Wayfaring Strangers Lonesome Heroes

No common ancestral folkie—no mercurial Fahey or lilting Joni—makes a fitting a touchstone to this third Wayfaring Strangers installment. These Lonesome Heroes are linked instead by mood: the turn of a strange phrase, a piano oddly mic’d, the sound of a room, both its guitar and man falling perfectly out of tune. For these somber, dark, and meditative troubadours, we opened up space for everything between a shambling revisit of some dusted Highway 61 capillary and a blue afternoon gone black. Each traveler tracked here took first steps out of his own Nowhere Special. Some made stops in common, but none ever honestly intersected, and each recording thus owes its sound to a divergent time, method, and reason. From back-porch singer-songwriters who never played a single professional gig to those dragged off stage only by years, these sung tales were mostly privately pressed, privately created, and intended for the most private of audiences: those kindred lonely few who listened along the way.