Reed Turchi: World on Fire album release show

Hailed by the Oxford American as an artist “beyond genre constraints,” Reed Turchi first became fascinated with the sound of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues as a teenager, when he began making regular pilgrimages to northern Mississippi to capture field recordings of the last of the music’s originators. On his captivating new album, World On Fire, Turchi revisits those vintage blues and spiritual tunes with new perspective gained in the wake of four tumultuous years marked by debilitating illness, divorce, and a cross-country move. Recorded live over two nights without any edits or overdubs, the collection is the raw and haunting testimony of a man who’s been to the brink and back, as stark and eerie as it is enthralling and hypnotic. Turchi produced the record himself, stripping each track down to its barest essentials with only acoustic guitars, upright bass, and drums to accompany his evocative slide playing and aching vocals, and the result is a timeless recording that lands somewhere between Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, an alternatingly harrowing and hopeful journey of self-discovery fueled by doubt and despair, pain and healing, loss and redemption.

“I’ve known how to play these tunes for a long time now,” Turchi explains, “but I didn’t know how to sing them until I lived them. I had to find my voice.”

With World On Fire, Reed Turchi hasn’t just found his voice, he’s found himself, too.