The Places

Amy Annelle, better known as the Places, is a true musical nomad. Wielding a 1933 Gibson guitar, she carves compelling avant-folk tales of distance and clime that yearn for some long-gone pastoral past. Her travels are perhaps best documented on the hauntingly beautiful Fawns With Fangs: Selections From the Dark Heart of the Thicket (2005). Recorded at various radio stations and shacks across the country, the career-spanning covers compilation transforms and reenvisions songs by Syd Barrett, Led Zeppelin, and Neil Young, among others, into enchanted lullabies. "Once a song is good, it becomes an entity that shapes itself to the context of where it's being played and who is playing it," she says. Annelle is currently exploring the countryside with Ralph White of the Bad Livers in support of her fourth Places CD, Songs for Creeps. Deceptively dark and stripped down, the album incorporates found sounds and field recordings — further enhancing the feeling of displaced wonder that inhabits each song. "There's something about how the mind seeks patterns and relationships in chance that makes those sounds powerful," she says. "There are gut reactions and dream-self recognition of sounds that can lend more depth to what a song is getting at."