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“Tonight I’ve chosen to play
the one band the American Fascicrats don’t want me to play. Tonight
I’m going off the air with the music of Hierophant. For those of you
not familiar, you’ll get a taste of Hierophant’s music tonight –
their message, their light.”
-Will O’ The Wisp
Forget everything you thought you knew about Shooter Jennings.
The acclaimed singer-songwriter is kicking off a bold new chapter in
his career with new band HIEROPHANT and Black Ribbons (Black Country
Rock/Rocket Science Ventures), a mind-blowing 70-minute opus that
completely obliterates genre distinctions. On this unprecedented
work, twanging dobros coexist with Nintendo chipsets; brutally
assaultive passages alternate with moments of unabashed tenderness,
and surreal Floydian soundscapes float above smoking slabs of
whiskey-soaked southern soul. It’s an electrifying thrill ride
across a dense, dark and gloriously decadent musical landscape.
At its core, Black Ribbons is a concept album about truth—searching
for it, locating it, wrestling with it and eventually coming to
terms with it. From the opening track (and lead single) “Wake Up!,”
a pummeling psychotropic stomp that sets the album’s tone, to the
synth-injected paranoiac anthem “When The Radio Goes Dead,” this
elliptical narrative takes the listener on a harrowing,
life-affirming and altogether rapturous journey.
Binding the whole thing together with alchemical deftness is
acclaimed novelist Stephen King, who provides the voice of Will O’
The Wisp, a late-night talk-radio host who is in the last hour of
his final broadcast before the airwaves are overtaken by
“government-approved and regulated transmissions.” In retaliation
for his muzzling, he speaks his mind like never before, punctuating
his rants with selections from the discography of Hierophant.
Throughout the album’s 14 songs, Will O’ The Wisp flits in and out,
painting an apocalyptic picture of what America could become in the
not-so-distant future, while offering his loyal listeners—from whom
he is about to be permanently cut off—the unvarnished truth.
The seeds of the album were planted during a particularly intense
period for Jennings. He and his fiancée had just had their first
child, Alabama, and sobered by this blessed event, he was feeling
restless about his artistic direction and ready to take stock of
himself as a human being. On 2008’s Waylon Forever, Shooter, with
the help of long-time producer Dave Cobb and his band the .357’s,
had resurrected and recreated music for an album Shooter and his
father, country music pioneer Waylon Jennings, had started when
Shooter was 16. The album, featuring Waylon’s voice over progressive
re-workings of some of his hits, foreshadowed what was to come, as
Waylon’s voice acted as a launching pad for Shooter and his band’s
musical experiments.
Jennings considers Waylon Forever “a bow tied on the past—the swan
song of what I’d been doing up to that point,” as he puts it. “And
after the birth of our daughter, I was doing a lot of soul
searching. My record company wanted me to change my recording
process to fit their idea of how a record was made and I just wasn’t
into that, so we parted ways. I found myself on my own as an artist
for the first time in six years, and at that moment, I was forced to
face exactly who I was, my mistakes included—it was like everything
was on a plate sitting right in front of me. I had this urge to open
up everything I had inside of me and put it down on the page. So I
started writing and it became sort of a cleansing process. Then I
called up Dave Cobb and told him I wanted to make a different kind
of record—a new adventure. And no matter what people would think, it
was important to not be afraid of anything. I was ready to follow my
inspiration, wherever it took me.”
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Artist's Web Site
See a YouTube clip from Shooter Jennings
Presented In Conjunction With Landshark Entertainment
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