Jon Dee Graham...

...is a veteran singer songwriter (but new to me) from Austin, TX, whom I saw live for the first time last night in Cleveland, OH. He sang many of his songs with a self-deprecating attitude, nothing-is-sacred-to-me attitude in fact, which is how I like it. His voice has grown very gravelly over the past thirty years he's been whoring around, but it suits the combination of cynicism and melancholy in his songs. One of the new songs he played is about a guy who is sent to a rehab or prison, where he meets "junkies and strugglers," and remembers how Neil Young got it all wrong in "Needle and the Damage Done," and concludes he's/they're "not beautifully broken, just broken, that's all." The song resembles the 1996 "Something Broken in the Promised Land" by Wayne Kramer so much--not just music, but the key word "broken" and the reference to the same N.Y. song--that it cannot be a coincidence. Kramer's song is about how fucked up things were/are in the U.S., and Graham complains specifically about our tendency to romanticize "junkies and strugglers" (all the while marginalizing, incarcerating them, etc.) On the other hand, Graham didn't indicate where his inspiration for the song came from. Should I care? I love both the songs.