Album Of The Day: Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars

Album Art of The Civil Wars's Barton Hollow album - A black and white photo of two young white people, on the right a man with curly hair, a beard and mustache in a suit coat with a bowtie, and on the left, a woman with darker, long hair and a sleeveless dark top. They are sitting in a corner booth with a marble tabletop sitting in front of them and glasses of water on the table. The man is looking at the camera and has his right arm behind the woman and the woman is looking away from the man to the left. There is lots of light behind them as the area has many windows, it seems. It seems like they also may be photographed through a window, because there's a reflection of another window overlaid in front of the couple.

Released on this day 14 years ago, this album won "Best Folk Album" at that year's Grammy Awards. Joy Williams and John Paul White, both accomplished musicians, joined forces as folk/country/Americana duo The Civil Wars. This album is defined by the duo's powerful vocals, plus very sparse but effective, simple instrumentation. Lyrically, this album is mostly love songs, even though both in the duo are married to other people. It's a beautiful album and is top-notch music throughout, though definitely a bit darker in tone and less energizing than most other albums I listen to. For a moment The Civil Wars were thought to be the next big thing in music, but a year or two later they stopped performing together due to creative differences. They have individually released solo music since then, but have not reunited.

Release Year: 2011
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify

Categories: 
Album Of The Day
Music

Add new comment

More information about text formats

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img>
  • You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>, <c>, <cpp>, <drupal5>, <drupal6>, <java>, <javascript>, <php>, <python>, <ruby>. The supported tag styles are: <foo>, [foo].
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.