Christopher Lockett Album Release

With his resonant baritone voice and knack for writing story songs informed by years of
world travel as a documentary filmmaker, Christopher Lockett’s first four albums quickly
caught the attention of roots music media in the U.S. and Europe. No Depression
played his self-titled debut (2009) continually, finding “great lines in just about every
song”, while Lonesome Highway summed up Between The Dark And The Light (2018)
as “an impressive late-night listen.” At the Station (2022) was a loving farewell to his
dying parents. While his lyrics focused on a small, personal world, he also began

exploring more elaborate instrumentation and music production elements with multi-
instrumentalist producer Fernando Perdomo.

On Lockett’s new album, A Town We Painted Blue, he takes a wide angle view of a
diverse cast of characters, subjects and life events: the river people of the world who
possess a unique awareness of life; a guitar being returned to a family via a circuitous
route, a recovered box of steamy love letters penned by a deceased relative. “These
songs are composites of traits, stories, experiences, as we all are,” Lockett says.
“‘Suitcase Full Of Kisses’ is probably the most ‘this actually happened’ song I’ve ever
written. Years after my grandparents passed, the family sold their house and found a
box of love letters between my Granddaddy Mac and his first wife. I pictured the woman
blushing when she emailed me: ‘The letters are… pretty steamy. Your grandfather was a
passionate man.’ I used some of his phrases in the song, like the title.”
Recorded in Los Angeles, where Lockett is based, A Town We Painted Blue also offers
sonic diversity. Several songs rest on a foundation of Country and Americana,
supported by the harmonica, Appalachian dulcimer and guitars of Lockett, violin of
Scarlet Rivera (Bob Dylan), pedal steel of Bob “Boo” Bernstein, and dobro and mandolin
of Craig “Fergheart” Ferguson, but they feature more unusual musical textures. These
are often provided by Perdomo, who remains in the producer’s seat. And just when you
think you know where the album’s going, you get “Death Ain’t Nothing/No Mercy,” a raw
blues duet with Kitten Kuroi (Elvis Costello), where a fuzzed out baritone guitar by
Perdomo casts the lyrics in a deeper shade of darkness:
“It’s a trad song that references earlier versions by Elder Roma Wilson and Rev. Gary
Davis,” Lockett says. “The stomps and handclaps were feeling appropriately ominous. I
love that track, it’s so heavy. I feel a lot of contemporary folk music can get in the weeds
in its striving for authenticity. It can take a living, breathing, vital song about death
coming for us all, a thing which all humans share, and turn it into something
presentational, museum music. That song should never become that. It’s harrowing,
haunted, and if it has a stomp ‘n’ holler with fuzztone baritone guitar, that just makes
sense to me in this chaotic world. Death marches to a different beat now. With distorted
guitar. Why wouldn’t it?

There are short instrumentals too: “Force Multiplier” is a tip of the hat to harmonica

quartets of yore, while “Dulcimer De Leche” has a surprise Cuban bassline. “A Cuban-
American from Miami, Fernando’s knowledge of Latin music is extraordinary,” Lockett

says. “But he also reads me as someone who travels. I grew up on Washington D.C.’s
eclectic, left end of the dial radio choices and don’t particularly care for genre fences.
The song is fun. It’s a break from some of the heavy themes I deal with lyrically. We
need that in life. On the album, too.”
The subject matter of the title track is not what some people might think. “I love
subverting expectations with wordplay that takes well-worn phrases and wrings
something new out of them,” Lockett says. “‘Paint the town red’ is an older expression
about being out on the town and having a good time. I was in a town while on the road
shooting a film, and there was someone I used to spend time with who still lived there,
but we were not making an effort to get together. It was a sad thing. It went from being a
happy memory to being a lonesome town with a sadness to it that wasn’t there before. It
was a town we painted blue, all on our own, without even having to try. I’m not sure I
could write that as a pop song. This is grown folks music.”

A Town We Painted Blue Album will be released globally on September 28 on Gritbiscuit
Records, and with a full-band show at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, California @9pm.