Lonnie Holley - Oh Me Oh My (2023) [Official Digital Download]

Singular blues journeyman Lonnie Holley returns, flanked by acolytes Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker for a significant new album.

Marking just over a decade since his late-blooming music career kicked off with the incredible introduction ‘Just Before Music’ (2012), Holley gathers his strengths alongside a stellar cast of pop, folk and jazz musicians who’ve understandably become smitten by his style of blues emoting over the past 10 years.

Born into an Alabama whiskey house in 1950, Holley had a tough upbringing that has been covered extensively in interviews and elsewhere, famously leading him to become a genuine “outsider” artist by his late 20’s, with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, and, most pertinently here, musical performance. Drawing on a wellspring of lived experience and hard-honed intuition, his mostly improvised music expresses a timeless pain and depth of emotion that practically snags any new set of ears on first listen, recalling everyone from Linda Sharrock to Scott Walker in a humbling and inimitable style that’s ultimately peerless in the contemporary field.

A vestige of old worlds, Lonnie’s deep fried croon feels like the final croak of a blues music that began began more than a century and a half ago. Thanks to Holley’s improvisational nous, ’Oh Me Oh My’ exemplifies how his naturally avant blues mutably bridges the old world of blues, gospel spirituals, country-folk and the modern worlds of pop, rock and its experimental offshoots. As such he’s sort of a psychopomp for the ages, letting us know things don’t change as quickly as we like to think, and that there’s still magick to be found int he old ways.

Always most powerful solo, as with the spittle-inflected holler of ‘Testing’, thru the sparking psych-rock-blues of ‘Mount Meigs’, and the remarkable closer of Burroughsian growl and pulsing flutes in ‘Future Child’, the album’s collaborations faithfully play to Holley’s style with rewarding results. Michael Stipe provides a Jason Pierce-like gospel counterpoint in the ether of its title tune, and Moor Mother is at her best on ‘Earth Will Be There’, while mutual spirit and contemporary Chicago jazz don Jeff Parker beautifully chimes in with guitar and atmospheric texture in ‘I Can’t Hush.

Tracklist:
01. Testing
02. I Am A Part Of The Wonder
03. Oh Me, Oh My
04. Earth Will Be There
05. Mount Meigs
06. Better Get That Crop In Soon
07. Kindness Will Follow Your Tears
08. None Of Us Have But A Little While
09. If We Get Lost They Will Find Us
10. I Can’t Hush
11. Future Children


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