Author Archives: Jude Warne

PHOTO: CASSIE SCOTT | Joel Paterson knows the guitar. He relates to its history, believes in its progression of instrumental prowess, its evolution of sonics over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and he creates his own version to introduce a new modern guitar dialogue for other players to commune with and respond to. Studying the antics and musical choices of guitarists from long ago and recent pasts, players ranging from Blues pioneer Robert Johnson to The Clash’s Mick Jones, Paterson maintains an intimate relationship with the instrument—which can only result in topnotch musical output.

His influences are more complex than old blues and punk. The Chicago-based Paterson primarily favors a carefully curated group of mid-century guitar players who pursued excellence in instrumental acumen above all else. Danish player Jorgen Ingman and the legendary Les Paul serve as inspirations.

Occasionally confined by the present-day limitations of non-commercial music among record companies and managers, Paterson tries to keep his sunny side up. Though he is a regularly booked musical act in the clubs and venues of Chicago, with a long-standing residency at the well-renowned Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, Paterson is always generating other projects too. Which occasionally leads him to collaborate on or produce the pop-rock works of other musicians like Annie Dolan, with their recent release Attaboy Girl (2024).

He is a studio wizard, adept at the classic rock era’s overdub process that creates a unique, painstakingly layered full guitar sound on records. But it is Paterson’s instrumental studio album releases from the last ten years, like the fascinating Beatles cover album Let it Be Guitar! (2019) and his underground hit Christmas record Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar (2017), with follow-up The More the Merrier (2023), that truly demonstrate his immenseness as a player, and showcase the unique irreplaceable value of his ardent history-forward musical quest in the 21st century.

In conversation with Paterson, we learn more about his musical motivations, how he precisely sculpts a complicated setlist, and why the guitar is still the most fascinating musical instrument around.

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Boz Scaggs has always been a musical artist of complexity. He founded his connection to music through the blues, but his lasting legacy is one of glamorous and romantic pop songwriting.

He possessed a somewhat shy and sensitive demeanor never totally at home in the public eye, yet his claim to several chart-topping singles and albums, particularly the millions-selling and critically acclaimed Silk Degrees (1976), demanded constant exposure. The persona he expressed through his music was laid back, effortlessly cool, sophisticated, stylish, romantically charming, and suave. But the immense success he achieved in his career pointed in part to the driven and determined artist within.

Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs examines the uniqueness of these contradictions and Boz Scaggs’s sixty-plus-year career and his rich and diverse musical catalogue. Over the decades, Scaggs collaborated with an array of talented heavies, from the Steve Miller Band to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (which included a young Duane Allman) on Boz Scaggs (1969), from the session players on Silk Degrees (1976) who would form the hit band Toto to Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald on the Dukes of September’s 2010 Rhythm Revue tour.

This first-ever book on Boz, written by The Vinyl District writer Jude Warne (author of America, the Band: An Authorized Biography) is constructed around intensely thorough analysis of his complete discography, and new and exclusive in-depth interviews with a selection of Scaggs’s associated colleagues from his vast career.

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PHOTO: AXEL DUPEUX | Towards the end of his memoir Under a Rock, which hit shelves on June 11th via St. Martin’s Press, Blondie co-founder Chris Stein reflects: “I remember that back then, Debbie and I never felt we’d quite succeeded, that we’d only attained some cult status; it’s only now in the rearview mirror that people consider Blondie as part of some grand showbiz hierarchy.”

Over the course of the memoir that covers Stein’s youth and formative years as an artist up until present day, Stein confronts his own life and artistic legacy with a down-to-earth grace and enlightened candor rarely found in a rock autobiography. And by reliving Stein’s and his group’s past along with him, one is left with the knowing feeling that they most definitely did succeed insofar as leaving a permanent cultural and artistic imprint on the world of music.

