Side One Dummy
2007
Feast Or Famine
About This Album
"Set adrift in the depths of the drink in the hands of the gods we curse," Chuck Ragan is searching, for salvation perhaps, for answers maybe, but mostly "drifting with clutching arms in a world ever dark, wondering what betook us." On the semi-acoustic Feast or Famine, Ragan's solo studio debut, the singer/guitarist sails far from the shores of his former band, Hot Water Music, offering up a dozen intensely introspective numbers, awash in compelling imagery and heartfelt emotion. Within, he bares his feelings, his views, and his doubts, an artist determined to swallow the world and make sense of it. "I wanna know, I wanna feel everything," he fervently declares on the exhilarating "California Burritos," a song that owes a bit more to the Balkans than the Latin lands, but is most indebted to country & western. That song's defiant lyric, "I can't stand standing for nothing, when standing up is all I know," is the most telling within, for Ragan stands very tall indeed here. He uses his lethal pen to devastating effect on "For Broken Ears," slicing and dicing the Bush Administration and all their lies in pure Americana style.
Track List (try tracks 4,6,7,9 and 10)

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