Hippies, Thugs And Heroes

Description

Sixty years after the start of a career that began with Fairport Convention and has spanned decades as one of rock’s most acclaimed singer-songwriters, Richard Thompson is still chasing surprise. On Hippies, Thugs and Heroes, he lets his subconscious take the wheel, drawing from a gallery of old friends, fake gurus, former versions of himself, and invented characters who insisted their stories be told. The result is an album that refuses to sit still. It opens with the bright Byrds-inspired jangle of “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” — a song rooted in Thompson’s history with the spiritual movements of the 1970s and the complex pull of charismatic leaders — before veering into the noisy “Everybody's Stealing” and settling on the bluesy closer “Stringer.” Along the way, “Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking” delivers some of his most inventive guitar playing to date, a raw, nervous surge into a blazing psychedelic solo that captures a hard cast of London wrestlers and schemers. Recorded live with his longtime band — Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, David Mansfield on guitar and violin, and his wife Zara Phillips on backing vocals — at Hobosound Studio in Weehawken, NJ, the sessions moved quickly, often in just two to four takes. But the writing itself runs deep: more elaborate home demos strengthened Thompson’s musical identity on the latest album, resulting in a record he describes as “less them and more myself.” What emerges is a spiritual inquiry disguised as a rock record — a meditation on the towers we build and the ruin that follows when we invest too completely. Thompson does not fully understand all the songs here, and that is precisely the point. Hippies, Thugs and Heroes proves that after sixty years, the joy of not knowing where a song will take you has not diminished at all.