Here's a great new folksy blues artist I have grown to like. He is from CA. Love his music. If you have a chance to listen to a sample of his work, please do.
Tony Furtado
Bare Bones
Brian Gearing
Monday, May 16, 2005
Merging the shuffling, lead-footed tales of the red-clay south with progressive songwriting and intricate, modern composition, Tony Furtado has joined peers like Kelly Joe Phelps as a new traditionalist genre bender of the finger-picked Delta blues style. His newest release, Bare Bones, captures Furtado alone on stage with nothing but an old guitar and a bag full of songs that span a career spent bridging the divides between American lands and cultures.
While songs like opener “These Chains” and “False Hearted Lover’s Blues” push a weary northern troubadour’s heavy feet down the dry, dusty roads of the depressed deep south, Furtado occasionally takes the time for a break beneath a shady tree. The singer’s sunny melody and stubborn optimism shine ironically through the stormy imagery of “Standing in the Rain” and “Can You Hear the Rain,” which answers itself as late spring showers echo quietly on the windows of an empty house warmed by a hearth and a love that hangs in the air even when its object is miles away.
If there’s one complaint here, it’s with Furtado’s vocal range: while the guitarist’s lightning-fast picking and bottleneck slide sprint in and out of Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream,” his droning vocal loses some of the original’s rock soul. On the traditional prison work song, “Oh Berta, Berta,” however, the same monotone lends a fitting resignation to a condemned man’s loving appeal.
In the end, Furtado’s vocal shortcomings are more than compensated for by his flowing, organic virtuosity and storytelling gifts, both often one and the same. The instrumental medley of “St. John’s Fire/Bolinas” sings a wordless story, and Furtado’s sparkling banjo work may likely draw associations with newgrass stalwarts like Bela Fleck, but such short-sighted comparisons miss the spirit of Furtado’s music. On an album that gives equal time to traditional delta blues (“Cypress Grove Blues”), Appalachian anthems (“Rove Riley Rove”) and contemporary composition (“I Will/Hazel Comes Home/Willow John”), Furtado shows that he is merely a vessel, relating stories of other times and places with his own unique voice.