Other musicians contending with the weight of Blondie’s art-forward legacy in a continually digitized world, and the glittering charisma of a beautiful and compelling band frontwoman Debbie Harry (who contributes a warmly enjoyable foreword to the book) may have selected a cynical jaded tone for their first-person narrative. Faced with the alternately perplexing and bizarre post- COVID reality of the 2020s decade we are currently living through, Stein instead uses Under a Rock to treat both the collective cultural past and his own personal past with the respect, inquiry, and celebration they deserve, without negating or damning the present.

But Stein’s understanding of New York art-grunge founded in the era of the mid-late ’70s and ’80s CBGB and Max’s Kansas City rock club glory, and the colorful living that went with it, is well articulated in his book, reminding readers of the music scene’s vitality and immediate youth-based power that still resonates in Blondie’s recordings and those of the band’s contemporaries like Television, the Ramones, and Patti Smith.

Together with Debbie Harry, Stein founded Blondie in 1974, serving as its guitarist and ideological force. The group’s ’76 self-titled debut album introduced an art-first, pop-music-honoring sonic world that continued for a number of lauded records, which included a slue of chart-topping singles whose sonic adventurousness continues to influence musicians today. Blondie designed an aural character that married downtown New York art-hip with occasionally radio-friendly melody, molding a brand new sound character that left a dramatic mark upon the world of music.

In conversation with Chris Stein, infused with his inherent New York-cool, we learn more about the roots of Blondie and the origins of his new memoir Under a Rock, his and Blondie’s creative ideologies and artistic influences, and his ongoing captivation with the Burning Man Festival.

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Muldoon’s Picnic is the recurring music-and-poetry event at the Irish Arts Center in New York. Occurring just about once a month throughout the past year, the Picnic is hosted by legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon. His own rock band, Rogue Oliphant, serves as the house band who perform several of their own original tracks during the evening.

Rogue Oliphant, who released their third studio album Highlights of the Low Life digitally just last year, features an intriguing lineup of talented musicians with varied histories: Chris Harford (guitar and vocals), Ray Kubian (drums and vocals), David Mansfield (guitar), Cáit O’Riordan (bass and vocals), and Warren Zanes (guitar and vocals) are all members. Some of these names may be especially familiar to you; O’Riordan was a member of the Pogues, Mansfield was a part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the ’70s, and Zanes is an author of music books including the successful Tom Petty biography released in 2015.

The group’s new album offers up a generous musical offering, an astounding twenty-six tracks. Given the plethora of unique talents among Rogue Oliphant’s band members and their overall leaning toward the literary, the listening experience of Highlights of the Low Life is multifaceted. The title track is a standout, with a jaunty rock sound, whose lyrics list quite comically a rigmarole of antics and past deeds, that justly qualify the character-narrator as welcome in the lowlife.

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Bob Dylan contains multitudes, as articulated in his song riffing on Walt Whitman’s concept, on the 2020 album release Rough and Rowdy Ways. And this is evident once again in Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. 

Throughout his complex and regenerative career, all of his different sides, and the characters within him, are tangible. The best writer is often the most empathic, able to inhabit the world and emotional memory of a character who exists universes away or who does not exist in real life at all. He is a changer, a shifter, malleable, and belonging to the world and all of its individuals and their probable and potential selves, beyond his own assigned self.

Dylan’s career has been defined by so many self-reinventions, in sound and performance persona. It is this core belief in self-reinvention, and the awareness of innumerable possibilities that lie in creative story-songwriting, that have defined Dylan as a writer and major creative force. His only loyalty has been to his everchanging ideas.

The less that one is attached to the self, the more they can become many selves, sometimes several in one hour or in one day. The less that one is aware of the self through the lens of ego, the more they are free to absorb as a sponge that which is around them, that which has come before them, and that which they would like to be. Taking all of this into account, Dylan’s new book is not surprising at all. It fits and suits him most authentically, paying homage to pop music history that he himself is so much a part of and will be remembered so as such too.

