Meanwhile, the dreamy “Shaking The Gates” unfolds like a hymnal as he croons, “I’m shaking the gates of heaven.” “Tears” shakes and shuffles from haunting verses towards a hypnotic refrain “about a friend’s hard and interesting life.” You can’t force it.”Įlsewhere, “Her Love Was Meant For Me” spirals into an emotionally charged display of fret fireworks punctuated by his deep wail. You have to wait for it to happen naturally. “The song references wanting to change your life-but it’s a difficult undertaking. “Obviously it's been a stressful couple of years,” he sighs. They also say Liberace’s ghost still haunts the place, but I hadn’t seen him myself,” laughs Thompson.ġ3 Rivers commences on the tribal percussion and guitar rustle of “The Storm Won’t Come” as the artist bellows, “I’m looking for a storm to blow through town.” The energy mounts before climaxing on a lyrical electric lead rife with airy bends and succinct shredding. Clay is a Beatles nut, so I could grab a Gretsch off the wall or dial into an amp that had this unbelievable tone reminiscent of The Beatles. It’s about the décor of the sound, and there’s a specific sound to Boulevard. “It used to be Hollywood trendy, but it fell into total disrepair. “It’s a funky studio that was quite popular in the sixties and seventies,” he says. Engineered by Clay Blair (The War on Drugs), usual suspects Michael Jerome, Taras Prodaniuk, and Bobby Eichorn joined him. Notably, this marked the first time Thompson self-produced in over a decade and he opted to track analog in just ten days. It also hosted the mixing sessions for Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Known previously as “The Producers Workshop” and once owned by Liberace and his manager, the locale served as the site for seminal classics by Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Ringo Starr, and Joan Baez. To capture this vision, he retreated to the famed Boulevard Recording Studio in Los Angeles. “They belong together in some way and seem to possess a commonality since they were written in the same time and space.” “I wrote the songs as a group to hang together,” he elaborates. As a result of the defined time period, the music possessed a distinct cohesion. In 2017, Thompson began composing ideas for what would become 13 Rivers at his California home. It’s a process of surveying my life and where I was at.” Some of them reflect on what happened a few months ago or even a year ago. “I never really think about what songs mean,” he admits. Those transmissions comprise his nineteenth solo album, 13 Rivers. Picking up a guitar, emotions echoed through his deft fleet-fingered fretwork, poetic songwriting, impassioned picking. In 2017, Ivor Novello Award-winning and GRAMMY® Award-nominated legend Richard Thompson gave himself up to the music itself.

Danny thompson ryley walker