Growing up in North Carolina’s Swannanoa Valley, Reed Turchi drifted off to sleep to the sounds of trains every night. He first fell in love with the North Mississippi Hill Country blues as a teenager. After a lengthy stretch of adversity marked by divorce and an especially debilitating form of Crohn’s disease, he’s returning to the likes of “Get Back Train” with some pretty harrowing life experience in his back pocket.
“‘Get Back Train’ is a song as old as sound itself—or at least recorded filaments,” says Turchi. “My version of is an amalgamation of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Luther Dickinson, plus sounds and spaces of my own.”
While studying at the University of North Carolina, Turchi stoked his passion for the blues with regular trips to Mississippi to make field recordings of Kenny Brown, Earl “Little Joe” Ayers and other living pioneers. As time went on, he also developed a distinct slide-guitar sound of his own, eventually landing a A&R/production job at Ardent Studios in Memphis. Turning to his own music in 2010, Turchi spent several years touring the U.S. and Europe before his momentum was halted by COVID isolation and illness.
Turchi eventually moved from Tennessee to New York, where he now runs Second Take Sound in Manhattan. He recorded his upcoming album, World On Fire, at the studio over two nights, with no edits or overdubs. The songs are all vintage blues and spirituals.
“We recorded ‘Get Back Train’ in the dark—the band isolated to emphasize the night around us, just like listening to those distant trains,” says Turchi. “It’s the sound of something coming around the bend or, maybe, the sound of someone coming home again.”
The self-released World On Fire is out May 30. In the meantime, we’re proud to premiere Reed Turchi’s “Get Back Train” and its live-in-the-studio video.
—Hobart Rowland
