NED COLLETTE - "Old Chestnut" LP

Ned Collette - Old Chestnut LP (Feeding Tube, 2018) I've spent a lot of time alone in a van with this fucker. Waking up in friends-or-strangers' houses, hitting the road for a few hours, finding a bite, bitching to him about this or that, him bitching back, saddling up at the bar or back in the van drinking again, inevitably watching his charming Aussie expat stage spiel night after night -- sometimes with a band and sometimes solo, sometimes playing for no one and sometimes to a full'ish room, sometimes shabbily hungover and sometimes cockily dialed in, sometimes on his home turf but mainly on mine...In other words, there's been plenty of opportunity for the rare enchantment of 'Old Chestnut' to have run its course on me, having unnaturally over-familiarized myself with both the once-mysterious artist behind it and the once-equally-mysterious songs therein, and I can still say with some shred of *actual* objectivity that not only was this was probably the greatest record of 2018, but