Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1 cover

Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1

The Dead South

Album · 2022 · DevilDuck DDUCK 094

Easy Listening for Jerks, Part 1 is a six-song covers EP by the Dead South, the string band from Regina, Saskatchewan. It was released on 4 March 2022 together with a companion EP, Part 2. The band produced and engineered the recordings, and Jimmy Nutt mixed them at the NuttHouse in Sheffield, Alabama. Six Shooter Records issued the pair in North America. DevilDuck Records of Hamburg released Part 1 in Germany as a ten-inch vinyl EP (DDUCK 094).

Nate Hilts plays guitar, Scott Pringle mandolin, Colton Crawford banjo and Danny Kenyon cello, the lineup that formed the band in 2012. Crawford was away from 2015 to 2018. These were the band’s first releases on which all four members take turns singing lead. The announcement billed the pair as “Carter Family meets Addams Family.”

Part 1 draws on older gospel, country and bluegrass repertoire: “Keep on the Sunny Side” by Ada Blenkhorn and J. Howard Entwisle, recast in a minor key; the traditional “Pallet on the Floor”; “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by Ada Habershon and Charles H. Gabriel; Earl Scruggs’s “Flint Hill Special”; Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine”; and “Matterhorn,” by Fred Burch and Mel Tillis, which the Country Gentlemen had recorded. Part 2 turned instead to the band’s pre-show playlist, with songs by the Doors, System of a Down, Cold War Kids and the Misfits.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Yahoos and Triangles (Intro) 0:34
  2. 2 People Are Strange 3:11
  3. 3 Chop Suey 3:22
  4. 4 We Used to Vacation 4:17
  5. 5 Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain 2:42
  6. 6 Saturday Night 5:24
  7. 7 96 Quite Bitter Beings 3:31
  8. 8 You Are My Sunshine alt version 3:20

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