Evolutionary Love & Life’s uncanny tales,
untamed guitars and explosive textures — plus a guest shot by soul legend
Mighty Sam McClain — create an epic sweep; Drozdowski’s debut e-book to
coincide with album’s release
NASHVILLE,
TN — Listening to Love & Life,
the new album from Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen, is like taking an acid trip in
a time machine. Day-glo guitars slither through stories about old bluesmen and
coal miners. Tectonic plates of sound churn the past, present and future of
great American music into a stylistic kaleidoscope. And a dizzy spray of
vibrant slide six-string permeates the album’s performances, adding a fine
sonic mist of unpredictable virtuosity to the mysteries in its 11 tunes, which
ricochet between deep truths and bald-faced lies.
Drozdowski
made the new album Love & Life in
a tent down a dirt road in the woods on top of a mountain in the unincorporated
hamlet of Pasquo, Tennessee. That’s just another example of this highly
creative singer, songwriter, guitarist, bandleader and producer’s passion for
thinking outside the box. And there are plenty more within the dynamic, evocative
sixth album from Ted Drozdowski’s Scissormen.
Love & Life will be released on the Dolly Sez
Woof label on July 31. That same day Drozdowski, who is also an award-winning music
journalist and educator, will publish the first in a series of e-books, Obsessions of a Music Geek, Vol. 1: Blues
Guitar Giants.
Love & Life is evolutionary. For Drozdowski,
the album celebrates the expansion of his internationally touring duo
Scissormen — with stops at Bonnaroo and other major festivals under their belts
— into a fiery, flexible trio. That core trio sound is made even bigger, with
as many as seven of Drozdowski’s own guitar tracks layered on some cuts, while
capturing his finest songwriting and studio performances. He’s also joined on
the album by legendary soul singer Mighty Sam McClain and Grammy nominated
organist Paul Brown. For great American music, it proves that traditional
styles can be celebrated with authenticity while creating tunes that are
contemporary, timeless and slammin’.
“I wanted
every song on this album to tell a story and be deeply rooted in great American
music,” Drozdowski relates. “I also wanted to apply more elaborate production
techniques, like multi-tracking my guitars and treating them with multiple
effects during and after recording, to create a broader, unpredictable sonic
palette, and just plain get weird. That weird streak is what made the pillars
of American music — Muddy Waters, Bill Monroe, Sam Phillips and others —
original, authentic and evolutionary, and somewhere along the way the truth and
beauty of honest weirdness got lost. I want to bring it back.”
Love & Life starts with “Beggin’ Jesus,” a
riff-fueled yarn about temptation and the conflict between good and evil, with
a wicked, sizzling, doubled slide guitar solo. A few songs later, “The River”
unfolds as a ghost story. A swirling mist of guitars and Drozdowski’s soulful
voice recreate the mystery and magic of the foggy, moonlit night along the
banks of the Tallahatchie River in North Mississippi that inspired the song.
It’s one of the album’s few tracks cut without overdubs, recorded live in one
take.
Drozdowski
pays tribute to two of his friends and mentors on the album. “Watermelon Kid”
is an homage to the bluesman Watermelon Slim, and “R.L. Burnside (Sleight
Return)” is a funky, psychedelic recollection of a night the juke joint blues
patriarch came to visit – replete with a slinky groove and layers of backwards
guitar. Drozdowski’s own family history as Pennsylvania coal miners fuels the
grinding, visceral Mississippi hill country music inspired “Black Lung Fever,”
citing an occupational affliction that claimed both of his immigrant
grandfathers before he was born.
The
romantic ode to the Bluff City “Let’s Go To Memphis” reflects the classic sound
and spirit of Stax Records, with shimmering B-3 organ and four intricately
woven guitar tracks. But the song’s star is the legendary soul singer Mighty
Sam McClain, who first appeared on the R&B charts in 1966 and whose
passionate command and emotional depth are practically unparalleled today. “Sam
and me have been friends for more than 20 years,” says Drozdowski. “I’d hoped
to someday write a song worthy of his voice, and now I’m thrilled and honored
by his performance.”
