This is the first full-length CD from Fred Gillen Jr in four years. It features guests Andy LaDue, Abbie Gardner, Steve Kirkman, and Laurie MacAllister, and includes 8 new original songs, 1 old original song, and 1 Woody Guthrie cover... Extremely intimate production.
Indie-music.com editors put it in their "TOP 25 CD's of 2006."
"Fred, your record is so good i nearly soiled myself when i heard it." -Koji Mabuchi, Chicken Coop Records
Review in Indie Music.com by Liza Monroy
Quote: "Like Guthrie, Gillen has the uncanny ability to take you places, take you on a tour of a long-awaited escape, and all the bittersweetness that comes along with that weighted word called leaving."
Review:
Filmmakers should pay special attention: You'll want to use one of Fred Gillen, Jr.'s soulful songs to punctuate a poignant moment in your movie now, before he gets super-huge. Or at least that was my first thought on hearing his fifth release, Gone, Gone, Gone - it's cinematic and emotionally evocative, the subtle strains of a landscape born of sound, in the way only a true folk artist can create. "This Town This Time" tells the story of a man desperate to leave a place he's outgrown, and the memories that go along with it. Travel is a major theme of this album, as the title suggests, and these are songs of the road at their best. "Free!" chronicles what seems to be the pinnacle of escape from that oppressive small town ("what's a nice guy like me doing in a dump like this"), while "From the Lobby of a Cheap Motel" tackles nostalgia and regret of love lost in a man's desperate phone call to the one he left behind.
Most impressive is Gillen's cover of "I Ain't Got No Home," a cover of - and homage to - his muse and influence Woody Guthrie. Like Guthrie, Gillen has the uncanny ability to take you places, take you on a tour of a long-awaited escape, and all the bittersweetness that comes along with that weighted word called leaving. With his pensive guitar strumming and quietly powerful voice that envelops the listener from the very first line, it's easy to imagine Gillen's tunes playing on the soundtrack of the next Garden State-style filmic tale of a wandering soul taking a look back - and ahead.
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