I got this shortly after it came out in 2001 on the strength of a good review. Where? I can't remember where I was getting my music tips back then: might have been Uncut or one of those monthlies; might have been Sheffield Telegraph! The other thing was that it had been a decade since I last heard a Kristin Hersh/Throwing Muses album. I just wanted to see if she was still doing interesting stuff.
Along with Drawn from Life and Not the Tremblin' Kind and maybe three or four other albums, I took a mini-disc recording of Sunny Border Blue with me on my month long West Coast of North America tour in the late spring of that year.
It usually happens that, on a holiday like that, the music gets woven into the sense of moving through space, and thenceforward always recalls it. That didn't really happen on that trip, except maybe with the Laura Cantrell. I feel like I ought to remember this album better than I do, because it must have had some fairly concentrated listening then. But it didn't stick. The only thing I remember about this album was that they've recorded several songs up close so that you can hear Kristin's left hand moving up and down the strings on the frets (on Candyland, for example). I had just started learning to play guitar back then, and started to notice things like that.
… And now… my reader may disagree with me, but the song that stands out most, Trouble, turns out to be a cover version (Cat Stevens, no less; can't say I've heard the original). Spain has some of the old spark, and Kristin's voice does that crack that I used to love so much. There's nothing really to object to, but I've forgotten it again, just a few hours later.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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