- Jim White's itinerant career (as, variously, surfer, cab-driver, model, film-maker, preacher, wrestler) is a lot like this record. Like an American cabinet of curiosities it presents any number of colourful splashes of Americana in a variety of styles (country, folk, blues, rock, funk and large tracts of experimentality that do their best to rip those genres apart and stich them together in strange new arrangements) and there are a large number of performers, particularly of the spoken-word numbers, bringing these little vignettes to life. I don't know if it makes more sense if you know this began life as a soundtrack to a production by Sam Shepherd (called The Americans: Part 1: The Lay Of The Land) for the Juliard Drama School, because it would've had to've been a fairly odd little play, too. They're almost like a large number of American haikus set one after the other. "I went for a ride in a pick-up truck, someone shot me in a drive-b, a doctor named butcher stitched my nose back together with cartelidge from my ear."