Between the sheer force and potent lyricism of his guitar playing, the riveting depth of his songwriting and the straight-from-the-soul conviction of his vocals, New Orleans’ Anders Osborne is among the most original and visionary musicians writing and performing today. Relix says Osborne plays “hard-hitting songs” featuring his “raging, expressive guitar and soulful singing…from scorched-earth rock to sweet, tender ballads.” OffBeat magazine recently named Osborne the Crescent City’s Best Guitarist for the second straight year, and also awarded him with the Best Roots Rock Artist title. Guitar Player called him, “The poet laureate of Louisiana’s fertile roots music scene.” 

Since the release of his 2010 Alligator Records debut, American Patchwork, Osborne has toured virtually non-stop, performing with his own band, solo with Keb Mo, with The Stanton Moore Trio, alongside Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe and with Luther Dickinson as well as with The Voice Of The Wetlands All-Stars. He appears on Galactic’s song Dark Water from their Ya-Ka-May album, and in 2011 produced and played on critically acclaimed albums by Tab Benoit, Johnny Sansone and Mike Zito. Along the way, he also found time to write and record the next chapter in his still-unfolding career, Black Eye Galaxy.

Recorded at the famed Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana, Black Eye Galaxy was produced by Anders along with engineer Warren Riker and Galactic's Stanton Moore. Sounds on the album range from heavy electric mayhem to joyous acoustic melodicism. Anders begins the album singing from the darkest depths of despair and concludes it affirming the healing power of love. The title is an unambiguous metaphor for Osborne's life as a traveler, a musician, an immigrant, a recovering addict, and as a husband and father. Black Eye Galaxy is a harrowing but ultimately uplifting cycle of richly detailed songs that are musically and lyrically thought-provoking, exhilarating and completely engaging.

The album is a journey of sorts, following the main character (based on Anders’ own life experiences) from the uncontrolled, primal chaos of Send Me A Friend to the inner peace of Higher Ground. The disjointed and brutally honest Mind Of A Junkie leads into the warm and hopeful Lean On Me/Believe In You. The gentle When Will I See You Again?finds Anders rebuilding broken relations, while the feral and confrontational Black Tar(co-written with Little Feat’s Paul Barrere) says farewell to a dark past. The final four songs — Tracking My Roots, Louisiana Gold, Dancing In The Wind, and Higher Ground — bring an almost ecstatic tranquility after the intense stress and turbulence of the beginning of the album. From ultra-heavy and challenging to sweetly soul-soothing and melodic, Osborne’s guitar work, like his vocals, is simply mesmerizing. Black Eye Galaxyis a harrowing but ultimately uplifting cycle of richly detailed songs 
that are musically and lyrically thought-provoking, exhilarating and completely engaging. 

Live, Osborne is a force to behold. His wildly energetic, physical performances find him ripping notes out of his guitar, forcing out intense steel-on-steel slide solos, pouring his entire soul into his vocals. His piercing guitar playing, slide work and fluid finger picking (oftentimes happening simultaneously) are simply unmatched. His use of Open D tuning (a rare choice for a guitar virtuoso) gives his fretwork a signature sound and feel. “I first heard Open D on Joni Mitchell’s Blue,” he says, “and my fingers just fit the tuning.” His influences range from Ry Cooder and Robert Johnson to the great horn players like Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Past gigs include repeated appearances at The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, stops at Bonnaroo, The High Sierra Festival, The Telluride Blues Festival, The Hollowbaloo Music & Arts Festival in Honolulu, The Voice Of The Wetlands and an appearance at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He has toured North America and Europe extensively, and is constantly in demand as a guitarist, songwriter and producer.

Since his recording debut in 1989, Osborne has written virtually all of his own material and contributed memorable songs to a wide variety of artists. Two tunes co-written by Osborne appear on blues great Keb Mo’s Grammy-winning 1999 release Slow Down. Country superstar Tim McGraw scored a #1 hit with Anders’ song Watch The Wind

Blow By. Osborne’s compositions have been covered by artists as diverse as Brad Paisley, Tab Benoit, Jonny Lang and Kim Carnes. His song What’s Going On Hereappeared in the 1996 feature film Fled, and Osborne, along with Ivan Neville, wrote and recorded the title track for the 2010 Kate Hudson film Earthbound. He can also be seen performing in a recent episode of HBO’s New Orleans-based drama, Treme.

