It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going to Love You The Best #1

Do you remember your reaction the first time you heard Karen Dalton? Honestly, now. I remember mine – it was probably in the early 2000s. I was doing the blog Agony Shorthand, and there was another music blog/site/”online magazine” called Blastitude who’d cover all sorts of strange noise and post-hardcore craziness, yet who also had an incongruous soft spot for the female singer-songwriters and girl groups of the 60s (as I very much did). I’m not sure if it was Larry Dolman or Tony Rettman, but one of those dudes was seriously championing Karen Dalton and her 60s/70s recordings, so I went and checked her out as one does on the internet, and was like – ugh. Couldn’t get past her voice, which was a strange, froggy thing that almost sounded like someone trying to emote & intonate through a cleft palate. 

But friends, this is why we show grit and persevere when we encounter barriers. It didn’t take long for me to see just how beautiful, pained and otherworldly her folk music was, and to really embrace her flawed voice – if it is even flawed – the way we embrace Neil Young and Bryan Ferry for their own vocal foibles. Then when Karen Dalton’s archival 1966 tapes came out and I heard ‘em – well wow, that really did it for me. She entered my pantheon of farsighted, tragic geniuses immediately, and I cursed myself for ever having doubted her, even if she almost totally performed songs that were not written by herself. Who cares? Karen Dalton, especially in the 60s, was phenomenal, and I’m delighted that so much of her music from that period has flowed out to the people in recent years.

It was into this vortex of unbridled enthusiasm that a one-off, small-batch fanzine called It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best came into my life. It was put out in the UK by an outfit (or person) called Cherry Styles, who also put out a Patti Smith fanzine and one called The Chapess, and who seem to have gone mostly dark and missing from the internet. I think it was maybe 2015 or so that this came out on Cherry’s own Synchronise Witches Press? I believe that Cherry Styles and her enthusiasms were very much borne of and furthered by the “Tumblr era”, an era which now seems to have passed. 

Anyway! It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best is a “Karen Dalton fanzine”. It was accompanied by a cassette tape of murky, blown-out, proto-folk recordings by Bridget Hayden, one of our favorite discombobulating modern musicians here at FH HQ. That’s probably how I heard about it in the first place, though her music’s connection to Dalton’s is tenuous at best. The fanzine is a collection of tribute articles, poems, pieces of art and even a Bean Bread recipe (!), all in tribute to St. Karen. It’s a cool, personal, homespun, underground fanzine all the way. If you heart Karen Dalton, you’ll heart this fanzine.

You know what’s even better? The Karen Dalton documentary In My Own Time that was one of the very first films I saw in a theater after getting myself vaxxed & done. I’m not exaggerating when I saw that it’s one of my favorite music docs ever, right up there with The Decline of Western Civilization, Gimme Shelter, Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt and Dig!. See it! Then buy that 1966 LP, and then offer me up your No Mag collection in exchange for It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best #1 and we’ll talk!