New Music 2017 - Part 7 - Otis Gibbs - Mount Renraw

Serendipity has played a large rôle in determining that which appears in these pages and so it is with this artist, whom I knew nothing about until I poked my camera lens over the door of the Saloon Bar at Truck Festival 2014. This is that picture. Why wouldn't one want to be party to a gig like this?

Otis Gibbs, Saloon Bar stage, Truck Festival, 18 July 2014.

It was around  a month before the release of his LP 'Souvenirs of a Misspent Youth'. I was smitten - it was exactly the start of my ongoing infatuation with this most unlikely, yet astonishing, of festival stages.  That album, like the others before it is down-to-earth roots songwriting and performance. It is also far more complicated than it might seem on first listen.
This is the follow-up by the native of Indiana and released into a world now full of uncertainty, which is grist to his mill.

'Mount Renraw' - Otis Gibbs (Wanamaker Recording Company, 13 January 2017).

Otis Gibbs - Mount Renraw:

• Ed's Blues (Survival)
• Bison
• Great American Roadside
• Sputnik Monroe
• Empire Hole
• Blues For Diablo
• 800 Miles
• Copper Coloured Fools
• Kathleen
• Lucy Parsons
• Wide Awake

If this, from the previous LP, doesn't resonate with you in some way or another then I wonder why I write about stuff at all.


'The Darker Side of Me' (official video). The railway footage in this is actually entirely shot in the UK. It will, obviously, make putting locations to the lyrics quite impossible!