RYAN BINGHAM ‘American Love Song’ – CD

$25.00 Inc GST

Available on backorder

Description

Even as a relatively young man, Ryan Bingham came across as an old soul. At age 17, he hitchhiked to Laredo to join his divorced dad, and from that point on, he spent his time drinking beer, becoming a rodeo rider and eventually making his way to France where he busked in Paris parks. Returning to Texas, he made a pair of self-released records, gained a major label deal and helped score the soundtrack to the film Crazy Heart, including co-writing the song “The Weary Kind,” which garnered him an Academy Award, a Grammy and the Americana Music Association nod for Artist of the Year as a result.

Whew. That’s pretty impressive list of accomplishments. It also sets a high bar. Fittingly then, American Love Song, Bingham’s first studio album in four years, finds him maintaining quality control. American Love Song is his most personal and political album to date, a rolling blues-country workout awash in slide guitar, soaring gospel-roadhouse stomps and meditative folk fingerpicking that takes on his past with a cautious hope for the future. At the same time, it’s also frayed around the edges, rather loosely constructed, and just as ragged as as it is raucous. American Love Song is a soundtrack to accompany today’s struggle for survival, a paean to those that are daring and determined despite all the odds. If it’s not Bingham’s best effort to date, and it may well be, then it’s certainly his most unflinching, and with that, his rawest record yet.