Sonny Landreth

Mascot Label Group's Provogue Records will release Sonny
Landreth's new album Bound By The Blues on June 9. The recordings mark a return to
the slide guitarist's musical roots, presenting a bold, big-sounding collection of tracks that
swagger like the best of classic rock, climb to stratospheric heights of jazz informed
improvisation, and inevitably remain deeply attached to the elemental emotional and
compositional structures that are at the historic core of the blues. Landreth offers, "Ever
since The Road We're On [his Grammy-nominated 2003 release], fans have been asking
me, 'When are you going to do another blues album?' After expanding my songs for
Elemental Journey into an orchestral form, I thought I'd get back to the simple but
powerful blues form. I'd been playing a lot of these songs on the road with my band, and
we've been taking them into some surprising places musically. So going into the studio to
record them with just our trio seemed like the next step."
With Landreth's mountainous guitar tones and nuanced singing leading the way on its ten
songs, Bound By the Blues is a powerful tribute to the durability and flexibility of the
genre, and to his own creative vision. It's also a radical departure from his previous two
albums, 2012's classical/jazz fusion outing Elemental Journey and 2008's guest-starstudded
From the Reach.
The lean Mississippi native, who grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, has enjoyed a prolific
career for decades, dating back to his solo debut album Blues Attack in 1981. Although
that album fanned the flames of his reputation as an emerging force in roots music,
Landreth kept a parallel career going as a celebrated sideman and session player. Over
the years he performed and recorded with artists that include John Hiatt, British blues
innovator John Mayall, and he toured as a member of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer
Band. He also collaborated with Eric Clapton, and has performed at all of Clapton's
prestigious Crossroads Guitar Festivals since 2004. Along the way Landreth has
continued to develop his vision and his musical voice, growing increasingly original and
diverse, expanding from blues, zydeco, folk, country and jazz into increasingly categoryblurring
musical excursions like Bound By the Blues. He offers, "Developing a style and
an approach that is your own musically is not something to be taken for granted, I'm at a point in life where I want to make the most of every moment I can and that changes your
perspective, your priorities and how you relate to everyone else. And at the end of the
day, I think that's the essence of what I wanted to express with Bound By The Blues."