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PAIRINGS: Bob Weir, “The Ground Don’t Want Me” & Abbey Lincoln, “Throw It Away”

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PAIRINGS: Albums & Singles — How Music Intersects
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Written By Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

The earth is supposed to take us back. It is where we build our homes, bury our dead, plant our histories, and imagine that something of us will remain. But what happens when the ground beneath us offers no promise of belonging? And what happens when the things we have spent our lives trying to keep become the very things we must learn to release? Bob Weir’s “The Ground Don’t Want Me” and Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away” approach these questions from different directions. Weir’s song evokes the unsettling prospect of a world that offers no guarantee of shelter; Lincoln’s composition considers the freedom that becomes possible when we loosen our grip on what we cannot keep. One confronts the ache of belonging denied, while the other asks us to reconsider the attachments through which we define ourselves. Together, they reveal a tension at the heart of being human: we want the world to hold us, yet we must learn to live without the assurance that it will.

Belonging is something we seek from the world. Freedom, however, may begin with what we are willing to release from ourselves.

Weir’s “The Ground Don’t Want Me” emerged from the sessions for Blue Mountain, his 2016 solo album, before being released as a previously unheard recording in 2026. Written by Josh Ritter, with music by Ritter, Josh Kaufman, and Weir, the song belongs to a musical world shaped by American roots traditions, where the landscape often serves as both setting and state of mind. Its eventual release also introduces a temporal dimension: a recording made years earlier enters a new moment, inviting listeners to consider how music acquires meaning beyond the circumstances of its creation. The title alone unsettles our relationship with the earth. The ground is supposed to be dependable. It receives our footsteps, supports our dwellings, and gives physical form to the idea of home. To imagine that it does not want us reverses this familiar arrangement. The land becomes something other than refuge; it becomes a presence against which we must measure our own vulnerability.

American music is full of travelers. The blues wanderer, the country drifter, the folk singer on the road: each carries a different version of the desire to leave something behind. The open road promises reinvention, suggesting that another life might be waiting beyond the limits of the present one. Movement becomes an expression of possibility, a declaration that our circumstances need not determine our future. Yet the mythology of movement contains a contradiction. Leaving is not the same as arriving. Distance does not necessarily produce freedom, and a person can travel indefinitely without resolving the reasons they felt compelled to depart. The American West intensifies this tension. Its vastness has long served as a metaphor for self-invention, a place where the individual might imagine beginning again. But the landscape does not owe the traveler a happy ending. Its openness can be exhilarating precisely because it is indifferent. The world can offer space without offering welcome.

This is what makes Weir’s song a compelling meditation on belonging. The question is not simply whether we can find a place to settle, but what happens when the places we seek cannot provide the security we expect from them. A landscape may be beautiful without being hospitable. A community may shape us without continuing to accommodate us. A home may remain physically unchanged while becoming emotionally unfamiliar. There is a particular vulnerability in discovering that the things we depend upon do not necessarily depend upon us in return. We may build our identities around a place, a relationship, or a community, only to discover that our attachment cannot guarantee permanence. The resulting disorientation is not merely about losing something external. It can unsettle our understanding of who we are.

Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away,” heard here in its 2007 interpretation on Abbey Sings Abbey, approaches this problem from another direction. Rather than asking whether the world will hold us, Lincoln asks us to examine what we insist on holding ourselves. Lincoln was a composer and vocalist whose work consistently connected artistic expression with self-determination. Across a career that encompassed jazz, film, political engagement, and songwriting, she developed a voice that could be intimate without becoming submissive, confrontational without sacrificing tenderness, and emotionally direct without surrendering complexity. Her music made room for the realities of the world while insisting upon her right to interpret those realities on her own terms. Abbey Sings Abbey, released in 2007, returned to her compositions through an intimate musical setting informed by acoustic folk and country textures as well as jazz. It was the final studio album of her recording career, and its performances carry the perspective of an artist revisiting her own work after decades of experience. The songs do not feel detached from the life that preceded them. They sound newly illuminated by it.

