New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Nashville-based folkicana troubadour Riley Moore's debut LP Vagrant, which Billboard called "a wide-ranging Americana effort," was released on July 6th, an album which highlights a soul-baring momentary pause in a life that's been anything but sedentary. Moore, who has wandered across the globe, is one of the first musicians to complete a 1,600 mile tour on foot from
Maine to Tennessee with folk collective The Walking Guys and currently lives on a sailboat suitably anchored in the Cumberland River in Nashville. As he speaks about his path towards this minimal, whimsical state, he romanticizes transience in the manner of a young Woody Guthrie, and summarizes this temporal spirit in fragments pulled from his history of perpetual movement across city, region, and country lines.
Today, Moore gives us a glimpse into his world as he invites us to his floating home--in his new video, he offers a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of album party anthem "Sitting On A Boat." We see our hero waking up in the cramped quarters of the boat's hull, brushing his teeth, and singing about a carefree lifestyle as his head touches the ceiling of the cabin. We're left to wonder if he's reliving a night of revelry, or wishing for one.
Music has propelled Moore's career from an early age; he's since lived in Sydney, Australia, Madrid, Spain, Birmingham, Alabama, and returned to his Nashville home, learning culture and refining his music in efforts to revive that initial excitement and intrigue. His debut album arrived after the completion of his record-breaking walking tour; he gained notoriety playing festivals and venues that included Philadelphia Folk Fest, Providence Fringe, New York City's Rockwood
Music Hall,
Music City Roots, and Magic City Art Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. In the past few years, Moore shared the stage with Arlo Guthrie, Lyle Lovett, Shakey Graves, and Parker Millsap-breaking entry into the Folk/Americana scene that so heavily permeates New Nashville.
Simultaneously, he pays his respects to the classics, particularly to his hero Bob Dylan, in true Americana fashion. The American Folk culture of the 1960's shaped his taste in music in addition to his approach to life, while living abroad in Australia. Returning to his origin, Moore brings a new maturity in his songs that nods to the passage of time while staying true to his light-hearted spirit. The collection captures the most impactful moments of his travels, and projects them upon a character ideal he describes as "Clint Eastwood with a little bit of
James Dean." Vagrant relates the fleeting moments and haunting relationships found in perpetual transience to the underlying complexity of our everyday lives.