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There was a moment during the Woodstock Music Festival of ’69, when its founder, the 24-year-old Michael Lang, was confronted with a generation-defining decision. People had started to climb the fences surrounding the stage and audience parameters in an attempt to gain entry. Lang had to make a call. Rather than tightening a hold on admittance, he decided in the moment to make Woodstock the free festival it was ultimately meant to be. Nearly half a million people was the ultimate headcount. Lang’s decision was an example of the greater good of enlightened ideas surpassing monetary interest and potential gain, something the hippie counterculture of the 1960s was all about. It is a spiritual-success story in an instance. 

Then there is Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, the publication created in 1967 that gave voice to the youth culture, the hippies, and leant them a stake in the Real World. The magazine invented a pre-internet meeting place where rock ‘n’ roll was given the reverence that it deserved, in which once could connect with likeminded music-mad people. Last month Jann published his memoir Like a Rolling Stone, a weighty tome surpassing five hundred pages. It came somewhat on the heels of the well-received and somewhat character-damning Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan, Wenner’s biographer who he eventually parted ways with mid-project.  Like a Rolling Stone is Wenner by Wenner, period.

One of the most immediately identifiable characteristics in his book is his huge ego. In many ways it’s deserved. He was present through the second half of the twentieth century, lived with eyes wide open through the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and from a privileged seat and ideal point-of-view. But solely and uniquely, he saw the need to give voice to this collective perspective, that it was worth a try to build a seat of power, and to garner recognition for it from the straight world at large. Rebellion against The Establishment is fantastic, and valid, and provides ample opportunity for creating a new world order—but what better way to rebel than by meeting the enemy on his own ground and forcing him to recognize a worthy adversary.

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Lovelorn music man Lester the Nightfly, a major player on Donald Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly, is a character with a complex identity. At first contemplation, he’s a jazz DJ on the nightshift during the golden, Camelot era of American life in the early ’60s, fielding calls from a cornucopia of after-hour nutsos while holding steady with his jazz heroes whose music he showcases across the night and out into the airwaves.

But upon further inquiry, Lester is made of deeper more profound soul-stuff. He wishes he “had a heart like ice,” so that he wouldn’t have to feel so much, wouldn’t get attached to someone outside of himself, wouldn’t fall in love. But his heart isn’t made of ice, he isn’t invincible, and he ultimately cannot be driven solely by the cerebral prowess in his possession. Lester is a reluctant romantic.

And so is Donald Fagen, known primarily for his work alongside Walter Becker in the jazz-forward rock group Steely Dan. Part of what Fagen’s solo discography speaks to is his intense musicality and identification with traditional pop songwriting, that of Bacharach and David and Henry Mancini—writers of legend. Where Steely Dan went heavy on the cerebrally obscure lyrical content, sometimes belied by their ear-catching musical accompaniment, Fagen’s solo discography, with four studio albums thus far, has steered more toward the traditional, but of course never sacrificing the signature snark.

Donald published his own memoir Eminent Hipsters in 2013 which was a mix of personal memory and tour diary showcasing the plight of the rock legend thrust forward into the future, now older and forced to encounter the modern world in all of its misguided TV-baby misery.

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PHOTOS: ROBERT ASHCROFT | “Get a little courage, find a little backbone,” urges Julian Lennon in “Every Little Moment,” the second track off his reflective new album Jude, in stores September 9th—and 10th on vinyl, in remembrance of his mother Cynthia Lennon’s birthday. Current and intensely relevant in its focuses of introspection and soul-searching—individually, and on behalf of the planet partly in turmoil—Jude was composed and produced over a span of years and shines as a beacon of authentic wisdom and earned insight, yet rooted in positivity.

The choice of album title, Jude, an allusion to Paul McCartney’s Beatles song written to Julian during a difficult time following his parents’ split—and his choice of album cover photo featuring his young self—suggests a kind of full circle of the individual. As in to know, understand, and feel close to one’s childhood self is to accept one’s truest, most uncompromised self.

In the past Lennon has alluded to having a love/hate relationship with the song “Hey Jude.” Releasing this album can be viewed as a revisiting of his childhood, and perhaps coming to terms with and accepting the past. Given that Get Back was released last year, which in part celebrated The Beatles’ legacy and brought the Let it Be era of the band’s career into a more finite documentation, that film’s journey in a way aligns with Lennon’s own journey as an artist, of revisiting feelings or episodes from one’s past and editing them differently and more comprehensively to reveal a more positive overall conclusion, and perhaps partly tying up loose ends in a spirit of enlightened acceptance.

