The collection of songs on singer-songwriter Tyrone Cotton’s self-titled CD release are immediately engaging, making the listening experience feel like an intimate live show performed just for the listener. The lyrics are written with the eye of a poet and sung in a vibrato-inflected vocal style at once vulnerable and commanding. And Cotton’s guitar-playing is laced with remnants of a classical technique he learned as a music student at WesternKentuckyUniversity.
With tracks ranging from the laid-back yet attentive original “Breaking Away” to the more raucous “As Befits a Man (Don’t Mind Dyin’),” a Langston Hughes poem set to Cotton’s music, and a vintage blues-style cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia,” the album is a great companion to a person’s everyday routine.
It’s not an album one might play as a certain mood strikes, but one that could remain in frequent rotation on the CD players of fans of blues, folk and roots rock.
Cotton, 41, and the album’s producer, Danny Kiely (also Cotton’s bass player), had the intent of creating an album that was only peripherally about showing off the skills of the musicians. “We didn’t focus so much on long solos,” Cotton says, “but wanted to have nice playing, serving one purpose of doing something for that song. Danny was good about leaving the songs with some room to breathe.”
Cotton, a graduate of EasternHigh School, began learning guitar around age 13. At 16, he says, he “went crazy (with guitar),” taking lessons and playing in rock bands after school. “I concentrated on flashy guitar licks; I wanted to play like Jimi Hendrix,” he says. Flash gave way to refinement: the classical technique he learned at WKU is integral to his performance. “The right-hand technique has been ingrained, along with the finger placement, the way I play chords,” Cotton says. “It may not be so obvious to others, but there are remnants (of that training). It’s subtle.”
After college, Cotton moved to Boston for several years before returning to Louisville in 1990. While he played his first show at Mr. C’s coffeehouse in Bowling Green, and played occasionally in Boston, Cotton didn’t begin performing consistently until her returned to Louisville. He plays regionally, solo or with a band, and last fall performed on a multi-city tour in Japan. He has monthly gigs at Seidenfaden’s in Germantown and the Monkey Wrench in the Highlands. For more information visit www.tyronecotton.com.
— Beth Newberry