Video: The Civil Wars - I’ve Got This Friend (Performance on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’)
The Civil Wars are a two-piece consisting of singer-songwriters Joy Williams and John Paul White from Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been listening to their album ‘Barton Hollows’ for a few months after discovering it jumped straight to No.1 on the U.S iTunes chart, and narrowly missed out on a top 10 spot in the Billboard 200 when it was released.
Their music is a lovely blend of progressive and contemporary folk music that washes over your ears beautifully. The production values of the album are incredibly tasteful and help make William and White’s vocal harmonies shine. Instrumentation-wise, you’ll be listening to a whole lot of acoustic guitar, with occasional additions of traditional folk instruments such as violins and bottle-neck guitar. The album has a feel of refined emptiness that I find very appealing.
Personally, with all that said, its The Civil Wars magnificence comes from their presence on-stage. With an expected bout of insomnia last night, I stumbled across this performance on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’ on the iPlayer, rekindling my admiration for them:
Where I would normally expect such sparse production values to be the downfall of any live performance, in the case of these guys it only makes them better. Both Williams and White have a real chemistry on stage together, which lead me (and many others I have now discovered) to think that they were a couple - this is not the case.
The vocal harmonies in the song, ‘I’ve Got This Friend’, are indeed ‘phwoar-worthy’ (as a gentleman in the audience can be heard to exclaim in the breakdown) and I am left fixated on how the two look entertaining when there is nothing going on around them.
The Civil Wars record is a great one to mellow you out, I suggest you give it a listen.
To watch the full ‘Later… with Jools Holland’ programme click here.