Though Jude’s songs were composed and developed over a span of years, much of Lennon’s new album seems to encapsulate the shared mindset of humanity dealing with and trying to recuperate from the Covid era. “Save Me” speaks to someone seemingly unable to handle or cope with the darker sides of being alive. “You’re the only one I know / who lets the darkness come and go inside,” speaks to God maybe, the Universe, or just a friend who tolerates and who lives alongside the darker parts of the self and the world.

Dramatic, sweeping strings, commune with computerized effects to emotively articulate the reality of modern existence. “Breathe” highlights our common victimhood as we who keep the specters of despair at bay. Its lyrics detail the world’s collective feelings, that of generalized trauma accumulated by facing the state of the globe during these past number of bizarre and alienating years. “Breathe” as well should resonate with most listeners with its background sounds of children, an echo of lost innocence for the world.

On an album full of revelations, “Love Never Dies” is a standout, with a beautiful articulation of where our energy might go and what it might become once we die. There is evidence of earned wisdom, knowledge of what is important and real, and certainly what lasts. Lennon is in possession of a lush musical heritage given his parentage, but his individuality and unique artistic viewpoint transcend this fact, while still honoring it.

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When listening to band members John and Tom Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s cover of “Good Golly Miss Molly,” from their career-making second studio album Bayou Country (1969), one becomes immediately aware of several factors: the driving beat that begins and sustains the song through its conclusion, which never slows down for one moment complete with hand claps—and that wild guitar.

The recording never takes a breath, almost as though the whole track is sustained by one long inhale and exhale. And at the moment of transition before every “Good Golly” chorus—when Fogerty issues out the same set of lyrics—it’s almost as though he will run out of musical notes on which to detail the song’s thoughts and he’s rushing to squeeze them all in. This kind of intense energy, the exercising of which can only lead to total exhaustion, is what true rock ’n’ roll is made of.

The story of Creedence Clearwater Revival in the 1960s and ’70s, of John Fogerty’s drive and determination to become a true artist and performer, songwriter, and lush compositional mythmaker, is a fascinating one. CCR was a band who in part defined the sound of the late 1960s in American rock, who had its share of issues and squabbles, who was ultimately run by John and the vision he had for himself and his music which led to immense commercial success and a fair share of legal battles and artistic frustration in the decades following.

A Song for Everyone: the Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival (Hachette Books) by journalist John Lingan, seeks to tell the real tale of CCR, from its earliest incarnations under monikers the Blue Velvets in the 1950s, then the Golliwogs, and finally Creedence Clearwater Revival, to its dissolution in 1972. Well-researched and drawing from new interviews with Clifford and Cook and from John Fogerty’s 2015 memoir Fortunate Son, Lingan’s biography is straightforward and historically focused. He does a fine job of weaving the CCR story through American cultural history of the their era, helping to bring the tale to life for the reader and widen its scope.

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1,000 Masks is a new album release from California-based singer-songwriter Brynna Campbell. Its title track, whose themes run throughout the album, is a quick-paced and racing meditation on the various roles we inhabit throughout the course of a day, and the corresponding masks we wear to communicate these roles to the world around us. The result is an energetic sprint of a song that inspires the listener to reflect on their own mask-wearing, and the seemingly endless chase we are all on to maintain a successful balancing act for the needs of others, of our immediate selves, and of our individual ego dragons that never sleep.

In part, most of the album’s seventeen tracks swim through waters of the inner mind. Brynna Campbell offers a wry yet sensitive voice depicting the female experience amidst wistful piano lines that offer hope among somberness. Her musical character is in the spirit of intelligent chanteuses such as Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette, but with two feet planted firmly in 2022 and in full view of the year’s trials and tribulations.

