For those unaware, after four years of upheaval—including illness, divorce, and a cross-country move, Reed Turchi found himself right back where he started, playing the same songs he learned when he first fell in love with the North Mississippi Hill Country blues as a teenager. This time, though, something felt different.

“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.”

Indeed, Turchi’s captivating new album, World On Fire, is an alternatingly harrowing and hopeful journey of self-discovery, one fueled by doubt and despair, pain and healing, loss and redemption.

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.

The songs here are all vintage blues and spiritual tunes Turchi picked up along the way on his circuitous route through the music industry—some traditional with no documented authors, others performed by so many artists with so many variations over the years that it’s impossible to pin down any definitive version—but he makes each his own with striking honesty and intimacy.

1. Walk With Me (3:57)
2. When You’ve Got A Good Friend (3:51)
3. Get Back Train (2:36)
4. Lay My Burden Down (3:30)
5. Don’t Leave Me Baby (3:47)
6. Backdoor Man (3:51)
7. 51 Highway (4:33)
8. Someday Baby (4:10)
9. Reprise (1:40)

Hailed by the Oxford American as an artist “beyond genre constraints,” Turchi opens his new recording on the plainspoken, reflectively laid low, aching yearn-veined Walk With Me and then brings us the gently strident fare of When You’ve Got A Good Friend, the rhythmically sculpted gem Get Back Train and the measured Lay My Burden Down.

Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, along next a languishing brood can be heard within Don’t Leave Me Baby which is itself backed seamlessly by the summoned Chicago blues of Backdoor Man, then we get the earnestly impassioned 51 Highway, the set rounding out on the earthy-hued Someday Baby, closing on a short, but sweet guitar instrumental simply entitled Reprise.

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.

The result is a timeless recording that lands somewhere between Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, a work of devastating beauty that feels at once intensely personal and profoundly relevant.

“In a lot of ways, this record feels like the culmination of everything I’ve done so far,” Turchi reflects, “but it also feels like a new beginning. I can hear myself turning a corner and, for the first time, knowing who I am and where I’m headed.”

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

Musicians:
Reed Turchi - Guitar / Vocal
Eric Burns - Guitar
Seth Barden - Bass
Joseph Yount - Drums

www.reedturchi.com

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