New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Earlier this month, the Portland, OR-based Blitzen Trapper released Wild & Reckless, a new album born of their staged musical of the same title and also a companion to their 2008 breakthrough album Furr. The band have just announced new dates to the already in progress Wild & Reckless Tour. Find a full list of tour dates below and at the band's website.
Today, Paste Magazine premiered the official video for "Joanna" and said, "The video for 'Joanna' offers a stark, handheld-camera tour around an ominous rural yard, where a man lays dead in the dewy grass as Earley recounts his heroine's story of pain and uneasy redemption."
"'Joanna' is one of the darkest songs I've written, a murder ballad that raises questions and gets at the riddle of what justice really means," explains frontman Eric Earley. "I wrote it some time ago but kept it from being released until this record, Wild and Reckless. It felt like the right time for it to see the light of day, a song that deals with sexual assault and gun violence, in many ways a fanciful tale since victims of assault rarely find justice against their attacker. In my twenties my closest friend was a victim of this type of violence and her story filled me with such anger and confusion. This song is in ways me explaining to myself and dealing with that frustration that there is extreme darkness that exists in the world, that there are monsters, and often those monsters end up holding the power.
Its release and the release of the entire Wild and Reckless story coincides with an election, much like Furr did in '08 with the election of Obama, this album finds itself telling similar stories but in an upside-down world."
Wild and Reckless is now available for purchase via iTunes, Amazon, and their website.
NPR
Music premiered the album in its entirety as a First Listen and called it "a sprawling, sumptuous testament to Weird America." Wild & Reckless has been embraced by Consequence of Sound, Entertainment Weekly, Glide Magazine, Rolling Stone Country, and The New York Times, who said "Missing Tom Petty? He lives on in Blitzen Trapper's 'Wild and Reckless,' an accomplished slice of classic rock that unabashedly sounds like Mr. Petty singing a Springsteen song with the Heartbreakers' California guitars and a harmonica intro from Neil Young."
The Associated Press reviewed the album and said, "Musically, the band feels right at home in the Americana neighborhood they fully moved into on their previous album — "All Across This Land" from 2015. The influences of Tom Petty, Neil Young,
Bruce Springsteen and
Bob Dylan are easy to spot but there are also echoes of Stan Ridgway and J.J. Cale in some of the grooves." AllMusic called the album "A nostalgia-driven cautionary tale of corruption, drugs, heartbreak, and science fiction -- think Bonnie and Clyde meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
Blitzen Trapper is Eric Earley (songwriter/singer), Erik Menteer (guitar, keyboard), Brian Adrian Koch (drums, vocals), Michael Van Pelt (bass) and Marty Marquis (keyboard, vocals). Wild & Reckless was produced by Eric Earley and Michael Van Pelt and was recorded by Gregg Williams at the Trench, in Portland, OR. It was mixed by
James Brown (Foo Fighters,
Kings Of Leon, Blitzen Trapper's All Across This Land) at The Union.
Tour Dates:
11/18: St. Louis, MO - Blueberry Hill Duck Room
11/19: Nashville, TN - Exit/In - #
11/30:
Santa Cruz, CA - Moe's Alley - #
12/1: Los Angeles, CA - Bootleg Theatre - #
12/2: San Diego, CA - Casbah - #
12/4: Mill Valley, CA - Sweetwater
Music Hall - #
12/5: San Francisco, CA - The Independent - #
12/7: Seattle, WA - Tractor Tavern - #
12/8: Portland, OR - Revolution Hall - #
2/16: San Jose, CA - The Ritz
2/17: Costa Mesa, CA - The Wayfarer
2/19: Phoenix, AZ -
Rebel Lounge
2/20: Tucson, AZ - Club Congress
2/22: Austin, TX - Antone's
2/24: Dallas, TX - Three Links
2/26:
Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf
2/27: Denver, CO - The Bluebird Theater
2/28: Colorado Springs, CO - The
Black Sheep
3/1: Fort Collins, CO - Washington's
3/2: Salt Lake City, UT - The
State Room
3/3: Park City, UT - O.P. Rockwell
# - support from Lilly Hiatt
