Some sort of palsy?

I'm all for girls mining!

doesnt alter the fact that Ms Merritt has a lovely voice and written some top tunes.

of a very rainy sunday afternoon in Cornbury this year.

says he, having just invested a small fortune in Jackie DeShannon's back catalogue.

I will confess, however, that I'd always rather have an original than an imitator.

So the question really should be, do these girls that we're up to armpits in at the moment bring anything new to the table?

I loved a lot of trendy-folkie-young-men-in-beards but have just gotten worn out with them all. I am struggling a bit with Fleet Foxes for this reason - more to admire than love - and I just want people to plug in and turn it up!

Having said all that, the master (Conor Oberst) is back and I can't wait for his CD to arrive.

there are probably more shy waifs strumming acoustic guitars in 2008 (and making a living from it) than there ever were in the early 70s.

she's great, leave her alone.

Shurely shome mishtake: she ain't none o' that. Check out her 2nd LP, the George Drakoulias produced Tambourine. Reasonably raucous brass tinged country soul rock. 1st and 3rd not bad, but Tambourine is simply marvellous. OK, this is a video rather than live, but I'd put her up there with Shelby Lynne.

In the seventies you had to sort the wheat from the chaff. In the 70's you had Joni, Nyro, Judy Collins (a sublime interpreter rather than a songwriter, witness her trilogy "In My Life", "Wildflowers", "Who Knows Where the Time Goes"),Sandy Denny,Carole King, Judee Sill etc., but really this was the cream of the crop leaving many by the wayside.

Today you have got the brilliance of Shelby Lynne, Tift, still Emmylou after all these years, kd Lang, Joan as Policewoman, Laura Veirs, Jane Siberry, Kathryn Williams, Kate Rusby, Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards and Eliza Carthy to name but a few who are all damn fine songwriters. In fact you easily could make an argument that there are many more decent writers around today than there were in the 70's heyday.

The cream as always will rise to the top!!

The New York Times comment is simply bollocks. Nails it? If the writer had any clue s/he would have at least referenced Dusty Springfield for Album No 2 Tambourine and clearly has no reference for album No 3 Another Country.
She may not be original in the sense that she's a woman writing and singing songs on guitar and piano. What do you suggest for originality Andrew, Swanee Whistle as lead instrument? Or is she supposed to give up because although she's got something to to say it's in a milieu in which others have already trod and she fails to mine a new seam of music? Like Radiohead?
Anyway here's Linda. No its Carole...

...when the chaps are just as bad?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Americans don't do humo(u)r in music; this is, after all, the nation that gave us Loudon Wainwright III, Chuck Berry, Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, Frank Zappa, George Jones and many more. Even Bruce can rise to the occasion – Pilgrim in the Temple of Love, anyone?

Possibly it's a generational thing but I've just about had it with the current crop, especially the vaguely Southern-sounding whiners which seems to be most of them (thanks a bunch, Stipe – see what you started?) It's also the main reason I can rarely get worked up about the Word CDs, which carry a disproportionate volume of this kind of stuff.

Enough earnest – at least entertain me with your pain. Is that too much to ask?

...the fallout of the music industry’s adherence to a strategy last pursued by the Common Agricultural Policy, in which subsidies offered to farmers resulted in production that outstripped demand, leading to the formation of grain and butter mountains.

The Nu-Folk Forest (actually a warehouse just outside Brussels) houses the overspill of a program which saw record companies offered financial incentives by the EU to record albums by waifish women with quirky fashion sense, who wrote folksy songs that sounded a bit like Mushaboom by Feist.

In addition, tariffs were levied on other genres of music, with strict quotas limiting the number of hours of heavy metal that could be recorded each year.

...whether the journalist in question was actually thinking about the right artist. I used to muddle Tift Merritt with Mindy Smith for reasons I cannot quantify, perhaps because Tambourine came out at much the same time as One Moment More. Now I quite like Mindy too, but she is certainly a less robust talent than is Tift, and wispy might well fit her: yes, even trembling country and pop infused. Still good but not as good.
Or was he thinking the trembly "not the trembling kind" Laura Cantrell? Again, fine stuff, but not for all.

The current issue of US music magazine Paste has an advert for Tift's latest album Another Country. It contains this quote from Emmylou Harris:
"I first heard Tift Merritt in a small club. She stood out like a diamond in a coal patch and everyone there knew she carried a promise of great things to come. She has more than fulfilled that promise, especially on Another Country".
So who do think is more likely to have 'nailed it' - some knob from the New York Times or Emmylou?