“Our friendship has
grown over the years to a very beautiful place in our lives,” McClain concurs.
“When Ted asked me if I would do a song with him, Hell, I couldn’t wait. When
he sent me ‘Let’s Go To Memphis,’ I liked the title right away, because it was
so Ted. I’ve heard him talking about Memphis and Nashville for so long. So
‘Let’s Go to Memphis’ was a no brainer for me! I would have sung almost
anything for a chance to do this with Ted. But ‘Let’s Go to Memphis’ is a great
song, written by a great person.”
Fans of
the stripped-down juke joint aesthetic that has governed the sound of Ted
Drozdowski’s Scissormen until now will dig “Can’t Be Satisfied,” a raw take on
the Muddy Waters classic as a full-throttle duet for drums and diddley bow – in
this case, an intensely electrified version of the home-made one-string instrument
that gave Bo Diddley his name. There’s also a solo number, “Dreaming On the
Road,” that features Drozdowski playing resonator guitar. But throughout the
disc a multitude of effects-laden six-strings slip in and out of the mix like
foxes in a henhouse, defining his own sonic terrain among musical innovators.
To
Drozdowski, risk-taking is an essential part of being an artist. Since the
1980s his bands have always pushed toward new ground. As a primary force in the
alternative-rock band Vision Thing, the textural music ensemble Bloodblister
and the explosively guitar-intensive Devil Gods, his narrative songwriting and
tireless sonic explorations won him a cult following.
That cult
has grown considerably since he established Scissormen a decade ago, under the
influence of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Jessie Mae Hemphill and other
totems of Mississippi hill country blues. “R.L. in particular got me to play
this music, which I initially resisted,” Drozdowski says. “But his
encouragement helped me find my voice and my sound.
“After
meeting and becoming friends with R.L., Junior and Jessie, who were making some
of the most profound music I’d ever heard, yet living in obscurity and poverty,
I devoted myself to bringing the music they and similar artists made to more
people,” Drozdowski says. First, that was as a music journalist, and he
received the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Journalism in
1998, in part as a result of that effort. Next, he became a visceral
torchbearer with Scissormen, physically taking this deeply rooted music to a
wider and more diverse audience with playful, high-energy performances built
around his singing and incendiary slide guitar showmanship. Club crowds are as
likely to find Drozdowski sitting in their laps, standing on tabletops and
sliding with every object imaginable as they are to see him on stage. Another
mentor, free jazz guitar granddaddy Sonny Sharrock, also had a major influence
on Drozdowski’s slide playing.
Drozdowski
has released five earlier recordings bearing the Scissormen name, including the
2012 collaboration with the award-winning music filmmaker Robert Mugge, BIG SHOES: Walking and Talking the Blues.
The CD+DVD set was built around a Mugge documentary starring Drozdowski that
premiered at the Denver Film Festival. He has also taken the band across the US
and to Europe, playing up to 100 dates a year at everything from the major
festivals Bonnaroo, Memphis in May and France’s Cognac Blues Passions to
theaters to clubs to coffeehouses.
“Love & Life begins a new chapter for
me, where I can connect all the dots of what excites me musically to realize my
own vision of great American music as a vital, original and still evolving art
form,” says Drozdowski. “But I couldn’t have begun to record it without help. I
conceived of this album five years ago, but didn’t have the funds to go
forward.” Enter Robert E. McClain, Jr., owner of the one-of-a-kind Omega Lab
studio atop a mountain high above Nashville’s famed Loveless Café, and Whit
Hubner, host of the Mando Blues Show, a program on Radio Free Nashville that’s
recorded live at the tent — a ProTools based “green” studio with surround sound
capability that draws less power than the average blow dryer.
“Rob and
Whit, who are dear friends, invited me to make the album at Omega Lab,” say
Drozdowski. But eventually costs intruded on the album’s progress, so
Drozdowski turned to his fans, launching a successful Indiegogo campaign that
raised nearly $14,000. “Knowing that more than 160 people from nine countries
had my back when I needed them fills me with gratitude and makes me feel like
I’m on the right path,” Drozdowski says. “And I intend to keep following it,
wherever it takes me.”
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