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Songs We Love: Silver Torches, 'Woman In Rust'

Erik Walters of Silver Torches.
Courtesy of the artist
Erik Walters of Silver Torches.

In the last week of 2016, we're featuring just a few of the songs that, for whatever reason, never got their due this year.

Performing as Silver Torches, Seattle singer-songwriter Erik Walters makes music that's both familiar and tricky to pin down. On paper, "Woman In Rust" doesn't do anything groundbreaking: It's got a nifty pop-rock arrangement, buoyed by churning guitars and a nice little piano melody, while Walters' voice evokes a shaggy Mount Rushmore of rootsy guys like Paul Westerberg and Ryan Adams. All of which sounds simple enough, so why did I keeping coming back to "Woman In Rust" — dozens and dozens of times — in 2016?

It may be that, at 2:35, the song ends exactly too soon: It builds and builds, piling on pleasing ingredients en route to just one grand chorus, at which point it pulls a quick fade. I've actually cranked it in my car, hit the final seconds and exclaimed, "No!" — at which point I've had to start the whole thing over again. After downloading Silver Torches' full album, Heatherfield, from its Bandcamp page way back in January (nowadays, you can ), it took me months to get around to playing the second song. Thankfully, the rest are plenty terrific in their own right.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)