The title track of Chris Castle’s new album has the kind of folk-country-rock amalgam that signifies many of the roots of this music that we call Americana – multi-layered storytelling with hints of deeper meanings that, it you’re inclined, you can dig for. Music was clearly always going to be a major part of Chris Castle’s life, and he started early as he explains: “I was born a first-generation midwesterner, and raised in an Ohio trailer park by Pentecostal coalminers from eastern Kentucky. They’d migrated north, chasing factory jobs and a better life for their kids. They settled on concrete and music. I was singing in churches and at local festivals by the time I could hold a microphone, and playing bars at nine years old. When I was fourteen, my mother sold the trailer and moved us to Nashville, where I signed my first staff-writing deal before I was old enough to drive.”
It comes as no surprise then, that he has found himself at home alongside some of the godfathers of modern Americana music – Chris Castle has shared stages and studios with legendary artists like Garth Hudson (the Band), Chris Hillman (the Byrds), Tommy Ramone (the Ramones), Jimmy Webb, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Larry Campbell (Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson). And in fact it is Larry Campbell that has taken the producer’s chair for ‘Long Way To The Bottom‘, which was released on May 17th and is Chris Castle’s first new album for more than 10 years.
