This is the title track from Bob Bradshaw’s tenth album, which features twelve tracks recorded between October 2021 and October 2022, with a core band of Boston musicians – guitarists Andrew Stern and Andy Santospago, bass-player John Sheeran and drummer Mike Connors, as well as frequent collaborators Kris Delmhorst on vocals, James Rohr on keyboards and Chad Manning on fiddle, and other special guests.
The Boston based, Irish-born singer-songwriter told Americana UK that “This is a wry, tongue-in-cheek song about someone who’s very good – indeed ‘something of an expert’ – at being sad. He’s got a ‘… gift for finding hurt/Any excuse will do/for feeling blue’.” Having said that, there is a deeper meaning to be extracted – during the recording of the album Bradshaw lost his wife Connie to cancer: “I lost my mind when she got sick”, he says, adding “This is the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me. I somehow went back into the studio two months after Connie died and finished up the four or five songs I started with the band in 2021.”
Despite the title of the album, Bradshaw says, overall, “there’s not an arc or a theme as such”. It’s not all about feeling blue. “The pattern is, when I have half a dozen decent new songs, I’ll ask my bandmates if they have scraps for a few ballads or a few rockers, and we’ll take it from there. There’ll be a deliberate attempt to make those final songs fit in sonically and narratively with the others. When I knew the album was going to be called ‘The Art Of Feeling Blue,’ I had a sense what the next four or five songs should be.”
