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NIGEL BARKER ‘FIRED UP, ATMOSPHERIC BLUES ROCK’ BLUES MATTERS

Nigel Barker has just released his first stunning solo album ‘LOVE DEATH AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN’. The album, his fourth, is a strong move away from the Americana of his three albums with Cowboy Hat and That Fuzzbox Voodoo. Interestingly Nigel has a badly damaged left hand as the result of car accident when he was twenty three. He didn’t play for nearly thirty years. He puts his recovery down to a heavy clutch on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, negotiating fifty sets of traffic lights a day. He plays with three fingers. ‘I get by’, he says. 
‘I’m just grateful to be able to pick up a guitar and make a pleasing noise.’ More on that later. Album 4 began whilst frying in a motorhome in Spain in the summer of 2018. Nigel listened to all thirty eight Bob Dylan studio albums in chronological order while writing the lyrics to this album. ‘I didn’t realise he had so many hits! “I wanted the background listening process to raise the bar for the lyrics for the album. I took myself away to Spain to really focus on the lyric writing process. Make ‘em really good. I always keep the lyrics separate from the music until the last minute. So I came back with twenty songs and the album was really easy to write. 

My process is that I first prepare the backing tracks from a collections of ideas I have gathered over the previous year. It takes about a year to have enough ideas to fill an album. When the backing tracks are pretty advanced I then get out the lyrics, turn on the microphone and just sing whatever comes out. So after a lot of prep, the song is written in about a minute and a half, just in that special moment when the lyrics and music meet for the first time.’ My aim? Well it’s to produce exciting contemporary music in abundance and I’m still looking for a record label, management and publishing support. 
I can’t believe I haven’t found that yet. I’ve done about one hundred or so gigs in the last few years and hope to expand and start gigging in Europe soon. I always believed when I started playing again that it would take 5 albums to break this project so I am nearly there and on this album … album 4 LOVE DEATH AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN…I’m definitely making the push, he explained. 
Though he was featured in recently released Lifoti's October/November 2019 issue 10, you can check it from below link's for your country:

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