Unsung Passage

Ryan Gustafson wrote these songs during quick spans scattered between tours of the last two years-as a supporting guitarist for his kindred North Carolina spirits Hiss Golden Messenger and Phil Cook's Guitarheels and as the leader of his own vehicle for a fractured vision of folk, country, blues, and cosmic American rock, The Dead Tongues. Gustafson's third and best album under that name, Unsung Passage is a first-person reckoning with the things Gustafson, a chronically peripatetic adventurer, has seen enough to sing about. There are meditations on mortality and devotion, on money and temporality, and on impermanence and acceptance. These ten songs are snapshots in time-glimpses at the sorts of emotional upheavals and adjustments we're all forced to face as we move from day to day and, as in Gustafson's way, place to place.