various artists - Mojo Buried Treasures (15 Key Tracks From The Greatest Albums You Never Heard)

It's a late evening drop for this week's Mojo Monday. So for those of you waking up Tuesday to see this fresh in your feed: my apologies. I've reached that stage in life where I can't read without my cheaters. Nor can I type with any sort of accuracy. And I couldn't find my reading glasses Sunday; hence, no midnight Monday AM post.

But enough of that. This one is about the ability of music to still surprise you. This one landed in my lap earlier this year. I'm sure I didn't pay more than a buck or two for it, and I snagged it on the basis of completion, more so than any other factor. I have the Third World War and Creation Rebel records from which their tracks here originate. And, at the time, other than Joe Meek, there was nothing here that piqued my interest. But it's a buck, and I like sharing and writing about Mojo comps, so why not splash out? It arrives, I rip it, it goes in a box, and I move on.

At some point between then and now, I decide I'm going to load a bunch of comps I've yet to write about onto my phone. It''s the way these things go for me; I'm at work, I want to hear something new, I put one on, I write about it later on. Onto the phone goes "Mojo Buried Treasures". I hit Shuffle. The phone plays me a ton of different stuff: Augustus Pablo, Masshysteri, Stiv Bators, LeeHi. Y'all should know by now that there's little I won't give a shot to. A song settles in on my headphones. It reminds me of Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch, the British folk music that I used to shelf at my first record store job a million years ago, back when I thought it was all dusty tea sippers with long beards. There's a percussive nature to the way the guitar's being played, like m'dude is beating the hell out of his acoustic while singing a tale about a drowned miner. I gotta say, I was enthralled. So I played it again. And again. And one more time on the way home, as I drove north into the gray Washington fall.

And that's how I discovered Nic Jones. Off a Mojo comp that I barely even paid attention to.

I ended up ordering the Shanachie reissue of "Penguin Eggs" a few weeks ago. I've not really dug into yet. But I'm taken aback that I've discovered this 30 years after I probably first grudgingly placed the same recording between Sandy Denny and Iain Matthews solo records. These things can still sneak up on your ears and grab hold of your brain and make you seek out more. What an amazing thing.

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