Event

Kevin Gordon

Kevin Gordons Louisiana is a strange place. Its a place where restless teens road trip
to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are
in for life compete in a rodeo while the town watches; where a character can get lost in
the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; and where rivers, never
far away, carry secrets behind levees. One of the things I like about it and am mystified
by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere, he
says.

The kicker? All of these postcards are based on true stories. Its a place that hes been
exploring for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his astonishing new album
Tilt & Shine on Crowville Media. It is work that has earned him fans like noted author
and Elvis Presley biographer Peter Guralnick; New West Records artist Buddy Miller;
journalist, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame staffer Peter Cooper; Todd
Snider; head of the Americana Music Association Jed Hilly; and Lucinda Williams, with
whom he dueted on the song Down To The Well (which was featured prominently on
an Oxford American compilation).

Before you even hear his vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that 56 Gibson ES-
125 tuned down to open D, often with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an
unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. His MFA from the
Iowa Writers Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New
York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, A Musician Or A Poet? Yes to
Both.

Kevin sums it up, There are so many stories in north Louisiana and its a place that
nobody pays attention to. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing there. Im captivated by
the power of strong memoriesthose films that run continuously in your mind, if you let
em. With Tilt and Shine, those movies translate into rock and roll poetry.