Twice Grammy-nominated folksinger Eliza Gilkyson is touring her 20th album, Secularia. Produced by her son, Cisco Ryder, with a spare urban approach, it’s a collection of poems and hymns; deeply spiritual old and new songs that praise the world’s wonder and beauty and lament its destruction.
About Richard Thompson · United Kingdom
In the 1960s, Thompson’s band Fairport Convention helped invent and perfect a new musical genre - British folk rock. He left the band to form a duo with then wife Linda. Their 1982 album Shoot Out The Lights, which chronicled their disintegrating marriage, is number nine in Rolling Stone magazine’s top 100 albums of the 1980s.
Since the mid-‘80s, Thompson has continued to release solo critically acclaimed albums filled with incisive originals that tap into deep human emotions, from a middle-aged woman’s love for Elvis to a man’s undying love for his motorcycle to a scathing anti-Iraq-war anthem from a G.I.’s perspective “(Bagh)Dad’s Gonna Kill Me.” Others excoriate the quackery of religious leaders, contemplate a dark self and critique politics. Thompson’s material has been covered by Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, Del McCoury, even Bob Dylan, and he also happens to be a guitar god, with the L.A. Times describing Thompson as "the finest rock songwriter after Dylan and the best electric guitarist since Hendrix."
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Twice Grammy nominated folk singer Eliza Gilkyson is touring her 20th album, Secularia. Produced by her son, Cisco Ryder, with a spare urban approach, it’s a collection of poems and hymns; deeply spiritual old and new songs that praise the world’s wonder and beauty and lament its destruction.