Damien Jurado is the sort of songwriter who straddles rock's past and future, and with each record contributes a new chapter to an ever-fruitful body of work. Before we move onto the next chapter, we look back at his first album with Secretly Canadian. An instant classic when released in 2003, "Where Shall You Take Me?" was his fifth full-length, and is a beautiful collection of ten Raymond Carver-esque vignettes terror and bliss inMiddle America. Arriving two decades after Springsteen's "Nebraska", Jurado put the darker, more complicated side of the heartland back on the map with his tales of young love (some requited; some not), innocent fun and bloodshed. Mostly acoustic with very sparse band arrangements - with the notable exception being the old ... read more