Osborne was destined to live in New Orleans, and it’s no surprise he’s become one of the city’s favorite sons. His path home, however, was a long and winding one. He was born in Uddevalla, Sweden in 1966. His father was a professional touring jazz drummer who played all over Europe and was exposed to a lot of styles of popular American music. He brought home reel-to-reel recordings of jazz, R&B and early rock ‘n’ roll from artists as diverse as Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Art Pepper and Miles Davis. As a teen, Anders started playing guitar and listening to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell records. He fell in love with the vocal styles of Ray Charles, Van Morrison and Lowell George. Then he heard the blues of Robert Johnson and recordings of African drumming, and suddenly, everything clicked. “Blues connected everything together for me,” Osborne recalls. “The early rock, the R&B, the jazz, the singer-songwriters. Blues was like a thread running through everything.”

With a serious case of wanderlust, Anders began traveling on his own at 16. For the next four years, he hitchhiked across Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, earning money by doing odd jobs and performing on the street or in bars at every opportunity. He worked assembly lines in Israel and dug ditches in Greece. He picked fruits and vegetables in many locales, following the harvest seasons across Europe. He wrote constantly, soaking up the life experience and honing his craft.

In 1985, after landing in New York with only $5.00 in his pocket, Osborne hitchhiked to New Orleans to meet up with a friend. “Once I got to New Orleans, everything I heard in my head — the music, the way people treated each other — was happening. I knew I was home.” He naturally absorbed the spirit of the Crescent City into his soul, as he was fully embraced by the city’s vibrant music community. Shortly after moving there, he found out that his grandfather, a sailor, had lived in New Orleans for many years. His grandfather then began telling him vivid stories of the city, and sharing old photographs. “I just felt connected to his memories,” Osborne says, “and I knew I was where I was supposed to be.”

Anders spent his first few years in New Orleans writing and developing his sound and style, all the while continuing to soak up the music of the city. He cut his first two albums for the independent New Orleans-based Rabadash Records in 1989 and 1993. The excitement surrounding those releases led to a major label deal with Sony’s Okeh imprint in 1995. Osborne released a series of successful albums for Shanachie and MC Records, all to wide critical and popular acclaim, before joining forces with Alligator Records. 

With the 2010 release of American Patchwork, Osborne’s fame suddenly reached a whole new level. Critics went wild, with OffBeat saying, “American Patchworkis the album Osborne fans have been waiting for. The record is a focused and tuneful triumph. Osborne’s gifts as a guitar player are significant. His voice is so emotionally intense it feels like an explosion. He writes with remarkable eloquence...this is the living definition of great art.”

In the studio and in concert, Anders Osborne channels the music throughout his entire body, becoming a whirling dervish of pure energy. Blurt says, “This is modern music at its transcendent best.” Paste adds, “He is wildly diverse, thoughtful and raw.” With Black Eye Galaxy, Osborne’s star has exploded into the universe, fully formed and spinning freely in its own unique direction. 

Over the span of five albums literate and honey-voiced singer-songwriter Clarence Bucaro has crafted an impressive canon of uplifting Americana, garnering comparisons to Jackson Browne and Van Morrison. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter initially built his career on a robust 300-shows-per-year schedule. His warm and rustic aesthetic has a broad appeal and has made him compatible sharing stages with such diverse and established artists as Aaron Neville, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gomez, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, North Mississippi Allstars, Cowboy Junkies and Fountains of Wayne. His initial apprenticeship with singer-songwriter Anders Osborne—best known for penning Tim McGraw’s 3-million selling single “Watch The Wind Blow”—helped him define and refine his own down-home palette. Clarence’s upcoming fifth album is his most ambitious and diverse album to date. The lushly soulful Walls Of The World, released April 3rd 2012 on 20/20 Records, is a thematic piece using walls as metaphor for political and personal division.

