Seasick Steve - You Cant Teach An Old Dog New Tricks '2015

Tracks list

Tracklist:

[3:52] 01. Seasick Steve - Treasures
[3:34] 02. Seasick Steve - You Cant Teach An Old Dog New Tricks
[4:08] 03. Seasick Steve - Burnin Up
[3:24] 04. Seasick Steve - Dont Know Why She Love Me But She Do
[2:36] 05. Seasick Steve - Have Mercy On The Lonely
[3:44] 06. Seasick Steve - Whiskey Ballad
[4:15] 07. Seasick Steve - Back In The Doghouse
[3:05] 08. Seasick Steve - Underneath A Blue And Cloudless Sky
[3:16] 09. Seasick Steve - What A Way To Go
[4:02] 10. Seasick Steve - Party
[3:44] 11. Seasick Steve - Days Gone
[3:37] 12. Seasick Steve - Its A Long Long Way

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ABOUT THE ALBUM
1 disc(s) - 12 track(s)
Total length: 00:43:13
Main artist: Seasick Steve
Composer: Seasick Steve
Label: Theres A Dead Skunk Records
Genre: Blues/Country/Folk, Blues
2015 C60EV AS Trading as Theres A Dead Skunk Records
2015 C60EV AS Trading as Theres A Dead Skunk Records

It’s easy to be sucked into the Seasick Steve legend (his real name is
Steve Wold). Raised in California, he left home at 14 and began life as a street
kid hobo, hopping trains, traveling, working odd jobs, drifting, playing music
on street corners, doing whatever it took to survive, until somehow he ended up
in Norway in his sixties where he began his late-in-life recording career as a
fire-breathing rustic trance blues musician famous for his searing slide work,
gruff voice, and a penchant for cigar box guitars and other odd instruments. All
of which is true. But there’s a bit more to the story. Wold, aside from
seeming like he stepped right out of a Jack London story, has also been a
session musician and recording engineer (he worked with Modest Mouse), appeared
on BBC television, and even played with John Lee Hooker, so he is not a hobo
savant -- he knows exactly what he’s doing. It just took him a long time
to find an audience, or perhaps even to know he wanted one. His sound is rough,
ragged, and stomping, a bit like North Mississippi trance blues players like
R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, but he doesn’t do traditional blues
songs -- it just sounds like he does. There’s no doubt he understands the
heart, soul, and kinetics of country blues, but he’s also a natural
songwriter who has lived a few decades and seen a lot of things in the back
alleys that have given him a wonderfully urgent and wise perspective on what
he’s doing. He’s not a young man. He’s been around. He
knows what he’s singing about. You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New
Tricks, his fifth album, is his best yet, and easily his most considered and
polished -- polished being a relative term here because this outing is
thankfully still plenty rough and raw. There are a half dozen of Wolds signature
roaring slide guitar tracks here, usually accompanied by Dan Magnussons powerful
and inspired drumming, including the delightfully romping “Don’t
Know Why She Love Me But She Do,” but there are other tracks here that
reveal Wold as something more than just a brilliant side-street blues player.
The opening track, “Treasures,” is a thing of stark beauty as Wold
looks back at what is truly worth holding in a long life, and it isn’t
blues, unless one calls those old Appalachian banjo songs the blues. He sounds
like Fred Neil after a two-week bender on another gem called “Whiskey
Ballad,” which is more folk than it is anything else. Then he’s
back to the banjo again for “Underneath a Blue and Colourless Sky,”
a song that Dock Boggs would have cried over, and it’s sad and real and
powerful. The set closer, “It’s a Long, Long Way,” is a pure
country song, and one can almost imagine what Johnny Cash would have done with
it. You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks builds on the loose and raw
sound of Wolds earlier records, but it is also an extension of them, pulling in
strains of folk and country and adding them to his signature trance blues sound.
The result is a powerfully good record that Tom Waits is probably going to play
to death if he ever gets ahold of a copy. ~ Steve Leggett

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