Lew Card will play at OddStory Brewing on Friday, March 9.
Review for Lew Card:
Lew Card is not just a songwriter, and he is a song.
He is a story.
Born the son of a wealthy businessman in the hills of East Tennessee, he had it all laid out for him. A legacy, riches, romance, country club swimming pools, the top tier of the social elite. But after a brief modeling career in the early nineties, he decided to leave it all behind to make hundreds of dollars a year in the music business.
He worked for countless hours over his craft. Holed up in his bedroom smoking weed and listening to the likes of Bill Monroe and Neil Young for days on end. It was there where he would learn to emulate the different styles of picking and lyric. For years, this proved to be a bountiful experience, albeit not a profitable one.
Enter Texas. Joining the circus in Austin for most of the beginning of the new millennium, Lew learned how to incorporate its techniques into the business of music. The illusion of magic, mystery, grand scale, and good plain ole’ trickery was just what he needed to skyrocket his career.
Although, he's not in Texas anymore. Lew moved back to Chattanooga and will be touring for his new album.
"I made Takeouts because I had the songs that didn't make it on other projects for one reason or another. So when I was in Austin for a few days, in Spring of 2017, I went in with James Stevens at East Austin Recording and laid them down. Having worked with James on all my albums, he knew exactly what I was going to do. I got there at 10 a.m. and left at 1 p.m. with the album in the can. Takeouts were intentionally made as a companion piece to the fast pace of today's world. That's not to say that these songs are throw away, like so many things are today, but more a reflection of a time. On the other ear, they are songs recorded in a purer form from a forgotten time; live, one guitar, one voice, mistakes and all."
"Ballad of The In Between"
"This song was conceived on a porch at the beach in South Carolina. I had been sitting around with some really good old friends that hadn't been together in awhile. It was 11 p.m. on a Saturday night and we seemed to be having a really good time when one of them got up and said they were going to bed. All of the others followed within two minutes and left me there to have the fun all by myself. I grabbed my guitar, as I do in these times, and just started singing softly, "Gonna throw myself in the ocean/roll across the sea/get myself far away/far as I can be."
"True Love"
"Growing up playing a lot of bluegrass, I've always had a special place in my heart for a good murder ballad - I think it is because they are so descriptive. It puts you in that place and time. This song is about loving someone so much that you have to kill them so no one else can have them."
"Colonial Pipeline Blues"
On Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, a Colonial Pipeline leak in Shelby County, Al., spilled 350,000 gallons of gasoline in the Cahaba National Wildlife Refuge. "The thing that really got me about this, besides having lots of family and friends in the area, was the way that the news, Colonial Pipeline Corporation, and US and Alabama government handled the situation. This was written from the point of view of the CEO of Colonial Pipeline Corporation."
"Building Boats"
"This song is for the everyman/woman. You work and work for some folks while they just keep getting richer. Or you dedicate your life, work-wise, to someone who never follows through like they say they were are going to do. Might as well work for me. Done building boats for other people to sail!"
Tennessee Twister
"This tune had an interesting origin. During the tornados of 2010 that tore through most of the Southeast U.S., I kept hearing these stories about how social media was connecting people with their lost objects. Bibles, rings, clothes, etc. I thought that was very interesting that social media seem to be working for a good cause. I didn't write a happy song about it. I took those objects I was reading about and put them into a song, not much different from the lyrical content of a murder ballad, by telling the stories of the thing we lose and the thing we don't care about losing."
"Lonestar Music - Veteran Austin sideman Lew Card has spent a good chunk of this decade exploring what it’d sound like to just sing and write his own songs. So far, so good. With Follow Me Down, he’s kept all of the good things about his full-length debut (2014’s subtly engaging Low Country Hi-Fi) and made them better. His sly, bluesy phrasing and hard-luck narratives have sharpened in the light of slightly higher-fi production, with a bigger-band feel augmented notably by the Tijuana Trainwreck Horns (Mark Wilson and Tiger Anyaya, to their friends). At its best, it grooves like New Orleans by way of Austin, cracks wise like John Prine by way of Randy Newman, and moves like a bayou boogie by way of a landlocked Central Texan who gets it."