Walls Of The World was produced by Hector Castillo (David Bowie, Björk, Lou Reed, Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, and Philip Glass) and Chocolate Genius. The album benefits from the complimentary approaches of Castillo’s penchant for organic ambience and Chocolate Genius’s knack for nuanced, moody electronic flourishes. The album was mixed by the highly-esteemed engineer Tchad Blake (The Black Keys, Pearl Jam, Sam Phillips, Al Green, Suzanne Vega, among others) who brought out the bold hues in Clarence’s richly textured album. This dual-perspective production is a theme deeply mirrored in the fabric of the album; it appears in the lyrical theme of the two sides of division and the album was written in two spurts, from two perspectives of division. The first batch of tunes are informed as much by literature such as controversial Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and conflict journalist Asne Seierstad’s Angel of Grozny as they are from Clarence’s travel to Jerusalem, Cuba, Morocco, and Russia. The second batch of songs was written after the birth of Clarence’s first child and, broadly, the tunes examine the theme of walls and division from a tender and personal domestic vantage point.

The literature-informed reportage dates back to 2009 when Clarence travelled to Jerusalem and experienced the contrasts between the old-world majesty of Jerusalem and the squalor of the refugee camps of Ramallah and the West Bank—it was powerful how the physicality of a wall could create such division and opposite worlds for people who lived in such close proximity. In the lyrics of the sweetly melancholy “Walls Of The World” Clarence notes the universality in this holy war when he sings: See the same old fighting/the same old hard lines/we're cutting our throats on the same old divides. The struggles seem so personal and political but, in a grand sense, it’s also a class struggle and he wisely notes this, alluding to the Wall Street protests here at home. The haunting arid ambience of “Child Of War” with the chilling twangy guitars and deep-in-the-mix Chocolate Genius loops explore the horror of children who take on messianic suicide missions and find themselves sacrificing their innocence and carefree childhood to be political pawns in such tangled and tragic wars. Clarence chronicles this horror with bluntly poetic lines like What do you see through those eyes?/What do see through those eyes?/Blood for blood, limb for limb/When There’s No Way Out Vengeance Wins/What Do You See Through Those Eyes? The initial inspiration for “Child Of War” was, again, the Israel and Palestine struggle but the song also has kernels of inspiration from Asne Seierstad’s story of a Chechnyan orphanage, Angel of Grozny. The elegantly electric-folk tune “Two Men Down” is a tribute to conflict photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington who were killed in Libya in April, 2011 while covering the rebel uprising against Gaddafi’s forces. It’s not only an homage to the two men’s bravery but echoes Clarence’s artistic quest to seek the truth in his songs.

