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Seasick Steve
Postiwyd gan Sam (Sub-Editor) o Caerdydd - Cyhoeddwyd ar 25/09/2009 am 00:00
Seasick Steve has lead an interesting life and isn’t backwards in coming forwards about it. His songs are filled with tales of his youth, sitting atop the music of his youth, boogie-woogie, country and good old-fashioned blues.
He’s been a hobo, a tramp and a bum, the differences as he explains are “Hobos are people who move around looking for work, tramps are people who move around but don't look for work, and bums are people who don't move and don't work. I've been all three.”
Hopping on freight trains and travelling the United States looking for work; even then Seasick Steve was A Man From Another Time, a point he recognises, naming his new album just that.
Featuring the rough and ready production of his previous two solo albums Dog House Music and I Started Out With Nothing And I Still Got Most Of It Left, Seasick Steve utilises ancient recording equipment, old ribbon microphones from the forties, a battered Fender amp and the atmospherics of the recording studio to get the echo, the space, the reverb. All analogue and loosely edited, you can hear the musicians move, snippets of conversations, breath, life. None of that digital nonsense, that clean pristine soulless sheen for Seasick Steve. “Me and computers don’t see eye to eye”.
But that only goes some of the way to helping explain Seasick Steve’s unique sound. Rarely a piece goes by that doesn’t mention his array of bizarre instruments including the “Three-String Trance Wonder”, a haunted guitar that a friend ripped him off over, the “One Stringed Diddley Bow”, basically a guitar string nailed to bit of 2x4 and the “Mississippi Drum Machine” which is a box. That he stomps on.
Sometimes you get musicians whose back-story is more interesting than their music but this isn’t the case with Seasick Steve. His music is too good to be dismissed in such a manner.
Rough and ready and real, Seasick Steve’s new album A Man From Another Time is out on October 19th and he plays the Wales Millennium Centre on November 12th.
