Song of the Day: “White Shoes”

You can get your hair all wet sleeping on the riverbed
Kiss a frog and then dissect, gotta find out what’s inside
And you can have my bad side too, anything you wanna do
Sure anything you wanna do

…Conor Oberst sings on “White Shoes,” a slow and beautiful ballad that appears on the record Outer South, released in 2009 with the Mystic Valley Band. As veteran backing musicians for their well-known front man, the Mystic Valley Band sync up with Oberst dramatically on many of Outer South’s sixteen tracks. But the haunting voice and lone guitar on“White Shoes” is vintage solo Oberst. The shadow of melancholy deepens this song and makes it memorable.

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Read more of Max Gray at Big City Sasquatch or follow him on Twitter @City_Sasquatch. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Encounters, Mount Hope, Conte, tNY.press, and English Kills Review. He co-hosts the etymology podcast Words For Dinner and is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.

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