Many of the songs’ voices are full of angst that only a pandemic era could have inspired, or at least brought out into the light—thoughts previously half in shadow. There is social anxiety (the title track) and a standout on the album,“Party” which cleverly articulates the tug of war that goes on inside the mind of a person who does—and does not—want to go into the party, and who focuses a great deal of energy amid the song’s chorus with the mantra “just get out of the car.” The songwriting brings to mind Andy Shauf’s similarly focused “Early to the Party,” yet offers a fresh female perspective.

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The Show is the latest studio album drop from New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Evan Toth. Its stylistic tone and overall sound are reminiscent of classic ’70s singer-songwriter records released during an era when The Album reigned supreme.

And, this nostalgic quality is brought even more to the forefront by the album’s backing band members themselves who are, in effect, Billy Joel’s core group from the ‘70s: drummer Liberty DeVitto, saxophonist (and organist) Richie Cannata, and guitarist Russell Javors. Classic Billy Joel albums Turnstiles, The Stranger, 52nd Street, Glass Houses, and the Nylon Curtain all featured these experienced instrumentalists, who today perform on their own as The Lords of 52nd Street. Original bassist Doug Stegmeyer sadly passed away in 1995, and Malcolm Gold has assumed the role.

Consider for a moment the sonic grandeur of such classic recordings as “New York State of Mind,” and pretty much the entirety of The Stranger, recordings for which The Lords are partly responsible. Echoes of this particular studio sound are ever-present on The Show, and Toth being a piano man himself, serves as an ideal frontman for such a band in this recording context, whose original songs are instrumentalized with the experienced studio musicians they deserve.

The Show offers the cohesion that ’70s concept or thematically-conscious records also did over the course of its ten original songs. Echoes of Billy Joel’s influence, via some song composition and vocal and piano delivery, can be heard throughout. Joel’s “self-conscious performer” songs like “Piano Man” and “Zanzibar” are echoed in Toth’s title-track “The Show,” which narrates his character’s experience surrounding a concert appearance.

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One of the running tenets that makes up the current incarnation of America the band’s creative creed is the idea that while Dewey Bunnell writes the group’s “outdoor songs,” like “A Horse with No Name,” “Ventura Highway,” and “Tin Man,” his bandmate and creative partner for the last fifty-one years, Gerry Beckley writes “I Need You,” “Daisy Jane,” and “Sister Golden Hair”—the “indoor songs.” Possessing a penchant for self-examination and introspection, Beckley favors the navigational terrain of the ever-elusive human heart—and its frenemy the mind—and the moments when they do and do not work together when carving out compositions.

America (originally a trio until band member Dan Peek departed the group in ’77) has left quite a number of ’70s-So-Cal-and-beyond culture-defining songs in its wake since debut hit single “A Horse with No Name” arrived in late 1971 in the UK, and in early 1972 in the US. And the band has led a corresponding road-life to keep such a legacy and long discography alive, having celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in the strangest of all last years, 2020, which was accompanied by the release of an all-encompassing boxed set, an authorized biography penned by yours truly, and a fiftieth anniversary multi-national tour, which has of course been delayed.

Gerry’s compositional character, like that of his bandmate Dewey, is an interesting one. As a songwriter his philosophy is in the school of “write ten to get two” good songs—which not surprisingly has resulted in a plethora of material since he began writing songs as a teenager. Although America has continued to record and release some quality studio albums in recent years, Gerry Beckley’s work has also led to his intermittently releasing solo studio recordings since 1995 with Van Go Gan.

Last month, Beckley released a solo best-of through Blu Elan Records entitled Keeping the Light On, which spawned an associated release of Beckley covers by an all-female cast of Blu Elan artists entitled Watching the Time. Available digitally, on CD, and on transparent double vinyl, the compilation is comprised of fifteen of Gerry’s favorite solo songs from his seven past solo records and five newly recorded tracks.

Keeping the Light On, taken as a whole, stands as a thorough overview of Beckley’s musical output as a solo artist, displaying in full his artistic totems: twin lyrical focuses of time and its passage, and romantic love and its myriad of complications and possibilities for ultimate bliss or total annihilation; intricate studio production; and of course, his McCartney-esque gift for crafting melody.

