did the artwork, did all the harmonies, and even made his own instruments. Oh Boy is an indie label founded by John Prine, who signed Reeder after hearing his demo cassette. The first Dan Reeder song I heard was his meditation on death, “Maybe,” featured on an Oh Boy Records CD sampler.
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