During the creation of the Cave Singers' fourth album, Naomi, they added bass player, multi-instrumentalist, and Seattle nice guy Morgan Henderson to their assemblage. He's a highly cerebral musician whose rooted, willowy bass lines and flute sounds fit naturally within the Cave Singers' illumined folk framework. Through his experience playing various types of music with various types of bands over the years (the Blood Brothers, Past Lives, Fleet Foxes), Henderson has developed a keen sense of what a song needs. He knows how notes should be delivered, and his palette of ways to play is wide and apt. Naomi, as an album, is a continuance and extension of the Cave Singers' celestial riffed-bluegrass sound. With Henderson involved, Peter Quirk, Derek Fudesco, and Marty Lund have broadened and burnished their Blue Ridge Mountain hook-stomp and groove. Quirk's vocals animate with revival and traveling-medicine-show tones. "Karen's Car" takes you to a place in Toccoa, Georgia—close to the Carolina/Tennessee borders. (Home to James Brown in his youth.) There's an abandoned shed in some thick-ass woods near the dark-green shade of Lake Rabun. Ivy overgrows the shed, its one window is busted out, and water moccasins are all around. I think it used to be a still.

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