With “Cheap Machine,” Troy Mercy was looking to accomplish one of recorded music’s tougher feats—even with today’s technology.
“I wanted to imprint as much of the energy of my live show as possible onto the vinyl,” he says. “To feel the crackle of the electric guitar and smell the tubes overheating in the amp.”
Mercy has spent decades working as a guitarist for the likes of Booker T, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Chicago blues originators Billy Boy Arnold and Pinetop Perkins, also appearing on two Grammy-nominated albums by T-Birds frontman Kim Wilson. Now the Massachusetts lifer is set to release his debut, Let The Night Begin, an album that leans on his razor-sharp songwriting as much as his guitar work.
“Proper rock ’n’ roll should make the listener feel transcendent … Picture a time when you broke the rules, and it was the right thing to do,” Mercy says. “I want to ignite that feeling in people. I usually just set the controls for somewhere between Little Richard and Live At Leeds and hope my spaceship knows which way to go.”
Mercy describes the lyrics to “Cheap Machine” as “a bit of a Trojan Horse.”
“If any of us are honest with ourselves, we may identify with the narrator a tad more than we might want,” he says. “Adrift in a consumerist ocean repeatedly casting away pieces of our lives in exchange for cheap convenience and planned obsolescence.”
We’re proud to premiere Troy Mercy’s “Cheap Machine.” Look for Let The Night Begin on May 29 via Gitcha.
—Hobart Rowland
