longmanmall

“Katie Miss” borrows an age-old melody most often associated with the song “Louis Collins.” The opening song, “Milk and Sugar,” kicks off with no-doubt-about-it blues guitar riffs, but also uses metaphor to thinly disguise the salacious thoughts on the singer's mind — a trick that likely dates to the birth of the blues. “Get Going” is reminiscent of the twisted blues of “Highway 61 Revisited”-era Bob Dylan, with a touch of Allman Brothers thrown in.

“Fixin to Die,” which is set for a Feb. 22 release, “is the kind of record I've been meaning to make for a lot of years,” Love said. He explained that, after an early fascination with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, he went into a musical phase that was filled with the bluesman John Hammond and other blues greats.

In fact, Love has made records before in the vein of “Fixin to Die.” His first album, made independently, was the solo, acoustic “Street Side Blues.” After G. Love & Special Sauce began to establish itself with their 1994 eponymous debut, Love would occasionally put out underground releases that were far more roots than rag-mop. “In the King's Court” was super stripped down; Love describes “G. Love Has Gone Country,” which prominently featured pedal steel guitar, as his “Johnny Cash/Bob Dylan country album.”

But the various Sony-affiliated labels that Love recorded his first handful of albums with wanted to push the stripped-down Love to the background. “The label would say, ‘Let's make the big hit record first' — they always want a record that will sell a lot of copies — ‘and then you can make some blues records,'” Love said.

Love said it wasn't just the label suppressing his inner bluesman. He had a hand in it, too. When he'd come up with a song that felt like it had potential to be a hit, Love would want to dress it up as much as possible; a modestly blues tune with modest production probably wasn't going to get much attention from radio programmers.

“When I was in that songwriting machine, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I was always struggling to get to that commercial success that would lead to the artistic freedom,” the 38-year-old Love said from his home in Boston.

Love has had tastes of commercial success. The debut “G. Love & Special Sauce” was a hit; the single “Cold Beverage” cracked into MTV's rotation. The band, whose original lineup featured Jimi Prescott on stand-up bass and drummer Jeffrey Clemens, became a force on the concert circuit; following tonight's headlining gig at Belly Up, the group (now a quartet of Love, Clemens, bassist Timo Shanko and keyboardist Mark Boyce) heads to Denver to open two shows at the Pepsi Center for Widespread Panic.

 http://longmanmall.noxblog.com/article-8.html