Illinois River Valley Blues

LPA

1. Ride Ahead and Light the Way For Me
2. Cairo Levee
3. The Canyons of Illinois
4. Andalusia, IL
5. Spanish Venus

LPB

1. On the Move and Vanishing
2. Rise, Fernanda, Rise!
3. Ursula
4. The Strollers Memorial
5. Night Falls on Chillicothe

A sense of place has been essential to the music of Brokeback since guitarist/bassist Douglas McCombs first launched the project in 1995. Initially conceived as a solo outlet, the Chicago group has taken on new dimensions over the past two decades, morphing from the lean, pastoral ambience of the first album, Field Recordings from the Cook County Water Table, to the more muscular, taut arrangements and dynamic swells of the last release, Brokeback and the Black Rock, for which McCombs assembled a new quartet lineup. Each album develops with exacting detail, revealing McCombs s gift for dialing in the essence of a mood, feeling, or distant locale with a handful of reverb-laden guitar tones, elegant and sustained, strategically placed and sparingly deployed.