I kept on living in my own dream.
Nick Cave kind of nails it in the liner notes to last year's re-issue of Karen Dalton's final album, 1971's In My Own Time. He forgoes the historical review/significance-in-the-lost-folk-pantheon route taken by Lenny Kaye and the shitty poetry route taken by Devendra Banhart, and instead talks about listening to "Something On Your Mind" over and over, how much he likes her voice, and the album itself being inextricably linked to a very specific time and place in his life--more or less exactly what I would have said, our experiences with the record being almost identical. Granted, his "time and place" was an extended stay in Sao Paulo, Brazil some years back after a Bad Seeds tour, while mine was driving my grandmother through the back roads between my parents' house in Newark and her new apartment in Clifton Springs last fall, trying to shake off what felt at the time like a monumental, crushing personal defeat. But still, the record had a similar impact, and I imagine the Cave and Werts experience is not unlike that of anyone who spends some time with Dalton's follow-up to her also-great, surreptitiously-recorded debut (1969's It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best). You lock into "Something On Your Mind" because it's so classic and starts off with that awesome, kind of distorted bass count-off, and you listen to it like 100 times before you even get to the other songs. And you maybe think the other songs are alright, and that a couple of the cover choices are questionable ("When A Man Loves A Woman" being linked with Michael Bolton and lame Andy Garcia/Meg Ryan movies in your mind). But at some point you realize that her voice is a fucking saxophone sound, that all the songs you may have thought were filler-ish are actually pretty good, and that she was such a skilled interpreter of other peoples' songs that nobody will ever care that she never recorded a single original composition. I mean, I'm pretty sure that's the universal In My Own Time experience.

Karen Dalton - "Something On Your Mind"
Karen Dalton - "In A Station"
Karen Dalton - "Are You Leaving For The Country"

I should have mentioned this earlier but--yes, there's a new Soiled Mattress song up on their myspace place, and yes, their upcoming EP is called Honk Honk Bonk!. Also, compilations can be pretty good. Thai Pop Spectacular has Onuma Singsiri's "Mae Kha Som Tum (Papaya Salad Merchant)" and other songs with equally great names. After Dark opens with maybe the best Glass Candy song I've ever heard, called "Rolling Down The Hills (Spring Demo)". And if you haven't checked out Oliver Wang's Soul Symphony mix at his Soul Sides page, then you need to get on that (and if you can clue me in as to the full tracklist, please get on that, as well!). If you only have room on your drive for one side, I'd go with Side B, but Side A is no slouch.