Jeff Cowell - Arrival (2009)

A hard-living country-folk troubadour from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Jeff Cowell spent his musical youth (the 1970s and early '80s) in the bars, barns, and concert halls of Michigan and Northeastern Wisconsin, offering up a distinctly Northern rendering of the outlaw country sound, invoking names like Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, and David Allan Coe. A member of the regionally successful country-bluegrass/honky tonk bar band The Great Northern Iron Band, Cowell issued Lucky Strikes & Liquid Gold in 1975 -- an evocative, high and lonesome solo recording brimming with northern gothic-informed, youthful nihilism -- that remained firmly in the grip of the mitten state until the archivists at the Numero Group got their hands on it and reissued it in early 2015. ~ James Christopher Monger