In a fun, lively, and enlightening chat with Beckley from his home in Sydney, Australia, we learn more about Keeping the Light On – the Best of Gerry Beckley’s genesis, Gerry’s long-standing working relationship with the home recording studio, and how his compositional career’s lyrical theme of time is about as universal as it gets.

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Hearty Har, whose creative nucleus consists of Shane and Tyler Fogerty, possesses a plethora of creative influences. And while the duo did cut some of their performative teeth backing up their dad—rock legend John Fogerty, the co-founder of Creedence Clearwater Revival—during recent live tours, Hearty Har’s true gift for musical expression appears to lie in recording studio prowess, or so the band’s debut studio album Radio Astro, released last month, would suggest.

The eloquence in execution and a simultaneous demonstration of artistic risk that Hearty Har’s album incorporates offers creative traits that in other quarters could cancel each other out. Here, in the making of Shane and Tyler Fogerty’s music, they coexist and amplify one another. Radio Astro sounds new, as it should, but it also sounds steeped in knowledge of the history of recorded sound—founded not only by the Fogerty’s familial musical legacy, but by Tyler and Shane’s acute listening and absorption of great albums from the past. Yet, instead of regurgitating sounds from previous eras, Hearty Har rebirths them into brand-new listening experiences.

The album’s songs are varied and experimental—psychedelia and heavy-horn sounds are sonic characters here. It’s admirable that Hearty Har chose to craft a song like “Radio Man” that relates to and reflects upon radio itself which many of us now associate with the golden era of rock ‘n’ roll—the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s—when radio was king and played a vital role in shaping people’s musical tastes and steering them toward records they should buy—a role which nowadays has more or less been assumed by the internet.

“Radio Man” is another contribution to that canon of songs that are in conversation with radio somehow, or with famed DJs like Wolfman Jack, as Todd Rundgren (“Wolfman Jack”) and The Guess Who (“Clap for the Wolfman”) chose to do. Hearty Har has also crafted an an epic instrumental number for the album. “Canyon of the Banshee” serves as a cinematic dream portrait set in southern California with echoes of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores. Such unique creative decisions point to the vastness of the group’s aesthetic ideology.

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Much like the families and groups from which it was bred and sprung, The Allman Betts Band has consistently thrived as a live performance act. But just last year they proved their studio mettle by releasing a debut album Down to the River, and in late August of this year—and what a strange and volatile year it has been for the universe—they released Bless Your Heart, a versatile, expansive, and guitar-driven record that serves as a testament to the band’s studio abilities.

Possessing a penchant for live performance The Allman Betts Band has configured themselves to operate within the newly outlined confines of these strange days. They are in the midst of a socially-distanced live tour—at select venues across the United States that vow to honor safety precautions—to share works from the new album. And what works they are. For those music fans still possessing some interest in the legacy of the guitar, Bless Your Heart does not disappoint.

The band is spearheaded by talented offspring of the legendary Allman Brothers Band: Devon Allman, son of Gregg, and Duane Betts, son of Dickey—not to mention bassist Berry Duane Oakley, son of founding member Berry. Through songwriting, production, and instrumental acumen, both Devon and Duane prove themselves to be worthy of their own independent musical footprint, while—to the probable satisfaction of longtime Allman Brothers fans—still being wise and thoughtful enough to honor the enduring legacy of the Allman Brothers Band.

Bless Your Heart is a modern album that seeks to make the old new again. There’s the authentically collar-grabbing album opener “Pale Horse Rider,” the 1970s-romantically charged epic “The Doctor’s Daughter,” the cross-country road trip of “Much Obliged,” and the scene-stealing, tripped-out yet sophisticated instrumental piece “Savannah’s Dream,” amidst a sea of solid and varied songs to create an album experience. The album proves that the echoes of classic rock are not dead and finished but instead still malleable and up for grabs. Plus, it’s been released as a nice-looking coke bottle clear, 180 gram vinyl double record.

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