Folky rocker Chet Vincent is out in the world via Misra Records (one of my favorite labels to work with: the bad bois who also brought you Melaena Cadiz and Anthonie Tonnon), and he is so great. Reminds me quite a bit of classic folky-rocker stuff like The Band or Neil Young, or I often catch glimpses of contemporary Langhorne Slim in there too. Super easy to love, and from recent experience I can tell ya this record works great as a jam on a long road trip. Too much rock for just your folk charts (in my opinion), and I didn’t have many hard copies of this one to work with so odds are higher than usual that this came your way as a download. Check your station’s email and grab it today!!
CHET VINCENT
WHERE THE EARTH OPENS WIDE
Misra Records
Not every great songwriter is prolific, and certainly not every prolific songwriter is great—but those who qualify as both tend to face a common challenge: How do you sort and classify a body of work that might span moods, styles and genres? What goes together, and what goes where?
Chet Vincent—frontman of The Big Bend and longtime notable in the pool of singer-songwriters in his hometown of Pittsburgh—has been living something of a double life on account of just that problem. There’s Chet the rock singer, leading the increasingly loud and raucous Big Bend on an entropic path over the years. Then there’s what you might call Chet the folk singer, honing his craft in the quieter corners of town, palling around with singer-songwriters who might not even realize The Big Bend exists.
Vincent’s latest effort, Where the Earth Opens Wide, is a product of the latter Chet, though you might say it bridges the gap between the two. For the nine-track album, out now on Misra Records, Vincent dipped into both his catalog of solo tunes and an impressive crew of collaborators from across the city’s music community.
The songs themselves are simple, in a way: they were, after all, written for guitar and voice only. To avoid the trap of overly simple folk songs—the ones that all start to blend together halfway through an album—Vincent began to experiment as a writer, changing up tunings, for example, and exploring varied song structures.
He then took the songs, optimized for just one musician, and took them into the studio (Alex Herd’s Thunderbird House, in Pittsburgh) to flesh them out with a full band of ringers: Nathan Zoob of Wreck Loose, James Hart of the Harlan Twins, standup bass-around-town Trish Imbrogno, and a handful of other known quantities.
The album that results is at once familiar and original—familiar not because it sounds like Vincent’s other band, but because it draws from reference points like Neil Young, George Harrison and The Band. It’s sonically interesting, playing with echo and effects to create moods a solo artist can’t alone. At its heart, though, it’s still a roots-centered record, on a level bringing to mind what happened when John Cale hired the core of Little Feat to back him on Paris 1919: an album that stretches the boundaries of tradition, but refuses to abandon it.
RIYL: John Prine, Neil Young, George Harrison, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Langhorne Slim, The Band, Bob Dylan
Start With: 2, 4, 8 FCC CLEAN
Contact me for a download link if you’re a radio rep!
the band mom loves you 
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