Eddie Turner - Change In Me

Bitrate: 320K/s
Year: 2021
Time: 45:31 
Size: 104,3 MB 
Label: 7-14 Music
Styles: Blues
Art: Front 

Tracks Listing:
 1. Change In Me - 5:12
 2. Dignify Me - 4:39
 3. My Friend - 4:11
 4. This Is Your Night - 3:40
 5. I'm Waiting for My Man_She Caught the Katy - 6:35
 6. Standing on the Frontline - 4:37
 7. Another Sign of Weakness - 4:12
 8. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa - 3:56
 9. Let My Soul Run Free - 5:06
10. Hoochie Koochie Man - 3:19

Access bluesman Eddie Turner on SoundCloud and you’ll note “Devilboy” and not “Eddie Turner” above the music.  Yes, Eddie Turner is to the blues what Dennis Rodman was to the NBA – inventive, mercurial, multi-faceted, and mostly misunderstood.  In musical vernacular, maybe a comparison to what Sun Ra was to jazz is as appropriate – mystifying, visionary, compelling, and clearly, even with the self-promoting mythology, “from another place.”  That’s also the way most initially described Jimi Hendrix, to whom Turner is most often compared. This is how this writer described his 2010 release Miracles and Demons – “Eddie continually pushes the envelope and authors a sound that is somewhere between Otis Taylor, where Turner began in the nineties, Hendrix, and cosmic funk.  While this is not for the faint of heart or the blues purist, much of it is irresistible due to its gutsy intensity…Here we are, after an 11-year recording hiatus with Change In Me, his fourth studio release and the change referenced must be a more socially conscious outlook because musically little has really changed.The socially/racially conscious approach appears in both the opening title track (“Look the world over, see what I have sound/But one day I know that some man will take me down/Look at me, look at me, a life of pain an endless train/Gonna be a change, change in me”), and from the single “Dignify Me” (“Still, I stand alone inviting/All that walk this shadowed road”).  This was the first time Turner came into the studio with lyrics to songs instead of music which was essentially improvised and reshaped with the help of three producers, his good friend Kenny Passarelli, Tim Stroh, and Turner. There’s plenty of guitar effect via pedals and a ridiculous arsenal of guitars. His vocals are layered in several places too, supported by B3 and on some tracks, female background vocals. The comparison to Hendrix is starkly direct on “My Friend,” especially when he sings “Come into my room.” Protagonists in Turner’s songs can be a man or a woman, none more apparent on the blending of his and a female voice on his cover song mash-up of the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting on For the Man (“Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown/”) capped by a brief nod to Taj Mahal’s “She Caught the Katy.” The racially conscious theme appears in the psychedelic “Standing on the Front Line” with this line reminiscent of Brionna Taylor’s death (“Hear your voice evermore/Watch them leave through my splintered door”). ”Another Sign of Weakness” and “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa” are similar tunes stacked back-to-back that are existential in nature as Turner questions his own identity, his inability to simply reboot, and what the future may hold. These thoughts seem to coalesce in his cry for independence, one of the stronger vocal takes in the flowing, swirling “Soul Run Free.”  He concludes with the standard “Hootchie Kootchie Man,” slowing it down and singing in a husky whisper, and delivering it in a funky rap style, while his psychedelic guitar moves it into almost unrecognizable territory.
Blues purists have long shunned Turner of which he is aware, choosing instead a left-of-center approach akin in some respects to his former bandleader Otis Taylor, and with a spectrum wide enough to include Miles Davis, British Invasion styles, and elements of jazz.  Say what you will, he continues to forge his own path, with Hendrix being the guiding light that burns most brightly. ~Jim Hynes

Change In Me