We got in touch with the pair to talk about the music that soundtracks their lives – and it all comes with a handy Spotify playlist to cut out and keep. Set your speakers up so you can lie back in this record out by your door in the late afternoon sun with a long drink, and let Bill and Nathan take care of the rest. It’s a perfect April album, the renewal of spring all around, and Christ knows it’s been a grind. “The songs within veer from experimentally fragmented to delicious instrumental interplay, homage to the roots of the musics, bluegrass, purer folk, hoedown reels, and all with a little bottled sunshine. We said of Keys: “You know what the best thing about this album is for all its intimacy, the focus wholly on the interplay of the two players and their instruments, how they mesh and in how many ways, a real joy in creation rings through. It comprises eight originals and a brace of songs “from other centuries” Bill and Nathan say it ‘s made of “equal parts bluegrass, classical, country, gospel, improv and that ol’ innocence and experience to boot.” They’ve been sending sketches and ideas back and forth from Bill’s base in the Windy City and Nathan, out there in Durham, North Carolina, and played together a year after meeting at a festival under the grab-bag name Cropped Out, and that night went swingingly, serenely, even they found a depth, a gestalt, more than the sum of their parts in concert with each other.Ī few more shows on and there was an obvious next step. Keys is actually the first time Bill and Nathan have stepped out together on record, although they first met a few years back now it’s said that after the first night they hung out, it felt as if they’d known each other a while already. BILL MACKAY, the Chicago-based guitarist, improviser of note and all-round scion of six strings, sure loves to enter into a two-way conversation with other artists with reliably beautiful results witness the brace of albums he’s recorded with the freewheelin’ Ryley Walker, Land Of Plenty and Spiderbeetlebee.Īnd loving that American instrumental guitar tradition in all its iterations, from early blues up through John Fahey and Robbie Basho through to Jack Rose, William Tyler, et al, we were excited as could be when Drag City announced he was getting together with Appalachian folk and drone fellow traveller Nathan Bowles for Keys, an album that it is pushes way beyond the simple, sterile categorisation, ‘guitar/banjo duets’, with easy companionship, an ear for the past and for each other.
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