A Charm / A Blade

Houck wrote it, and Pete Bischoff engineered it along with the following track, Muchacho's Tune. It was an album track rather than a single. The Boston Globe called it a rollicking country-rocker that brings back the exuberant horns of Aw Come Aw Wry. The Austin Chronicle heard it revisit the broken, one-man choir first used on Pride. Beats Per Minute called it the grand and boisterous closer to the album's first side, and Flagpole counted it among the revelatory tracks, with yelled epiphanies and chanted melodies. Pitchfork picked out the dryly whispering bowed harmonics that open it.

The track features Houck on guitar, organ, shakers and rattlers, Jeff Bailey on bass, Bobby Hawk on fiddle, Ricky Ray Jackson on pedal steel, Scott Stapleton on piano and clavinet, Christopher Marine on drums and bongo drums, David Torch on conga, and Kyle Resnick, Benjamin Lanz and Jon Natchez on trumpet, trombone and bass saxophone. John Agnello mixed it.

The upload in the hypersongs web is the Muchacho album recording.