Australian blues musician CW Stoneking shares new raw as bones single, "The Thing I Done", in advance of new album release.
Australia's CW Stoneking grew up in a remote part of the Northern Territory, but he fell in love early with gospel music, blues and ragtime and those first loves have been with him ever since. Stoneking notes that when he first heard blues he "thought it was kinda funny music because it was so deconstructed and not really adhering to any rules that I’d been told music [should] fit into." Robert Johnson and Son House are among Stoneking's influences, which makes sense given Stoneking's raw, unvarnished, passionate form of the blues. That rawness has always been a part of country blues at least and it melds well with Stoneking's somwehat punk sensibility.
"The Thing I Done" is Stoneking's latest single from his upcoming new album Gon' Boogaloo releasing June 3rd via King Hokum Records and it's a haunting, dark blues song with herky-jerky, Joe Strummer-style guitar chops and punk attitude up the wazoo.
Stoneking says, "'The Thing I Done' is a blues song I came up with. It's point of view is something like the old Gnostics who considered the material realm of existence as a cursed sort of habitat, a sinister and beguiling penitentiary of the soul. I wrote the music with a driving offbeat rhythm to lend the vocals a quickened kind of breathless quality, the bassline in the verses works in a call/response with the vocal which (to me) conjures an image of someone moving quickly across a flat desolate plain, with these gigantic black abstract shapes falling from the sky into the landscape."
TOUR DATES
May 24 Washington, DC DC9
May 25 Philadelphia, PA Boot & Saddle
May 26 Brooklyn, NY Rough Trade
May 27 New York, NY Mercury Lounge
May 29 Boston, MA Great Scott
May 31 Montreal, QC Bar Le Ritz
June 1 Toronto, ON Drake Hotel
June 2 Ferndale, MI Magic Bag
June 3 Chicago, IL Do Division Street
June 4 Chicago, IL Beat Kitchen
June 5 St. Louis, MO Off Broadway
June 6 Davenport, IA Daytrotter
July 16–17 Vancouver, BC Vancouver Folk Festival
July 20 Boise, ID Alive After Five
July 22 Denver, CO Lost Lake
July 23 Kansas City, MO Record Bar
July 24 Dallas, TX Three Links
July 25 Austin, TX Stubbs Jr.
July 27 El Paso, TX Lowbrow Palace
July 28 Phoenix, AZ Rebel
July 29 Huntington Beach, CA Don the Beachcomber
July 30 Los Angeles, CA The Echo
July 31 San Diego, CA Soda Bar
August 2 San Francisco, CA Slim’s
August 4 Seattle, WA Tractor Tavern
August 5–7 Happy Valley, OR Pickathon
