LP Available
Book Trailer And Video Poem
Praise for Still Running
I’m not sure what’s more shocking– Joel Peckham’s Still Running or that it took him this long to craft a poetry-rock n’ roll mashup. If you know Peckham, the eventual marriage of these seemingly disparate mediums felt inevitable. Yes, he’s the author of nine poetry and nonfiction collections, including last year’s Much and Bone Music, works that deal in memory as Peckham manages its wreckage and emerges as living proof of something I want to call miraculous. But anyone who’s spent time with him knows he’s also a fine guitar player with a malt shop croon of a voice, the kind that gave Sam Philips fits as he wondered what he could do with Roy Orbison. He’s a believer in the three-chord rumble and the big beat who’s threatened a band for years, and with Still Running, he’s delivered on that promise, even if unconventionally.
There’s no shortage of records featuring poets accompanied by musicians, but so many of those follow an exhausted template– the poet reading as jazz sax adds occasional punctuation. Here, Peckham replaces cocktail lounge stylings with shards of chords, feedback, swirls, and Nuggets-friendly fuzz and beats, creating textures that envelop his poems/songs/lyrics of excavation and renewal.
Peckham identifies as a cynic, but when he says that, I believe he’s either imagining himself a Johnny Strabler-type or selling himself short. Still Running, like his other collections, is nothing if not a celebration of somehow still existing.
--Charlie Farmer, The Creek 100.9 FM