Poor Boy's Soul

November 16, 2011, 12:00 pm

A one-man band of slide, blues, folk and some serious smolder. Catch it at Doug Fir tonight (11/16).


POOR BOY'S SOUL

In the very interesting bio on Trevor's website comes this revealing stuff: (MY emphasis)

The name Poor Boy's Soul comes from a line in an old time song called 'Wild Bill Jones,'" Trevor says. "In the song a fella is defending himself and his girl from Wild Bill and he 'pulls out his gun and destroys that poor boy's soul.' And I just love that line." When he took his second album Everything I Had out on tour, he'd made the decision to go one man band. "I want to reach as many people that I can with my music and keep doing it till I get too old to hold my guitar. And of course make a bit of dough doing it! I don't want to be a rock star," he says. One listen to the festival-filling blues-punk come-on overflow of "54 Ways" though, it sounds like it's going to happen anyways.

Jones finds inspiration in gaunt blues shaman Mississippi Fred McDowell in rants like "You Gotta Move." Keeping his rocking spare like the original bluesmen, just his nimble grind on the six strings, spasms of laughter and disgust in concert with his fellow wayfaring souls. "That's when I finally learned how to yell!" he sings ("Nails In The Pines"). His clap and rasp-along rockers have the barest whiff of Waits, because it seems as though Jones is more like a character in one of the down-bound train songs the king of the sad noise is growling about. Jones music is without kitsch, much bar-room sentimentality, or layers of sound affects.

........"I am inspired by a little voice in my head that tells me to keep going and to get these words and songs out of my skull. And if I stop I would most likely go crazy. The process of making and performing music seems to me to be like breathing," he says. He also loves reading books on history, and telling from the topical insouciance of his lyrics (and his love for Dead Prez's "Let's Get Free"), has a thing or two to say about politics.

"I think that it is very important to keep politics in music and for artists of all types to challenge the norms of society," Jones says. "Music that moves me challenges me to think of the world in another way. My favorite musicians are all revolutionaries. We live in a world full of isolation and selfishness. I believe it is our job as artist to pull people out of the modern-techno make-believe world: Facebook, Twitter, and Google news."


More HERE.

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