Amazon.com Rock Editors' Top 10 2002:
1.) Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2.) Peter Gabriel - UP
3.) Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
4.) Elvis Costello - When I was Cruel
5.) Jim Roll - Inhabiting the Ball
6.) Steve Earle - Jerusalem
7.) Beck - Sea Change
8.) Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
9.) Robert Plant - Dreamland
10.) The Soft Boys - Nextdoorland
I am obsessed with recording amazing records in my 1800 square foot recording studio in Ann Arbor. Drop me a note if you want to talk about a project and are considering my audio engineer services. I have recorded/mixed and/or mastered songs and records for (among others):
Steve Amick (noted Novelist)
Chris Bathgate
Big Breakfast
Black Jake & The Carnies (in Production)
Breathe Owl Breathe
Chris Buhalis
Bobby Charles (in Production)
Neil Cleary
Todd Deatherage
Elm From Arm (in Production)
Frontier Ruckus (in Production)
Havilland
Matt Jones (in Production)
Charlene Kaye (in Production)
Brian Lillie (in Production)
Lightening Love (in Production)
Dave Lombardi
Greg McIntosh (in Production)
The Minor Planets
Tim Monger (of The Great Lakes Myth Society)
Mumu Worthy
The New Green
North (in Production)
Orpheum Bell
The Pants (Burlington Vermont's Finest)
Paul's Big Radio
Neal Pollack (noted Novelist and McSweeney's old timer)
Porchsleeper
Jason Ringenberg (of Jason and the Scorchers)
Robots vs. Dragons (Quack Media web-animation)
Secret Seven (in Production)
Jo Serrepere
Dick Siegel
Sik Sik Nation
Joe Summers Trio
Tandy
Rollie Tussing III
The Victrolas (for Found Magazine single)
Also, I currently play a Creston Electric Philips 76 Orange Esquire . Go to http://crestonguitars.com/ for more info on these amazing hand made instruments.
The New Yorker:
Roll's aching voice is a perfect match for (Denis) Johnson's dark sensibility, and (Rick) Moody leavens the album with such playful, romantic pieces as "In-Flight Magazines" and "Blue Guitar." Roll doesn't hand over the reins entirely: the catchy "Bonnie and Clyde" and the rollicking "Kicking at the Traces" are both originals that prove that he can get by without a little help from his friends.
L.A. Times:
The panorama: Americana born of the teaming casts an eye on the nation's social and psychic underbelly, with Moody, known for his dissections of suburbia, contributing whimsical ("In Flight Magazines") and regretful ("Blue Guitar") tales, and outsider-chronicler Johnson providing evocative if enigmatic moments (the title song and "You").
Roll, whose experiment-spiked musical settings jump from Neil Young folk to Stones rock to alt-country, doesn't shrink in this company, turning in among his five solo works the compelling narrative "Orphan
Train."
Roll wasn't intimidated by putting his lyrics up against the work of two noted wordsmiths. "I didn't feel like they had slaved over chiseling the perfect pop song or anything, and they were surreal enough where I felt like I could find little spaces in between their songs and have this kind of fun little record.
"For me it's a modern, digital, slightly cartoonish version of [Harry Smith's] 'Anthology of American Folk Music.' Just kind of strange characters that could exist now, as opposed to the characters like John Henry."
--Richard Cromelin
Q Magazine:
It's Roll's own more straightforward writing that impresses most, particularly on the moving Eddie Rode the Orphan Train. Set to a melodic blend of folk, rock and alt-country, the whole affair is difficult to pigeonhole but recommended to those who like their Americana with a noir-ish tang. (four stars)
-- Ian Cranna
...truly one of the unsung gems of contemporary music.
- Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
4.5 Stars: The tunes here are wrapped in an American timelessness that takes the grain of the voice and wraps it in shimmering strings, broken melodies, distorted drums, shifting, slightly off-minor structures, and treaded-out (as in truck tires, folks) rhythms that add ghostly lines, summer blacktop finishes, and rusted Coke machines to the rainbow bodies of musical language itself...
-- Thom Jurek - All Music Guide
With all this literary firepower backing the Ann Arbor, Michigan, songwriter on his third album, I half expected to flip the disc in my CD player and hear him somberly read off the lyrics--or, worse yet, earnestly strum guitar chords while belting out the words in a manner reminiscent of Joan Baez. Luckily, Roll shows little reverence for Johnson and Moody's precious words--no matter how poetic they may be.
-- Paul Demko - City Pages
Assisted by a rock band that includes guitarist Chuck Prophet, Roll makes Moody's "Blue Guitar" and "In-Flight Magazines" sound like two last ragged shots of rock-and-soul from The Band. His "Bonnie and Clyde" tears down the highway with images that suggest more than they say, and his haunting, sweet, rolling folk number "Eddie Rode the Orhpan Train" will likely be one of the finest story songs this year.
-- David Cantwell - No Depression
An Ann Arbor singer songwriter who doesn't flinch at the thought of feedback or barre chords . . . (Roll's songs) don't carry a whiff of lowlife posturing or bottom drawer mildew
-- Jim Ridley - Nashille Scene
'Inhabiting the Ball' is a smart, absorbing record. (Roll) wrote the lyrics to the album's best song, "Eddie Rode the Orphan Train," its sadness real and earned. This is one of those small albums that probably will fight to get heard, but it deserves a wide hearing.
-- Peter Melton - Tower ePulse!
The presence of three songs, "Bonnie And Clyde," "Eddie Rode The Orphan Train" and "To Be Alarmed," offer all the reasons I need to recommend this disc without reservation. They are perfect examples of Jim Roll's ability to create a new character with a few words, a new landscape with a few notes and spin those simple elements into a new world that you may not want to live in, but that you'll certainly want to know better.
-- Shaun Dale - Cosmik Debris
Roll admits that he doesn't completely understand everything he sings on the record, but, as any fan of The Anthology of American Folk Music can tell you, the most powerful songs are often the most impenetrable. Take the title track, which pits Johnson's lyrics against a lone banjo and spooky snippets from old TV shows: Your wife put Amy's head beneath the wheel/And acted out her black psychotic rage/That's why your second wife left you/And rode off on her wooden steed/And drifted off among the buttercups/And left you here to rot and bleed. Does it matter that we don't know who Amy is, what exactly happened to her or why this act would cause the subject's second wife to leave him? Not to Roll, a student of what music writer Greil Marcus once called "the old, weird America" .
-- Rene Spencer Saller - Riverfront Times
It's one thing to trample all over the past. But Roll respects his predecessors by taking older ideas and incorporating them into a fully modern sound. He does what every great artist has done: Assimilate and advance. And so while it's true that you could put him smack dab in the middle of the whole "alt. country" scene, Roll's music is hard to pin down that way. He simply does too much. Well, too much to tie him to a genre label, anyway. As music goes, Roll does just right. He's man who knows how to make great music, period. Those instincts have been translated on this disc into some stunning fare, indeed.
-- Jon Worley - Aiding and Abetting
It's Roll's ever-sharpening sense of songcraft that makes this his best album to date.
-- Don Yates, KEXP Seattle
