Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. It’s a place
where restless teens road trip to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of
Mexico; a place where prisoners who are in for life compete in a rodeo while
the town watches; where a character can get lost in the humid afternoon and
where religion may not signify hope; and where rivers, never far away, carry
secrets behind levees. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified by
is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade
elsewhere,” he says.
The kicker? All of these postcards are based on true
stories. It’s a place that he’s been exploring for twenty years now, on the eve
of the release of his astonishing new album ‘Tilt & Shine’ on Crowville
Media. It is work that has earned him fans like noted author and Elvis Presley
biographer Peter Guralnick; New West Records artist Buddy Miller; journalist,
songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame staffer Peter Cooper; Todd Snider;
head of the Americana Music Association Jed Hilly; and Lucinda Williams, with
whom he dueted on the song “Down To The Well” (which was featured prominently
on an Oxford American compilation).
Before you even hear his vivid lyrics, you start feeling the
sound of that ’56 Gibson ES-125 tuned down to open D, often with the tremolo
flowing like a river, and an unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and
Sun Records. His MFA from the Iowa Poetry Writers’ Workshop allows him to
capture it with a degree of precision. As the New York Times put it in its
headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musican Or A Poet? Yes to Both.”
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