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Seasick Steve

 

  • Seasick Steve

    Anybody else heard this guy? Just got his new album and it is great!



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  • AllMusicGuide Biography

    AMG doesn't have a review of his latest album, Man From Another Time, but here is their biography of Seasick Steve:

    Like T-Model Ford, Seasick Steve (aka Steve Wold) began recording his own music much later in his life than other musicians. A storytelling singer reviving traditional country-blues, Wold spent his childhood in California but left home at 14. As a hobo, he traveled for several years, jumping trains and working odd jobs. After drifting around the U.S. and Europe, he finally ended up in Norway. Aside from his respectable musical background (which includes recording early Modest Mouse, appearing on BBC television and playing with John Lee Hooker), Wold is also noted for his unusual custom-made stringed instruments. By the time he was in his sixties, he finally released some official material. His first solo album was Doghouse Music, out in late 2006, which was performed almost entirely by Wold. Another record, Cheap, was recorded with the Swedish rhythm section the Level Devils.



    Edited by RandyB1961 on 28 Oct 2009, 11:53
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  • Uncut Magazine Review

    Here is the review from Uncut magazine:

    It’s weirdly heartening to discover that even grey-bearded sixtysomething former hobos turned late-flowering blues superstars can suffer existential insecurity. On the title track of Seasick Steve’s fourth solo album, he wonders aloud what the heck he’s doing, and why anybody else is paying attention as he does it. “Anyway,” he mutters, in that gentle growl which has become as much a fixture of the British summer festival circuit as unseasonal downpours, “I don’t know why you wanna listen what I got to say at all… Don’t you got nothing better to do?”

    A fair question, to which a great many would clearly respond with an ardent, adamant “no”. Seasick Steve’s 2008 breakthrough, I Started Out With Nothin’ And I Still Got Most Of It Left, was a palpable Top 10 hit, staffed by guest stars (Nick Cave, KT Tunstall, Ruby Turner, Warren Ellis) and garlanded with critical accolades. His unusual autobiography was ubiquitously recycled in lurid shades of purple, though with rather greater emphasis on his years as a boxcar-jumping indigent than on his more recent toilings as a studio engineer.

    Now that Steve has established his myth – though it seems less a case of Emperor’s New Clothes than Tramp’s Old Overalls – it seems reasonable to consider these things. Is Seasick Steve the real deal – whatever that means – or has he merely cunningly deployed his picturesque, picaresque backstory as distraction from the possibility that his gruff, rugged blues is, on its own merits, not obviously superior to the fare available from any number of dive bar stages and buskers’ pitches?

    On the erratic strength of Man From Another Time, it’s hard to say. A couple of moments are arrestingly wretched. “Big Green And Yeller”, a Tim Hardin-esque talking blues love song to a John Deere tractor, is either mawkish or clumsily self-parodic. Opening track “Diddly Bo” (essentially a set of instructions for replicating one of Steve’s distinctive home-made instruments) and closing cut “Seasick Boogie” are wan, grating whimsy: you would not live long on the difference between either tune and “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”.

    The album is a much more ruthlessly pared affair than its predecessor. Steve plays all the instruments, aside from drums, and records on studio equipment of comparably venerable vintage to Steve himself. This fundamentalist approach inevitably places a huge burden on the singing and songwriting. When these rise to the challenge, it’s wondrous. The prisoner’s lament “That’s All” coughs and wheezes through aptly tense, claustrophobic verses before erupting into a riotous, unbound chorus: Steve/’s finest few minutes to date. “My Home (Blue Eyes)”, presumably an ode to the joy of returning home to his wife of many years, is an affectingly heartfelt echo of John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind”.

    Taken as a whole, unfortunately, Steve blunders in maintaining fidelity to the lo-fi approach at the expense of what might have best suited some of the cuts. “Banjo Song” features Steve’s voice at its weatherbeaten best, but suffers by the insistence on reducing the song to the title – there are reasons why the banjo is rarely featured as a solo instrument, and this sounds like a demo awaiting further work.

    The gently rueful railway stowaway’s reverie “Just Because I Can (CSX)” sounds similarly unfinished – what should have been a vivid evocation of a goods carriage rattling across the American prairie is a ponderous plod more reminiscent of a First Capital Connect train parked interminably amid sheepfields somewhere near Bedford.

    Seasick Steve sets his stall out with the title: he’s an old man, determined to have little truck with the new-fangled. He can plausibly claim, therefore, that it does what it says on the tin (a phrase which sounds like a Seasick Steve title in waiting). He should consider, however – and so should his audience – that antiquity and authenticity are not always necessarily the same thing.

    ANDREW MUELLER



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  • Seasick Steve Photo




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  • Yeah. Some friends who are into Scott H Biram turned me onto him.


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  • I had never heard of him tl I read the review in Uncut; I downloaded the album and loved it. Now I need to get the rest of his catalog!



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  • Great Catalog

    All of his albums are worthwhile. I haven't heard his newest but love the stories and unique guitar.

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