New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Miguel Rios
Second Album: 'Slaughterhouse Road'
Release Date: 5th February 2021
Laughing Outlaw Records
Miguel Rios is a story-telling guitarist; always giving space in his songs to powerful lyrics that speak of closed doors, magic men, replica pistols, and the cold spaces that no fire can warm.
Slaughterhouse Road, his second full-length album, has a pared-down grittiness, rich hypnotic timbre and heartbreakingly beautiful interludes of violin and mandolin by collaborators Ash Jones and Matt Stonehouse. Co-produced by
Miguel and Greg O'Shea, who also engineered and mixed the album,
Slaughterhouse Road was recorded straight to tape in a small tin music studio set among the scrawny eucalyptus of Cottlesbridge, north-east of Melbourne, Australia, during the Capricorn eclipse full moon. "We said we wanted that full moon madness and we certainly got all of that," says Miguel. "It rained... stormed actually. The dog howled outside, but we kept playing and we got it all".
Picking up the guitar at 11 years old,
Miguel would often rise at 4.30am to practise. Like most kids, he wanted to play fast and flashy, and penned his first song at 16. But he soon realised that narrative song writing is neither fast nor flashy; it is a craft that requires total and painstaking dedication. He set about learning the intricacies of rhythm and the mysteries of song writing, with the albums of Delta Blues legends and '60s American and English folk singers as his teachers. His influences include the fingerstyle and rhythm guitar greats, John Fahey, Lightnin' Hopkins, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Leo Kottke, and the writing styles of Bob Dylan,
Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash.
Miguel, who carries Mexican and American Indian Yaqui blood, has a stillness in him. Born in an alternative community in the Far North Australia,
Miguel had a free and lawless childhood. The kids played records late into the night and by day floated down wild rivers, drifting on the currents for hours. But there was also another side to this seemingly idyllic upbringing. A gifted guitarist,
Miguel has whispered the words of his new album
Slaughterhouse Road for years, trying to make sense of his childhood ghosts. Those whispers have now transformed, into evocative songs that capture the darkness, and the nature of the landscape, and his place growing up within the barefooted tribe that called it home.
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