“Greetings from Slaughter Creek” (Rivertale Productions, 2025) is the latest release by Italian roots musician Andrea Van Cleef. The album is a continuation of his fascination with americana music, filtered through his heritage. The live record serves as a journey through Van Cleef’s previous solo albums (“Horse Latitudes” 2024, “Safari Station” 2021, “Tropic of Nowhere” 2018, “Sundog” 2012), and ends with a cover of ‘Big River’, a tribute to Johnny Cash to whom Van Cleef’s current sound is indebted. The live performance was recorded in the studios of producer and musician Rick Del Castillo, a collaborator of Hollywood director Robert Rodriguez.
Born in a small mountain town, Van Cleef resides nearby in Brescia, Lombardy, Northern Italy. He has been playing music since he was very young, at the end of the ‘90s. “I began taking this seriously and actually earning some money doing this around 2005/2006,” he said. Besides his solo work, he has played in a number of bands for many years, mainly in the European stoner rock scene (Van Cleef Continental, Vic Du Monte, Humulus). “Now I’m a solo artist, but I love being in a band, so I’m planning to play a bunch of shows with the band that helped me record my ‘Horse Latitudes’ album, the BlackJack Conspiracy.”
This mini-gig was recorded for AUK in Simone Grazioli’s home studio in Rodengo Saiano, Italy. Grazioli is the guitar/mandolin player who is accompanying Van Cleef in the video. “We’ve been playing as a duo as well as in a band setting for a long time now,” Van Cleef acknowledged. “He’s an accomplished guitar virtuoso and writes and sings his own songs as well.”
Van Cleef sings and writes exclusively in English, coloured by the creative and visionary Italian approach, as well as the pragmatism, also from a sonic point of view, of the Vallecamonica Mountains. And it is this unique and personal style that has garnered interest among insiders and fans of the genre. He has culled a number of fine songs from his discography for the live album, none better than ‘Wrong Side of a Gun’, recorded as a duet with Patricia Vonne, which wouldn’t be out of place in one of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.
With Grazioli at his side, you will see Van Cleef playing a cheap but cool Gretsch dobro. “I bought it because it’s built like a tank and comes with a great-sounding Fishman Spider pickup,” he noted in an email. “I’m also playing an old (older than me) Ibanez Concord before the lawsuit era of 1974. (You can see the “open book” headstock they had to change after the lawsuit occurred.) I found this guitar for $200 bucks in a basement in Milan. Simone plays his beautiful luxury acoustic Gibson and a magnificent Italian mandolin that sits so well in the mix of americana music, it’s unbelievable.”
Andrea Van Cleef composed the three songs in his mini-gig. His impressions are below, as well as links to where you can look for his music.
- Arrows – I thought I was writing a blues song, or my own idea of a blues song. While recording it in Kyle, Texas, the sound engineer (Rick Del Castillo) said, “Hey, cool, a British folk song”! You never know how you really sound like until somebody else gives you his/her own opinion!
- The Longest Song – is actually a very short song, but if you put together, side by side, each and every song I’ve been singing since 1998 (when I played my first show ever that September), you can see it’s been all one song. A very long one indeed.
- Dry Queens– I wrote this in 2005. Alternative rock was still a thing at that time, I guess. The original version was full of electricity and distortion, a weird guitar played in a small Vox combo for bass. Sometimes I play an acoustic version of this song, and it brings back a lot of memories.
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