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He has lived in the north woods near Grand Marais, a farm valley down by Winona, a sailboat along the East Coast and, somewhere in there, a college campus in Amherst, Mass.
Just last month, Ben Weaver, 25, settled into a regular old apartment in St. Paul with his girlfriend, Donna Simpson. After a week there, though, he was headed for the road again.
"Donna's gonna play this thing here," Weaver said, holding up an antique metal mailbox doubling as a drum on tour.
Headed down to the Americana Music Conference in Nashville by way of Texas, Weaver will be back in town tonight for his CD-release party at the Turf Club for "Stories Under Nails."
A dissolute, fractured, fascinating album, "Stories" shows in colors as plain as the brown-paper CD cover why Weaver has become a buzzed-about singer-songwriter in Europe. His previous album, "Hollerin' at a Woodpecker," got loads of press over there, including a four-star review in Mojo magazine. His new album was put out by the French label Fargo Records, which also distributes Richard Buckner and Clem Snide.
Weaver is the kind of songwriting troubadour whose lyrics are moving even on paper, the kind like Steve Earle or Alejandro Escovedo whose scratchy, imperfect voice somehow accentuates his beat-up songs - the kind who subscribes to Townes Van Zandt's line that the only two types of music are blues and "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah."
"Stories Under Nails" is black and blue. With minimal, moody backing from Twin Cities MVPs Mike Wisti, Jimmy Peterson and Pete Sands, it sounds as hollowed-out and dented as Weaver felt when he wrote many of the songs, following a split with the mother of his 2- year-old son, Henry, after he came out of the woods (literally and figuratively).
Songs such as "Like a Wound" and "Ragged Words" alone have more...