Having found myself in a familiar state of happiness, thanks to a succession of fine albums that have made their way from my shelf to my head and heart, I tried to think back to how this purple patch started. I think it was sparked by two somewhat nondescript purchases that happened to occur around about the same time: Van Zandt's Our Mother the Mountain and Clark's Old No. 1. Both I now consider fine albums, the latter especially so, but at the time they were little more than curious explorations, obligatory fills in the gaps in my record collection. As I was in the process of absorbing these albums, I thought it fit to see the fine Van Zandt documentary Be Here To Love Me, which set me on an immersion of more of his work, and its siblings, amongst them Clark's Texas Cooking. At this stage I started to realize my palate had a particular taste for a particular strain of country and folk, which in hindsight should have been blindingly obvious the moment I first listened to John Prine many years ago now. Anyhow, this set about the aforementioned remarkably fruitful set of purchases, for which I am grateful. The only problem is that I find it hard to listen to anything without a steel pedal anymore.