For the past few months I’ve been getting together once a week or so with Hank Van Sickle working on tunes. Hank is an accomplished bassist (Electric Bass and Double Bass) who has played with a wide range of blues artists and shared or assisted with production on many as well. He and I both have been working on developing music that reflects the influences of roots music without being tied down to recreating or imitating a genre or style. A lot of what we have been doing is working on mostly “live” recordings in his living room (the bottleneck guitar on this track is overdubbed , but it was first pass/single take with no edits). Hank’s double bass playing and his solo help take it out of that “period” thing. . . I had a lot of fun playing slide on this (open A, no capo and a basic bottleneck), it felt good so there was no need for take 2.
Solitary Man is a blues, some of our other tunes are country, jazz or whatever influenced. Lyrically the song is pretty straightforward. Its contemporary blues, expressing the fears and hopes that a lot of us probably feel in the New Depression. One of the great things about the web and sites like NoDepression.com, is that we can communicate directly to like minded people. Its a gift. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this project but also about YOUR musical journey
