Yesterday I picked up, second-hand, a copy of "Big Iron World", a rollicking 2006 record by Old Crow Medicine Show. It contains some fine pickin', fiddlin' and blowin', and is augmented by appearances by David Rawlings (who produced) on guitar, and Gillian Welch on drums(!). As Gillian fixes go, it's not much, but it was all we had (leaving aside the Robyn Hitchcock disc, which wasn't really in the ballpark). Which leads us to our hopes for 2007:
1. A new Gillian Welch album. Please please please. It's well past being about time.
2. The repatriation to Australia of David Hicks, freed from governmental interference and armed with a seven-figure book deal, which for once I wouldn't be in opposition to. Think about all you have done in the last five years. Whatever it is, even if nothing more than sitting in a chair and looking out the window, is more than Hicks has been allowed to do, in whatever appalling conditions he has been kept (and you would have to think that if the conditions were in fact better than we have been led to believe, someone in authority would have made that clear; that they haven't speaks volumes). So perhaps he was hell-bent on killing Americans; more likely he was a misguided young man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For which he has paid with a large chunk of his life and his mental health.
3. World peace and happiness. Obviously.
