When We're Dead & Gone: The Playlist Pounder

 

I haven’t let the fact that the The Moaners, Melissa Swingle and Laura King, last released an album in 2010 — about a year after the debut of Zero Hour — stop me from playing the late Chapel Hill band all the damn time on my show over the last 15 years. It’s no surprise then that I’m making them the first honorees for something I’m calling The Playlist Pounder. I’m planning to highlight one song each week from my weekly radio playlist. A “pounder” to me is a song that can hit you in the head, heart, toes, ass, whatever at whatever moment you fully connect with it, and it does not matter if it is from 2025 or 1925, or if it’s the first time you’ve heard it. It’s whenever you surrender to the song’s now undeniable and overwhelming power and just let go, just let it pound you, baby. But a pounder is so well constructed you can also more superficially feel its marvelous magic.

 

“When We’re Dead and Gone” comes from The Moaners’ last album for Yep Roc Records, 2007’s Blackwing Yalobusha. The band produced the album with Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers at Money Shot Studios, located in a former school lunchroom in Water Valley, Mississippi. A lot of certified bad asses recorded there, including Fat Possum’s Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Hasil Adkins, T-Model Ford, and the Neckbones, as well as Jack Oblivian and Blue Mountain. The Moaners’ song has some of the booty-moving crunch and grind that Fat Possum’s stars rode to glory, and the song is no doubt catchy and rocking, but it is also rough and jagged in ways not uncommon with the likes of someone like Billy Childish, especially his more recent work with CTMF. It’s also made memorable by the tenderness in Swingle’s voice, her slight Southern twang, its wonder and sweetness, mixed with clever lyrics that center on life and death, desire and pain, history and the eternalness of songs.