30 Days til Newport: Day 24 Shakey Graves shakes the soul of a giant crowd

I have described a lot of songs, a lot of records, a lot of musical performances in my time writing Red Line Roots. More often than not it is hard to come up with new ways to describe music, especially when the vast majority of what you are reviewing comes from common place of thread in that folk music tapesty.

I had heard of Shakey Graves from a visit to Austin in 2012. At that point I believe he was just hitting some good success via SXSW and national blogs and media outlets but no where near the place he is now. I checked a video of him performing “Late July” and was hooked.

It is hard to describe what Shakey does. In recent time a lot of people have tried to achieve what he does, but few are able to come close to what he unfolds on stage for an audience. You see more and more folks with a suitcase foot percussion thing going on. I have seen two folks do this as well as Alejandro Rose-Garcia…those two folks are the late David Lamb of brown bird and Matt Lorenz aka The Suitcase Junket. These three artists just embody a certain something when they grace a stage that was pure magic. When I spoke with him he described his music as “An aggressive, finger-picked take on traditional troubadour tunes, story songs and fine coarse Texan crooning.”…I think empassioned could be substituted for aggressive, but he certainly puts is all out there when he plays.

The set that Mr. Graves launched into last year at NFF was electric. That is pretty much the very best that I can do. He was on fire, he was charming, captivating the audience and melting them in the palm of his hand. Mother f*cking magic.

I wasn’t lucky enough this year to get Rose-Garcia on the horn to talk about Newport, a testament to how busy and successful the gent has become over the last year. All of which is so incredibly well deserved. He is a performer in the truest sense and an artist that cares equally about his writing as he does his performance.