The album takes the listener on a journey
Nathan Bell – Red, White And American Blues (it couldn’t happen here)
Format: CD – Digital
Label: Need To Know Music
Release: 2021
Release date: October 21, 2021
Recorded in 2019 in Capitola, California at Skunkworks Studios, and delayed two years by the Pandemic, ‘Red, White and American Blues (it couldn’t happen here)’ remains relevant in every way.
In 13 original songs, featuring guest appearances by Patty Griffin, Regina McCraryand Aubrie Sellers, the album takes the listener on a journey, from the Dead Thumb Blues of South Texas, through Swamp Music, American Roots Rock, and West Coast Spoken Jazz Poetry to the Folk stages of London.
“This is the kind of artist that Nathan Bell is: The year Donald Trump was impeached as president of the United States, Nathan was writing songs that would make up Red, White and American Blues (it couldn’t happen here), the subtitle a direct reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel imagining the possibility that the people of the United States of America could be mindlessly led to fascism. Like Lewis’s novel, this album could be the most important piece of literature of our particular moment in time. You may call that last sentence hyperbole, but I just call it honest. Red, White and American Blues is not a protest album, although it has protest songs. It’s not a Black Lives Matter album, but in these songs, Black lives matter. It’s an American album. It’s a set of songs about a broken country and its broken people.
It’s a cautionary album.”
Mark Kemp, author of ‘Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South’
Tracks:
01. Angola Prison
02. American Gun (featuring Patty Griffin)
03. American Blues (for GSH)
04. Retread Cadillac (lightnin’) (featuring Regina McCrary)
05. A Lucky Man (for my father, the original Dead Man) (featuring Patty Griffin)
06. Wrong Man for the Job
07. When You’re Dead (Ghost reflects on his dire circumstances)
08. Mossberg Blues (featuring Regina McCrary)
09. Running on the Razor (family) (featuring Aubrie Sellers) (EXPLICIT)
10. Zensuit’s Samadhi Blues
11. Monday, Monday (the bony fingers reprise)
12. To Each of Us (a shadow) (featuring Patty Griffin)
13. Folding Money (you better move along)
All songs by Nathan Bell
