In No Man’s Land

I should start keeping track of the number of e-mail solicitations I receive each week asking me to review new music. It’s a lot, and most of them I ignore. For one thing, this is not the sort of blog that deals much in new music, and even if it was, many of the solicitations I get involve genres I’m not interested in—Balkan techno, for instance. Yet every once in a while, something in a press release catches my eye and makes me want to lend an ear—so lately, I’ve been listening to an album by a guy named Stephen Luke.

Luke’s album is called No Man’s Land, and his story is rather interesting. He played guitar in bands around Cincinnati as a young man, but like many musicians, gave up sustained gigging to raise a family. Relatively late in life, he accidentally cut two tendons on his left index finger while trying to open a box with a knife. His physical therapist recommended the guitar as a way to rehab the injury, and Luke found his interest in music rekindled. He fell in with a fellow Cincinnati musician, blues guitarist Kelly Richey, and says, “She took me from pitiful to powerful in about six months.” She ended up producing No Man’s Land.

I make no apologies for failing to be musically adventuresome at my advanced age. Balkan techno may be all that and a bag of chips, but I ain’t going there. Any new music I’m going to like will be inspired by the sort of stuff I’ve been digging for years. Stephen Luke’s music clearly is. (The fact that he’s about as advanced in age as I am certainly helps.) Luke’s press release compares him to James McMurtry, Steve Earle, Tom Petty, and John Hiatt, and says he’s influenced by Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Bob Dylan. That’s about right, but you’ll have to tell me what you think. Snag the tune below, and listen to some more of Luke’s music here.

Worth a Look: Although I should be working on stuff that gets me paid, I have been killing time over at Vinnie Rattole’s website for the last couple of days. The site wasn’t created as a music-themed blog, although it’s become one recently—Vinnie has downloadable scans of interesting musical ephemera, including the comic-book adaptation of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, vintage copies of Hit Parader and Circus from the early 80s, and the famous KISS comic book series. What you might remember about the latter is that the ink used for the first issue was said to have contained vials of blood from each of the band’s four members. According to Vinnie, “An unsubstantiated rumor claims that there was a mixup at the printer and the bloody ink was instead used for an issue of Sports Illustrated.” Which is too awesome not to be true.

“Hurricane”/Stephen Luke (buy it here)