Product Description
"With incendiary guitar chops and raw, powerful vocals, fiery Texas blues rocker Carolyn Wonderland draws instant comparisons to fellow Texans Stevie Ray Vaughan and Janis Joplin."
– NPR MUSIC
Red hot guitar heroine, lap steel virtuoso, whip-smart songwriter and fire-breathing singer has been recording critically acclaimed albums and touring the world for nearly 25 years, playing her original, bluesified, cosmic country soul music, mixed with heavy does of Tex-Mex and riff-fueled rock ’n’ roll. The album’s 12 tracks (including 10 new Wonderland originals or co-writes) deliver the blues’ honest truth in vividly detailed, infectious songs, all shot through with Wonderland’s stinging fretwork and full-throated vocals.
CAROLINE WONDERLAND
Truth Is
Alligator Records
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That seems to be the mode of thinking for the production team of Carolyn Wonderland, a supremely talented vocalist, songwriter-guitarist, and producer Dave Alvin, known for his work with his own bluesy, rootsy band, The Blasters. A few years back she released Tempting Fate, a stunning debut for Alligator Records, also produced by Alvin and hit the road hard with that release.
On Truth Is, she offers up some sparkling originals like the title track, and “Sooner Or Later,” “Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard Again,” and closes the album with “Blues For Gene,” a fine tune in memory of Austin piano man Gene Taylor, who was a formidable force on the Texas blues scene for years. Wonderland and band also throw in a nice treatment of “Orange Juice Blues” from Bob Dylan and The Band’s “Basement Tapes,” which is a testament to recently departed Band keyboardist-engineer-producer multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson, who lived to a ripe old age and passed in late January of this year.
Guest stars abound on Truth Is, including so many people who have helped put the Austin blues ‘n’ roots scene on the map: “Long Tall” Marcia Ball, Cindy Cashdollar, Ruthie Foster, and Shelley King. Throughout, she’s backed by her trusted bandmates Naj Conklin on bass and Giovanni “Nooch” Carnuccio on drums and percussion. Alvin also contributes some tasty guitar throughout the album as well.
Truth Is will surely open up new venues for Wonderland, whose longtime admirers include Bob Dylan, late New York commercial radio personality Don Imus, and myself, based at WRSU-FM, Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I first got to know Wonderland in the mid and late 1990s when Austin’s SxSW Music Festival was primarily a roots music conference. It has been a beautiful thing to witness a talent you always knew was a force of nature find ever-growing audiences.
– Richard J. Skelly