Phosphorescent: "Reasons To Quit"

Yeah, I know it’s pretty cool to do coke still, you reotch high schoolers snorting lines out of Altoid tins in the parking lot. I know this because I just read Charles Blow’s article in the New York Times about how you’re keeping at it even after giving up the grass and the smack. Not that I’ve been back anytime in the last four years to see if everyone’s still inhaling mommy’s back-to-school clothing budget.

However, you can’t keep on doing it all the way through college. Sorry. Once you’ve passed the three-or-four year mark you’ve passed the rebellious phase and are into the stupid trust fund trainwreck stage. And if the magically named Mr. Blow is correct, and you’re not going to stop on your own, you need Willie Nelson. Now the problem is that Willie Nelson hasn’t actually quit shit, and is culturally present mostly as a weird drug joke in Colbert specials.

Solution? We get a clean indie folk group to take that Bonnie Prince country thing and do a Willie Nelson tribute album, starting immediately with “Reasons To Quit.” The Merle Haggard collaboration in service of sobriety is turned, awesomely, into a meditative, context-free way to get your blog reverb along with a nice dose of reality. Just like how Matthew Houck and co. distill melodic country sighs into Neil Young-lite, the straight edge vocal somehow sounds authentic without a hint of autobiography in the lyrical interpretation. While Will Oldham may get that indie twist by always sounding vaguely jokey, Phosphorescent does him up one by putting the weirdness in the context of the album itself.

Stop doing drugs before you turn into a conked out, gray braided hippie casualty. God bless 2009, because now you don’t have to listen to one to glean their timeless wisdom.