This guy’s wife, Dr. Pelley, was my chiropractor
for a time, back when I had health
insurance that would cover such a
thing. I was kind of smitten with
her, and learned that she and her husband
played music together, as my wife and I
do, and so we traded records, one of ours
for one of her theirs, on which she
plays some keyboards and sings. He calls
himself D Pel, short for Dan Pelley, and he
plays a kind of acoustic, singer-songwriter,
folky, alt country thing which I am listening
to tonight for maybe the second or third time
in I don’t know how many years. This record,
Potluck on Dukkha Plateau, is an
independent release from 2014. I’m sure
D Pel’s still playing music, but I have
no idea what he’s doing now stylistically,
and while I have thought about it often
when I hear that he is performing,
I have never been out to a local haunt
to see him play live. It’s lovely to
have music in the collection made
by people you know, even tangentially,
and even if the music is not in your
wheelhouse, maybe not even in the slightest.
D Pel’s music is like that, but I sense
his gifts are formidable as a guitar
player and lyricist–and his singing
I think, belongs to that long tradition
of guys whose words and delivery carry
the day rather than their beautiful voices,
a kind of Neal Young, Jeff Tweedy, Tom
Waits kind of thing. He doesn’t sound
really like any of these guys, but is
copping that kind of approach to singing.
I love me some Wilco, and have always
loved the weirdness of Waits, but Neil
has rarely floated any of my boats.
D Pel manages to find a kind of sweet
spot to pull me into a type of music
that I would not likely ever seek out,
and for that I am grateful.
Notes on the vinyl edition: D Pel, Potluck Dukkah Plateau, Truly Punk Records, 2014, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
