On the North Carolina side of the Southern Appalachians, the land still retains its secrets. It’s a place of paradoxes, where poverty is handed down from one hardscrabble generation to the next in towns passed over by the New South progress that gives a city like Asheville its bourgeois charm. It’s a resilient pocket of wilderness where a small band of Cherokee once disappeared into the misty hollers to wait out the white man’s ire, back in the deep woods where old growth timber blocks out the sunlight and compass needles sometimes spin crazily and the trappings of civilization give way to things beyond human understanding.
With the release of his 13th studio album, Come Hell or High Water, singer-songwriter Malcolm Holcombe is a both a part of and apart from those Blue Ridge hills, a Southern folk golem brought to life by the deeper mysteries that give these hills so much of their folklore.
His songs belong in the same Western North Carolina echelon of mysteries like the Brown Mountain Lights or the ghostly apparitions along Helen’s Bridge or the phantom choir of Roan Mountain — things that surpass conventional explanation but summon forth a combination of awe and primal longing, an ache to understand the great questions of the human condition.
Malcolm may not have the answers to those questions, but his songs are drawn from the same waters that begin as a trickle in the deep woods: wild, untamed, filled with the whispers and roars of all the mysteries and wonders those hills contain. And like the region’s otherworldly manifestations, they come from a place that transcends easy understanding, even by their creator.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the music video for “New Damnation Alley”, a song that finds Iris DeMent’s harmonies sweetening an otherwise bleak outlook – “Feelin’ my age, feelin’ cynical and wrong, too scared to believe I belong anymore.” With the video we get a candid black and white look at an acoustic performance that is accentuated with rootsy mandolin. This is the kind of song that makes you think about the life you live and the world that swirls in all its chaos around you. This is a folk song with a groove, but mostly it speaks to our troubled times when hate is spewed from the mouths of so-called politicians and the class divide grows wider by the day.
Malcolm says of the song, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
WATCH:
Tour Dates:
July 26 — Stan Rogers Folk Festival — Canso, Canada
July 30 — Evergreen Theatre — Margaretsville, Canada
August 8 — Soulshine Farm Music Festival — Green Mountain, NC
August 22 — Songs By the Brook — Alcoa, TN
August 29 — Micaville Music — Burnsville, NC
September 5 — Micaville Music — Burnsville, NC
September 12 — 3rd & Lindsley — Nashville, TN — AmericanaFest
September 27 — Sundilia Concert Series — Auburn, AL
September 28 — The Listening Room — Mobile, AL
October 5 — Coopers’s House — Columbia, MD
October 19 — Hopmonk Tavern — Novato, CA
October 23 — Tales From the Tavern — Santa Ynez, CA
October 26 — The Fret House — Covina, CA
December 13 — Annual Hometown Holiday Show — Black Mountain, NC
