Gill Landry (Old Crow Medicine Show)

Please Please You & High & Lonesome presents
Gill Landry
Thursday 31st May, 7.30pm
Tickets are £9 in advance (more on the door) and available from the venue in person, from our friends at Earworm Records or online via See Tickets.

A little over two short years ago, I was set to be married to a woman I loved very much, had just won my second Grammy with Old Crow Medicine Show, and life was good by all perceivable standards. However, I was deeply unsatisfied artistically and needed to leave the band. After the first year of touring my last album, I swore to myself I wasn’t writing another goddamned broken-hearted love song, but then my lover took flight and I found myself alone, worn out, disillusioned, and heartbroken in a way I hadn’t known before. The future was looking like an exhaustingly long walk through a knee-deep tunnel of shit ending in death, so, it seemed like it wasn’t going to be an overly joyous next record after all. BUT, I wanted to find a light in the darkness. This album is more of ‘a map out of the darkness’ than ‘an invitation to it’.

In December, I spent two weeks on the Washington coast at a friend’s place where I wrote over half of these songs. I was alone with the cold wind and rain pounding in from the North Pacific. Then I ended up back in Nashville living above my friend Nikki Lane’s for a few months where I wrote the rest of them. I moved to a cabin in the country outside Whites Creek, Tennessee to record the album and then took it on the road where I finished vocals and bits in Stockholm, The Isle of Skye, and Blue River, Oregon.

I wanted to personally tell the story behind this record, but there are some things I can’t write so freely. Here’s all the name-dropping, self-congratulatory bits that I’d feel like an ass saying myself, written by “a professional.”

The album follows his critically acclaimed self-titled 2015 ATO debut, which featured appearances by Laura Marling and Robert Ellis among other musical pals. Rolling Stone raved that the record landed at “the four-way intersection between Dylan-inspired folk-rock, atmospheric Americana, dusty cowboy songs and street busker ballads,” while American Songwriter hailed it saying “these songs, and especially Landry’s honest performance, resonate long after the last note fades. They beckon you back to further absorb his heartfelt, occasionally comforting, musings on the trials and tribulations of romance-gone-sour. It’s a subject most of us have experienced, can easily relate to and one that Landry explores with taste and subtle, refined passion.” The album earned Landry dates with Ben Harper, Laura Marling, Brandi Carlile, Justin Townes Earle, Warren Haynes, Bruce Hornsby, The Wood Brothers, and more, in addition to festival appearances in the US, UK, & Europe.

‘Love Rides A Dark Horse’ breaks new ground for Landry with contributions from fiddler Ross Holmes (Mumford & Sons, Bruce Hornsby), keyboard player Skylar Wilson (Andrew Combs, Rayland Baxter), and drummer Logan Matheny (Roman Candle, Rosebuds), the songs explore a more seductive, stripped-down sound built upon a hushed sense of intimacy that calls to mind Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. The album’s tattered narratives cast aside romanticism in favor of reality.

Landry sets the tone from the outset with the alternatingly joyous and ominous album opener “Denver Girls,” singing, “If it’s not paradise now / Tell me what you’re waiting for / Don’t you know there is no evermore?” The song features haunting background vocals from First Aid Kit’s Klara Soderberg, who joins Landry again later for a proper duet on the driving “Berlin.” Additional female vocals appear throughout the album, some from Karen Elson and others from Odessa, their presence a gentle reminder that, as Landry puts it, “it takes two to disagree.”

On the spare “Bird In A Cage,” Landry searches for escape from the prisons we build inside our own minds, while the classic country of “The Only Game In Town” offers up biting wit in its take-down of love for love’s sake. It’s a sentiment he explores from a number of angles, perhaps most poetically on “Scripted Love,” which looks at the ways we set ourselves up for failure by aspiring to unrealistic standards.

The scope of Landry’s songwriting extends beyond just romance, though. On “The Real Deal Died,” he laments the performance nature of style-over-substance art, while “The Woman You Are” finds solace in the company of a partner equally alienated by gentrification and sanitization of contemporary culture.

Press:

‘Recorded in a south Nashville apartment and produced by Landry himself, the album pitches its tent in the four-way intersection between Dylan-inspired folk-rock, atmospheric Americana, dusty cowboy songs and street busker ballads. Landry gets a little help from his friends along the way, duetting with British folkie Laura Marling on the lush, lovely “Take This Body” and recruiting fellow Nashville transplant Robert Ellis to add some mariachi-inspired fretwork to “Fennario.” The result is a record that’s too far removed from Old Crow Medicine Show’s old-time rave-ups to stand in that band’s shadow — and probably too good, too.
Rolling Stone Country

‘…these songs, and especially Landry’s honest performance, resonate long after the last note fades. They beckon you back to further absorb his heartfelt, occasionally comforting, musings on the trials and tribulations of romance-gone-sour. It’s a subject most of us have experienced, can easily relate to and one that Landry explores with taste and subtle, refined passion.’
American Songwriter Magazine