Have you heard? The Laurel Canyon sound is back! No, it’s true! In California, there are all manner of lank-haired, trust-fund youngsters brandishing exquisite vintage equipment and worshipping at the alter of Buffalo Springfield/CSN/Byrds, et al. And they’re making money, goddamit!
Zac Gunthorpe had been waiting for this moment all his life. Biding his time in a quiet Australian seaside hamlet; nightly watching The Last Waltz and memorizing every line; painstakingly learning every chord Neil Young ever strummed; growing his hair and suede-brushing his vintage tasseled jacket. He was R-E-A-D-Y to take those Californian sissies head on!
And yet, his diabolical plan went awry somewhere between conception and execution. That infuriating, irreproachably honourable, Andrew Morris (Wilson Pickers, etc), cooked up some nauseating notion of home-recorded integrity, talked Gunthorpe out of spending his entire inheritance on flying to ‘The Canyon’ to record straight to tape on the very studio desk that David Crosby once vomited on, and instead lured him to his own modest seaside home-studio to record.
The results are what you have before you. Disappointingly, they don’t sound one bit derivative. Hell, they’re not even retrospective! No epic guitar solos recorded backwards at midnight on a blue moon. No posse of hopped up pro musicians. No drugs, no sex, very little rock and roll. Just a young man with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica finding his own voice.
Come to think of it, that just might be the closest thing to rock and roll I’ve heard all year.
Who: Zac Gunthorpe, age 26, from the Sunshine Coast, Qld.
Original acoustic singer-songwriter influenced by Dylan, The Band, Neil Young.
What: Long Lost Love Lies, five-track debut EP recorded by Andrew Morris.
Track Listing:
Anything But Nothing
Long Lost Love Lies
William Blake
In The Shadows
Know One I Know
Great new 6th solo album from my record producer and label dude Andrew 'Moz' Morris. Alterntive country rock folk bliss, includes covers by Dylan, Gillian Welch and You Am I plus 5 new compositions. Zac Gunthorpe
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