kristen hall is leaving sugarland to “concentrate on her songwriting”.
kristen hall, for new or casual readers of my blog, is my favorite musical artist ever, bar none, number one. you may never have heard of her before, but i’ve mentioned her here and here and here and here on my site. and you can go to her site to learn more about her.
it would be worth your time.
i know her from her many many solo albums, the best of which in my opinion is “be careful what you wish for”, although many hardcore fans think that “fact & fiction” is her best record, and i can’t say that they are wrong because it’s wonderful too.
and as i mentioned here, i want “peaches” played at my funeral, and it’s on “fact & fiction” so there you go.
i saw her once, at eddie’s attic in decatur, georgia, and that’s enough for me. i could have gotten sugarland tickets when they played new york last year, but i didn’t bother. they were third billing and you just knew that they would play fifteen minutes or three songs, whichever came first, or whatever, and then because i am cheap i would have felt obligated to stay to see toby keith or whoever the hell they were appearing with, and who wants to go through that?
i was very happy for kristen when she had such success in her group sugarland, because she really deserved it. she’s an amazingly talented songwriter, and should have gotten greater fame and financial rewards for it long before sugarland was formed. (i bought the sugarland cd on itunes. my first, last, and only itunes purchase, by the way. kristen, put your back catalog on itunes!)
i have a feeling that she’s not too interested in fame and fortune. and i also have a feeling that she did this sugarland thing just to cash in a bit, which she richly deserved to do, and now she has a little stash of cash to coast on and she can do whatever the hell she wants to do.
who wouldn’t like to be in that situation? i sure the hell would. but i’m too lazy to devote time and energy on the level that she has, and i don’t deserve it nearly as much as she does.
and she doesn’t owe anyone anything. if she wants to make more music, i’ll be first in line to buy it. i sure hope that she’ll make more music. there’s been a dearth of kristen hall product for long enough.
if she wants to sit on her ass and do absolutely nothing for the rest of her life, she can do that too, and i’ll be more than happy to listen to what she’s recorded up until now, ad infinitum.
and if she wants to be like j.d. salinger, and go off into the woods and write just for herself and for no one else, and we can all get her 1,776 songs tied up in ribbons after her death (that’s an emily dickinson reference, for those of you that are scratching your heads), that’s fine too.
did you know, by the way, that all of emily dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of “the yellow rose of texas”? or, for that matter, the theme from “gilligan’s island”?
but i digress.
go kristen. do whatever the hell you want to do. i’m behind you 100%, girl.
you’ll always have at least one fan who will never, never forget you.