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:
United States | United Kingdom | Japan (Asia) | Canada | Mexico | Germany | France | Italy | Brazil | Spain | Australia | New Zealand | Ireland | Portugal | Russia | Netherlands | Poland | Finland | Sweden | Greece | Switzerland | Czech Republic
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