Funny how things workout sometimes. No sooner had I finished rambling on about the PSA’s political songs than I got an email from singer Otis Gibbs saying that his new album Joe Hill’s Ashes was available for download.

 

I’d never heard of Otis Gibbs until I saw him support Billy Bragg just over a year ago – where he did a great job – and persuaded me to pick up all his albums in the bar after the show. Grandpa Walked the Picket Line, 49^th and Melancholy, Once I Dreamed of Christmas (not exactly an anti-Christmas album, but perhaps a realistic Christmas album – one where Santa stabs Lloyd the Reindeer in a bar fight and features the classic Crap for Christmas) and One Day our Whispers are all good examples of the blue-collar American singer songwriter’s art. There’s bits of folk and bits of rock and bits of blues and a dollop of country. Reading about his life (http://otisgibbs.com/) and listening to his lyrics you can see that Woody Guthrie was a big influence on the young Gibbs – and there’s some of Guthrie in the music, but the most obvious influence is Steve Earle (though, perhaps inevitably, there are threads from the likes Dylan, Springsteen and Willie Nelson on some of the tracks on some of the albums). Read more »

 

No excuses, just busy, but that’s probably going to change over the next few months so I thought I’d get back on the horse and see whether we cleared some hurdles (or something).

 

So, straight to business, having lost a lot of work to a computer malfunction recently I’ve been writing quite a lot. Read more »