JD McPherson is an artist with an unaffected take on vital American music and a voice that channels the spirit of Little Richard and James Brown. McPhersons seductively kickass album, SIGNS & SIGNIFIERS, finds this renaissance man/hepcat seamlessly meshing the old and the new, the primal and the sophisticated, on a work that will satisfy traditional American rock 'n roll and R&B purists while also exhibiting McPhersons rarefied gift for mixing and matching disparate stylistic shapes and textures. Recorded at Hi-Style Studios in Chicago, IL.
Sometimes the most American of settings can reveal the deepest artistic talents the world has ever known.
Johnny Cash on the farms of Arkansas, Mike Ness on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and a skinny kid from the ghettos of Tupelo named Elvis who happened to be brimming with soul. JD McPherson is one of those talents cut from that same artistic cloth. Growing up in southern Oklahoma, McPherson, the progeny of an ex-military, farming father and "good word" preaching mother, McPherson had an intriguing childhood and those influences shine blissfully through his music. His sound is raw, it feels old, like the hum of a 50's convertible cruising the back roads of the Mississippi delta but it's new and innovative. While most kids from the sticks heroes were rodeo stars and country singers, McPherson heard the liberal screech of The Talking Heads and Bad Brains and let it empower him. But the allure of the American roots music scene is what made his musical mouth salivate. The honest troubadours of song that roamed from honky tonks to back alley bar rooms that machine gunned a town ever night, one song at a time.
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