Showboat Honey Kyle Craft

• 1 Broken Mirror Pose 02:37
• 2 O! Lucky Hand 03:10
• 3 2 Ugly 4 NY 02:15
• 4 Blackhole/Joyride 03:36
• 5 Bed of Needles #2 03:08
• 6 Deathwish Blue 03:59
• 7 Blood in the Water 01:10
• 8 Buzzkill Caterwaul 04:47
• 9 Sunday Driver 03:40
• 10 Johnny (Free & Easy) 04:03
• 11 She's Lily Riptide 03:42
• Total Runtime 36:07

Info for Showboat Honey

In der Existenz der Dinge gibt es dieses seltsame Gleichgewicht: Um eine Balance zu schaffen, muss das Universum geben, und das Universum muss nehmen. Kyle Craft, mit seiner Backing-Band namens Showboat Honey, weiß das nur zu gut. Und deshalb spiegelt ihr selbstbetiteltes Album, das kontemplative und doch unruhige »Showboat Honey«, diesen Sturm und Drang wider.

»Dies ist im Grunde genommen ein Album, das sich um Unglück und Glück dreht«, erklärt Craft. »Alles ging schief und dann finde ich aus dem Nichts Liebe. Ich schätze, so funktioniert das Leben.« Der klebrig-süße Titel des Albums entstammt dem Song »Buzzkill Caterwaul«: »Once you were the showboat honey/But your ship sailed out.« »Ich wollte etwas machen, das wie eine heftige Kollision von Leon Russell und Patti Smith klang«.

Obwohl sich die Ästhetik von Song zu Song ändert, bleibt die unerschütterliche Formel von »Showboat Honey« unverändert. Drummer Haven Mutlz spielt eine '60er/'70er Jahre Fast-Molasses-Groove, der sich mit dem slinky rollenden Bass von Billy Slater verbindet. Wenn Kevin Clark nicht über das Klavier hüpft, schwellen seine Mellotronsaiten in und aus dem Rahmen, Orgel-Sounds ragen aus der Tiefe der Songs heraus, während die Soli des Lead-Gitarristen Jeremy Kale sie wie Strom durchziehen.

Darüber hinaus liegt die augenzwinkernde Phantasmagorie der Craft-Lyrik, in der sich die Perspektiven verschieben, um das Leben in eine Gruppe von faszinierenden, mysteriösen Charakteren zu verwandeln. Bob Dylan da ein deutlicher Einfluss. Kyle Craft ist zu einem erstaunlichen Songwriter herangewachsen, um es vorsichtig auszudrücken. Nach Jahren der Tourneen, zwei LPs mit Sub Pop Records und der Festigung der Band wurde Showboat Honey von Craft, Clark und Slater 2018 koproduziert - in ihren eigenen Moonbase Studios in Portland.

Kyle Craft, Gitarre
Haven Multz, Schlagzeug
Kevin Clark, Klavier
Jeremy Padot, Gitarre
Ben Steinmetz, Orgel
William Slater, Bass

Kyle Craft
grew up in a tiny Louisiana town on the banks of the Mississippi, where he spent most of his time catching alligators and rattlesnakes instead of playing football or picking up the guitar. He’s not the born product of a musical family, and bands never came through town–it was only a chance trip to K-Mart that gave him his first album, a David Bowie hits compilation that helped inspire him eventually to channel his innate feral energy into songwriting and rock and roll.

That self-made talent drives every note of Dolls of Highland, Craft’s exhilarating, fearless solo debut. “This album is the dark corner of a bar,” he says. “It’s that feeling at the end of the night when you’re confronted with ‘now what?’”

Craft knows the feeling well–Dolls began to take shape when everything he took for granted was suddenly over, including an eight-year relationship. “All of a sudden I was left with just me for the first time in my adult life,” he says. He decided to get himself and the music he’d been working on far away from the ghosts of his home in Shreveport, Louisiana, to make a new life for himself in Portland, Oregon, living under a friend’s pool table while he demoed new songs and started to tackle his own question about what came next.

Dolls of Highland crashes open with “Eye of a Hurricane,” a whirlwind of ragtime piano and Craft’s dynamic, enthralling vocals. He calls it a “jealous song,” stirred up by the memories of an ill-fated crush and a drama of “weird little connections, a spider web of what the fuck?”

The swinging, resonant “Lady of the Ark” is also tied up in that web, “a very incestuous song,” says Craft. “It’s about these messed up relationships, maybe involving me, maybe revolving around me.” Most of the characters and atmospheres on the album come from in and around Shreveport, where Craft briefly returned while recording the album for an intensely productive reckoning with his past. He stayed in a friend’s laundry room in the Highland neighborhood, where he recorded the whole album in two months on a home studio rig. “I dedicated the album to Shreveport and called it Dolls of Highland for all the girls and ghosts in town who influenced it so strongly.”

Craft eventually returned to Portland where Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel of The Helio Sequence helped refine and mix the album to move it from its DIY beginnings to a more fully realized work. Craft played most of the instruments on the album, but the recorded songs transmit the power of his live performance. “It’s just letting go,” says Craft. “I think it’s just all about feeling it in your chest.”

And then there’s Craft’s unforgettable voice–”I’m fully aware that I have a very abrasive, very loud voice, but Bob Dylan is the one that taught me to embrace that,” says Craft. “I stray away from him from time to time, but always come back. I don’t want to come off as antique, but I also don’t want to be afraid of paying homage to the stuff I’ve always loved.” With those influences as inspiration, Craft’s talent and singular creativity move the conversation into new and unpredictable places.

And no question, this album is very much about moving forward. “After everything fell apart, it didn’t take very long for me to learn who I was and what I should be doing,” says Craft, who is walking out on the other side with Dolls of Highland.

This album contains no booklet.