Album

Forty-Seven Dollars is the fourth record from Dixie Deadshot, and her most stripped-down. After the full-volume assault of Deadshot, she pulls the production back to sparse beats and deliberate silence for nine tracks about the actual arithmetic of making art with nothing. The title is the number in her account one October, the year every dollar had three jobs and could only do one, and the album is built on top of it. This is not a poverty album so much as a math album: wry, precise, and openly suspicious of anyone who calls being broke character-building. The stories are small and exact. A five-song EP recorded on a toilet lid in a Lexington bathroom, still sitting on a stranger's hard drive. Venues that pay in drink tickets and "exposure." Two AM entries from the studio notebook. A twenty-two-mile drive home from Breaks with the gas light on and no open station. Two tracks honor Cody, the Floyd County manager who quietly deferred his cut for two years and the library-computer release strategy that somehow worked. It ends with "Forty-Seven (Reprise)," a direct message to anyone still counting to the cent: don't wait for the budget, make the thing now, with what you have. The tile has good acoustics.