P.O. Box 1235
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA
Phone: 919.688.9969 x125
www.mergerecords.com
International Sales Contact Kraegan Graves: [email protected]
Track Listing:
SIDE A:
1. Mrs. Merritt
2. Tom Merritt
3. Elmer Karr
4. Ollie McGee
5. Fletcher McGee
6. Julia Miller
7. Willard Fuke
8. Elizabeth Childers
9. A.D. Blood
SIDE B:
10. Oscar Hummel
11. Nellie Clark
12. Johnnie Sayre
13. Dora Williams
14. Reuben Pantier
15. Emily Sparks
16. Amanda Barker
17. The Hill
18. William + Emily
On the 100th anniversary of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology,
Merge is reissuing the epic it inspired: Richard Buckner’s The Hill.
MRG 356
Richard Buckner
The Hill
(remastered reissue)
LP
CD
10 July2015
vinyl is non-returnable
Box Lot: CD 30 / LP 25
LP UPC: 673855035611
CD UPC: 673855035628
Format: CD 4-panel digipak with folder / LP is chipboard jacket + 12x12 insert
File Under: Alternative
Export:
World excluding North America, The Hill started in 1996 in The Ranch Olancha Motel, a dusty place near the
mouth of Death Valley, California. Buckner, who was en route to Tucson,
Arizona, to record what would become Devotion & Doubt, stayed a week in a
room with no phone, no television, carrying his guitar, a four-track recorder,
and a copy of Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. He tinkered with a few of the
book’s poems, put them on a cassette, and forgot about it until an acquaintance
discovered it in his truck four years later. Beset with writer’s block and looking
for a distraction, Buckner would find in the tape the spur he needed.
Recorded in Edmonton, Alberta, and Tucson, The Hill converts Spoon River
poems to music. Each page of Spoon River Anthology reads as a final, postmortem dictum of a different deceased resident—more than 250 of them
now passed—in the fictional Midwestern town of Spoon River. The epitaphs
are important for Buckner because, in death, these people strip the breathing
city of its dishonesty. Each one, from Reuben Pantier to Elizabeth Childers to
Oscar Hummel, is no longer concerned with whispers and pointed fingers that
are often the consequence of a life laid bare for all to see. They’re unleashing
themselves, without fallacy or attachment.
Buckner chooses 18 of these confessions, each given a unique rendering.
Backed by Calexico’s Joey Burns and John Convertino and surveyed with
Buckner’s unflagging vocal desperation, Spoon River’s residents come back to
life. Like so much of his career, Buckner disappeared into Spoon River and
returns to us with its story.