“The second batch of tunes brought together what it means to me to have a child in the world when you think of the subject of the song: ‘Child Of War,’” Clarence explains. “These songs were written after having my son and my perspective changed as I saw how having a child fits into a conflicted and divided world. So the two perspectives of the album became a marriage of observing the outside world with how it ties in to my personal own world.” Conflict and division in this clutch of tunes extends from the daily struggles of marriage in “Are We Gonna Make It Through The Night” to “Dangerous Secret,” a tune that details a woman’s struggle with gender-identity issues. “That song is based on a personal letter from a friend telling me about her struggles and fears of acceptance among family and friends with thoughts about transitioning. I took the letter with me on a trip to France and began writing the song there and finished with Freedy Johnston in Brooklyn,” Clarence says. Tracks such as “Same Small Threads” and “It’s Only Love,” written from the joyous and fulfilled feeling of a new parent, round out the album and provide a grounding counterpoint to the weighty issues discussed throughout Walls Of The World.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio Clarence left his hometown for New Orleans to follow his mentor, the Crescent City music icon Anders Osborne. From New Orleans he moved to LA before settling in Brooklyn. The stories in these journeys and Clarence’s passion for travel are documented from early critically acclaimed albums like his Anders Osborne-produced debut Sweet Corn and his Rounder Records sophomore album Sense Of Light to Clarence’s latest, Walls Of The World. This musical journey has sought to capture the human condition in the folk-storytelling heritage with a panoramic view of humanity. “I’ve always dove into the outside world for inspiration; social observation has always inspired me,” Clarence explains, “possibly encouraged by the punk music I used to love in the 1990s. I was inspired by the social commentary and conviction of a band like Bad Religion. In college I became interested in social movements and learned that music is as potent a weapon as any to speak to struggle and incite passion.” Studying the Civil Rights and Labor Movements led Clarence to the music of Woody Guthrie. He found the message in Guthrie’s music resonated with him the way punk first did in his formative years but the purity of the folk sound appealed to his maturing sensibilities and became an aesthetic touchstone for his own music. The growth in Clarence as a writer on Walls Of The World is not only in how sensitive of an observational writer he’s become—like on “Rose Of Jericho” where from seeing a woman on the subway in full burka he imagines her journey from her homeland to NYC—but also manifests itself in how he can turn the lens on himself and examine his condition with a mature level of objectivity. Walls Of The World is an interpersonal and personal travelogue scored by an ambient and soulful production aesthetic bittersweet enough to evoke the dissonance in the human struggle but warm enough for the music to fill you with hope. 

Between the sheer force and potent lyricism of his guitar playing, the riveting depth of his songwriting and the straight-from-the-soul conviction of h... more

TOMMOROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE, the newest addition to the Cebar catalog, boasts both the open-hearted spontaneous soulful- ness we’ve come to expect from this dedicated musician (Who Can Love Who?, The Same Dog, Marv’s Fluttering Guitar, I’m Qualified) and wild- headed, crazyquilt conjuring (Knock It To Me, Like A Gentleman Oughta, Spread That Sugar) that feels like a bold contemporary invigoration of the inviting verities he has always explored. There’s the meaty Hey Hey Honey, a delightful a capella nod to Alan Lomax and his recording of Norfolk’s Bright Lights Quartet, a tender tribute to Sierra Leone’s King of Palmwine Music, S.E. Rogie in his Do Me Justice, and Paul’s glorious homage to guitarist Marv Tarplin, Smokey Robinson’s right hand man for the last 40 years, Marv’s Flut- tering Guitar. Add the classic New Orleans swagger of I Got Trouble (replete with Cebar’s Jessie Hill-inspired tambourine machinations) and the storming plea for tenderness The Gimp Sparrow (richly reflecting the influence of Paul’s travels in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad), and it’s clear that this is a romp of colossal heart and scope. The years since the release of the last studio album have been spent touring continu- ally and intensifying the fervor with which Cebar has always infused his music. The guitar tones have taken on an edgier, more distinctive concision. Longtime cohort Bob Jennings comes to the fore on organ and horns in his sneakily apt and piquant less-is-more-ism. Drummer Reggie Bordeaux is simply a stone joy throughout lifting all and sundry to new heights of funk and drive. Bassist Patrick Patterson lays it low and mean in a thoroughly righteous display of bone-deep musicality. Percussionist Romero Beverly insinuates, articulates and pitches a veritable storm (witness Her New Church why don’tcha!!). From the Hot Chocolate meets Latin Playboys skank of How’d You Get Like That? to the stately Muscle Shoals balladry of I’m Qualified, featuring Nick Lowe’s brotherly back-up vocals, TOMMOROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE is the best batch yet of of an endangered strain of fortified, intensi- fied, fully jacked-up, roaring and exceedingly personal music-making from a singular Midwestern master. It may be time for all sorts of things, but it is high time for Paul Cebar. He has been, is, and will be the real doggone deal.

The Lawrence Peters Outfit:

The best parts of honky tonk, bluegrass, and spooky ol' mountain music, all mixed together, and wound up tight! 

TOMMOROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE, the newest addition to the Cebar catalog, boasts both the open-hearted spontaneous soulful- ness we’ve... more