“The darkness is creeping all over my soul / hold me closer to that flame” sings Eric Bolander on this song taken from his album ‘The Wind‘ (due out March 29th). For Eric Bolander the darkness is real – when he explains about the album it’s clear that for all its big country-come-folk-rock sounds it draws on a lot of negative experiences. For example the song ‘Oh Lord‘ which relates closely “I had a cousin who was burned alive in a car. It was marked as an accident. He was caught up in drugs. From what I understand, he owed money to the wrong people“.
Bolander was something of a latecomer to music – he didn’t pick up a guitar until college days, and that’s despite having familial connections to several Bluegrass players. His earlier releases sit squarely under Rock, but ‘The Wind‘ has seen him steered by his producer Duane Lundy (Sturgill Simpson, Ringo Starr) to record a more traditionally-rooted and sensitive storybook. It’s a music that fits well with Eric Bolander’s sensitivity to the human condition, which perhaps itself stems primarily from his humble roots in the small eastern Kentucky town of Garrison, stretching at the edge of the Appalachian foothills and running along the Ohio River Valley. Growing up in a low-income household instilled within him a sense of hard work and fighting for what he wanted in life. His mother was a homemaker and his father a union carpenter and construction worker, both pivotal forces behind his early development. Now Eric Bolander is an art teacher by day, and by night an Americana guitar-slinger with a pouch full of songs.
