An album which opens your eyes and ears to what can be done within the blues idiom and just to its leftfield.
Eric Bibb is not one of the number of young guitar-based hotshots that are seeking to show how modern blues can develop, but one of its venerable exponents with a storied back catalogue of 40+ albums to his name. Bibb’s producer and songwriting partner, Glen Scott, has helped him to craft an album of rare variety of style and subtlety of instrumentation.
The opening title track breaks you gently into how this music will be approached. Written by his old school friend Janis Ian, it is essentially a blues-based process but sets out the sonic stall with atmospheric embellishments of slide guitar courtesy of Robbie McIntosh and the first of various types of fiddle accompaniment. For the second track, with the none-more-blues -title of Muddy Waters, an acoustic blues has Paul Jones guesting on Harp. So far so blues, but the bass line is played on a tuba.
The trilogy of opening blues tracks is completed with the lead-off single, This One Don’t, a solid blues stomp with groove, all based on one chord. As the lyrics explain, the approach is deliberately basic “Some songs got complicated melodies – this one don’t”. As Bibb explains in his press release, “This One Don’t was inspired by a wonderful gig at a blues festival in Vienna, where I played in front of a groovy crowd who loved dancing to the blues.”
From here the album starts to take a distinctly leftfield route away from the core blues sound. Didn’t I Keep Runnin’, is a story song inspired by a photograph of a black banjo player with a peg leg. Undoubtedly a recaptured escaped slave, Bibb tells the story against a funky backdrop and the ethereal accompaniment of a Hardanger fiddle, Norways national folk instrument.
This is the first of two story based songs, the second being Crossroads Marilyn Monroe. This a based on a true story about a “…Mississippi Delta Beauty Queen.” Married young to a controlling husband, she perjures herself at her husbands trial following the murder of a black man, “She lied….. she lied, for her husband Roy and that brother in law on trial for Emmett’s murder.” This left them “Free to lynch a 14 year old boy, down in Mississippi.” Bibb recounts that she then admits this some 50 years later to a journalist; however instead of disavowing this action, he finds solace that she does admit the truth for her sake and the sake of the world as “The truth will set you free.” This sense of hope and peace is one of the central themes of the album.
Further into the album there follows another group of three songs maintaining a subtle distance from traditional blues, taking an almost singer songwriter style to document the state of the world today. Leading off with New Window where Bibb contrasts the clearing up of shards of glass from a broken window with dealing with the state of the nation, this again ends with a hopeful lyrical motif, “Love is the key”. If You’re Free, is the second single and has a stunning video. Here Bibb takes the view that whilst there may be hunger and deprivation in even our western countries, if you are free to speak your mind this is a hard won liberty to be grateful for. The backing vocalists who have provided tasteful support throughout the album as each track requires, here become a choir. The last track of this sequence, Change, has a funky drum and bass over which McIntosh plays a beautiful melodic guitar solo whilst Bibb lays out a simple message of how we have to “Change our way of thinking”. The nearest point of reference would be the New Orleans flavours of Robbie Robertson’s solo work.
The final song on the record is the elegiac We Got To Find A Way, which ends on a note of hope and a plea for peace over a sparse acoustic backing track and the return of the Hardanger fiddle to great effect.
All the songs on this beautifully written, produced and sequenced album, have their place in the whole. It balances thoughtful sincerity, hope and a nuanced belief in the goodness of the world, with musical backing that is by turns atmospheric and subtle or basic, bluesy and funky.
