2014 John Hiatt and The Combo with The Robert Cray Band
John Hiatt, who the Los Angeles Times calls “…one of rock’s most astute singer-songwriters of the last 40 years,” will release his new album, Terms Of My Surrender, on July 15, 2014 via New West Records. Hiatt, a master lyricist and satirical storyteller, weaves hidden plot twists into fictional tales ranging in topics including redemption, relationships, growing older and surrendering, on his terms. The new record is musically rooted in acoustic blues, accentuated by Hiatt’s soulful, gritty voice, which mirrors the gravity of his reflective lyrics.
For Terms Of My Surrender, Hiatt turned to his longtime guitarist Doug Lancio (Patty Griffin, Jack Ingram) to produce. Though Hiatt initially picked up an electric guitar on day one of recording, Lancio challenged him to play acoustic instead, which set the tone and mood for the whole process. Hiatt even plays harmonica on the album, which he hasn’t done in several years. They recorded most of the album off the floor as if in a live setting, which was fitting since the band in the studio was Hiatt’s exceptional touring band (Lancio, Nathan Gehri, Kenneth Blevins, and Brandon Young).
Hiatt’s songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt (“Thing Called Love”), Emmylou Harris, Iggy Pop, Rosanne Cash (#1 country hit, “The Way We Make A Broken Heart”), the Jeff Healey Band (“Angel Eyes”), and even the cartoon bear band of Disney’s film, The Country Bears. He earned a Grammy nomination for Crossing Muddy Waters, while B.B. King and Eric Clapton shared a Grammy for their album Riding With The King, the title track from which was a Hiatt composition. Hiatt has received his own star on Nashville’s Walk of Fame, the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting, has been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and was saluted at the Indiana Governor’s Arts Awards.
With his seventeenth studio album, In My Soul, the five-time Grammy winner (and 15-time nominee) reasserts his position as one of his generation's great musical storytellers—this time steeped in the down-home sound and rich emotion of Southern Soul, yet never straying far from his incomparable guitar mastery. Produced by Steve Jordan, whose long list of credits includes extensive work with Keith Richards and John Mayer, the album blends funky originals with surprising covers, and captures a new configuration of the Robert Cray Band: long-time bass player Richard Cousins is joined by keyboardist Dover Weinberg (returning to the group, with which he played in the 1970s and '80s) as well as new drummer Les Falconer.
Robert Cray is widely recognized as one of the greatest guitarists of our time. The New Yorker recently called him “one of the most reliable pleasures of soul and blues for over three decades now.“ He has written or performed with everyone from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan, from Bonnie Raitt to John Lee Hooker, and in 2011, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
This year marks four decades since the inception of the Robert Cray Band and with In My Soul, he is celebrating in style. He notes, with pride and with some amusement, that he continues to see new, younger faces in his audience. "There's a younger generation now whose parents turned them on to our music," he says. "It reminds me of when I was young and going to see Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, all the blues I could. It is kind of funny to be in the position of being the older generation now. But I'm just going to continue to do what we do. I can only do what I know, and we'll see what happens."
