October in the Railroad Earth

Tom Russell is perhaps the only living American songwriter who could get away with describing his album as "Jack Kerouac meets Johnny Cash...in Bakersfield." It may read like conceit, but his work over the last 45 years has earned him that claim. Russell is a renaissance man: He writes songs that have been covered by Cash, Ian Tyson, Doug Sahm, Iris DeMent, and more; he is also a fine painter, poet, essayist, and author. For over five decades his work has documented an all-but-forgotten North America -- from Mexico to the Northwest Territories -- through cultural and historical human archetypes, landscapes, events, and roads. The title derives from a long, rambling prose entry by Jack Kerouac that appeared in the Evergreen Review in 1957 recounting his experiences as a "student brakeman" on the Southern Pacific Railroad. It's fitting; these songs are rooted in endless travel, loneliness, strange encounters, tragedy, and the lives of hard-bitten, eternally restless angels. Assisting Rus