Singer, songwriter and Premier division guitarist Doyle Bramhall II releases a brand new solo album “Shades” on 5th October via Provogue/Mascot Label Group – his debut for the label.
His pals Eric Clapton, Norah Jones, Greyhounds and Tedeschi Trucks Band all pop up for guest appearances. Also on the dozen cuts are musicians he’s worked with over the years – bassist Chris Bruce, multi-instrumentalist and string arranger Adam Minkoff, and drummers Carla Azar and Abe Rounds.
The new album follows up the 2016 “Rich Man”, his fourth solo album and his first in 15 years. That really was one of the albums of the year, so “Shades” has a lot to live up to.
Doyle Bramhall II has spent more than a decade as Eric Clapton’s musical right-hand man, collaborating both in the studio and on stage. He has also worked with Norah Jones for a number of years.
He played guitar and sang both lead and backup vocals during Roger Waters’ 1999-2000 “In the Flesh” World tour (On CD/DVD ‘In the Flesh – Live’). He has worked with a number of other major league artists including T-Bone Burnett, Elton John, Gregg Allman and Allen Toussaint. He’s also produced albums and written songs for Sheryl Crow and the Tedeschi Trucks Band, among others.
Ahead of the album release, he has dropped the opening track, “Love And Pain”, and you can give it a listen below…..
“We wrote this song after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. The song asks the question behind the tragedies of mass shootings — not simply how did this happen, but why. Because these things are becoming more frequent and almost comfortably ubiquitous, because each one that happens seems to beget the instance of another one, because we are becoming hardened to and familiar with these tragedies — we wanted to write a song encapsulating the disorder of this new normal.
“The frequency of these occurrences eliminates them from being outliers. This has become part of the human condition. ‘Love And Pain’ asks why this is so and how we can live with it. It asks whether this is really living at all or some slow universal death that comes on too slowly to be recognized. These tragedies become who we are, as a species. Love and pain, you are what you know”.