Lincoln’s reflections on songwriting offer a useful lens through which to understand “Throw It Away.” In an interview with All About Jazz, she described the process of expressing what she felt and witnessed through music, then releasing the burden rather than continuing to carry it. Her understanding of creation suggests that expression can transform an experience without erasing it. This distinction is essential to the song’s philosophy. Letting go is not the same as indifference. It does not require us to deny that something mattered, pretend that suffering never occurred, or abandon the lessons that difficult experiences have taught us. It asks us to consider whether the meaning of an experience must remain inseparable from the pain it caused. We hold on for reasons that are not always apparent to us. Sometimes we preserve a relationship because its survival seems to validate the years we invested in it. Sometimes we cling to a place because leaving would mean acknowledging that the person we were there no longer exists. Sometimes we keep carrying an injury because we fear that releasing it will diminish the seriousness of what happened.

But pain is not proof of devotion. We do not have to remain wounded to demonstrate that something mattered. We do not have to keep a person in our lives to honor what they once meant to us. And we do not have to preserve an old version of ourselves simply because we recognize the person we used to be. Lincoln’s wisdom lies in the possibility of transforming experience into understanding. The past remains part of us, but it need not dictate every decision we make. We can remember without remaining confined to memory. We can acknowledge what was lost without making loss the organizing principle of our lives. For Lincoln, songwriting itself offered a model of this process. An experience enters the artist’s consciousness, acquires a form, and becomes available to others. The resulting work can carry the emotional truth of its origins without requiring the artist to remain permanently inside the experience that inspired it. Music becomes both testimony and release.

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Toward the Sacred Ordinary: Townes at The Old Quarter

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There is a particular kind of silence that only happens in a room where people are truly listening. Not polite silence. Not distracted quiet. The kind that hums — electric, anticipatory — because everyone present understands that something unrepeatable is happening in real time.

That’s what pulses through Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas — the newly reissued archival document from Townes Van Zandt, released again into the world by Fat Possum Records.

Calling it “new” feels almost beside the point. What this record offers isn’t novelty. It offers presence.

Recorded over a series of July nights in 1973 inside a modest Houston listening room, the performances unfold without adornment: one man, one guitar, and an audience willing to lean in close. There are no lush arrangements to shield the songs, no studio gloss to smooth their edges. What we hear instead is the architecture of Townes’ songwriting laid bare — the skeletal beauty of melody carrying emotional weight that feels almost geological in depth.

The mythology of Townes Van Zandt has grown outsized in the decades since his passing. He is often framed as the doomed poet, the tragic romantic, the saint of beautiful sorrow. But this record complicates that caricature. Here, he is funny. He is wry. He lingers between songs, tossing off remarks with an understated dryness that disarms the heaviness of what follows. The darkness in his writing isn’t theatrical; it’s conversational: When he moves through songs like Pancho & Lefty, If I Needed You, or Waiting ’Round to Die, they don’t feel monumental — not yet. They feel intimate. As if they are still becoming. There’s a humility in the delivery that resists canonization. These aren’t museum pieces. They are living, breathing things shared in a room that smells like wood and sweat and Texas summer air.

What strikes me most is the patience of it all. The record does not rush to prove itself. It allows silence to hang. It allows a lyric to land and reverberate before the next chord arrives. In an era that compresses music into snippets and background ambience, this kind of duration feels radical. You are asked to stay. To sit inside the story. There’s also something politically resonant about this simplicity. No spectacle. No mediation. Just an artist trusting that words — honestly delivered — are enough. That faith in language, in narrative, in human attention, feels increasingly rare.

The reissue by Fat Possum doesn’t attempt to modernize or reframe the material. Thankfully. What it does instead is remind us that live performance, at its best, is a form of communal reckoning. You can hear the audience responding — laughter breaking tension, applause surfacing like waves. The room itself becomes an instrument.

And perhaps that is the enduring power of Live at the Old Quarter: it captures not just songs, but relationship. Artist and listener meeting without pretense. Townes does not sound like a legend here. He sounds like a man in a chair with a guitar, telling the truth as he understands it. The legend came later. What remains in these recordings is something far more valuable — the sacred ordinary of a night when the music was enough, and everyone in the room knew it.