REED TURCHI - “GET BACK TRAIN”
FROM HIS NEW ALBUM WORLD ON FIRE (OUT MAY 30TH)
REED TURCHI - WORLD ON FIRE
After four years of upheaval—including illness, divorce, and a cross-country move—Reed Turchi found himself right back where he started, playing the same songs he learned when he first fell in love with the North Mississippi Hill Country blues as a teenager. This time, though, something felt different.
“I’ve known how to play these tunes for a long time now,” Turchi explains, “but I didn’t know how to sing them until I lived them. I had to find my voice.”
Indeed, Turchi’s captivating new album, World On Fire, is an alternatingly harrowing and hopeful journey of self-discovery, one fueled by doubt and despair, pain and healing, loss and redemption. Recorded live over two nights without any edits or overdubs, the collection is the raw and haunting testimony of a man who’s been to the brink and back, as stark and eerie as it is enthralling and hypnotic. The songs here are all vintage blues and spiritual tunes Turchi picked up along the way on his circuitous route through the music industry—some traditional with no documented authors, others performed by so many artists with so many variations over the years that it’s impossible to pin down any definitive version—but he makes each his own with striking honesty and intimacy. Turchi produced the record himself, stripping each track down to its barest essentials with only acoustic guitars, upright bass, and drums to accompany his evocative slide playing and aching vocals. The result is a timeless recording that lands somewhere between Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, a work of devastating beauty that feels at once intensely personal and profoundly relevant.
“There’s a line in the song ‘Lay My Burden Down’ that asks, ‘What you gonna do when the world’s on fire?’” Turchi explains. “I spent a lot of time thinking about that question for my own world, as well as the broader world around me. The thing I’ve always loved about traditional music is that everyone on Earth could sing that line and hear themselves in it. There’s only one human song out there, and interpreting these tunes felt like the most honest thing I could do.”
Hailed by the Oxford American as an artist “beyond genre constraints,” Turchi first became fascinated with the sound of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues as a teenager, but his obsession stretched beyond simply listening to the music. Armed with a cheap recording rig operated out of the back of his car, Turchi began making regular pilgrimages to northern Mississippi to capture the last of the genre’s originators, cataloging field recordings in the vein Alan Lomax or Mike Seeger while developing his own distinctive style of slide guitar in the process. After graduating from UNC, where he studied under former NEH chairman and esteemed folklorist William Ferris, Turchi launched a label to release albums he’d recorded by the likes of Kenny Brown and Joe Ayers. The buzz soon led him to an A&R/production gig at the legendary Ardent label and studios in Memphis, Tennessee.
“I never really felt like there was much difference between recording other artists and recording myself,” says Turchi, who would later move from Memphis to Nashville. “It was always about chasing a sound and a spirit, about trying to create an atmosphere where something real could be communicated.”
All the while, Turchi was building his own career as an artist, earning praise everywhere from Rolling Stone to American Songwriter and touring relentlessly around the US and Europe behind a series of critically acclaimed albums. After the pandemic ground things to a halt in 2020, Turchi returned to the road in the fall of 2021, only to be derailed again, this time by a mysterious medical condition. For two years, doctors remained perplexed by Turchi’s worsening symptoms, unable to pinpoint a source for the increasingly debilitating pain and internal bleeding that made even simple acts like eating and drinking utterly excruciating.
“As terrible as my illness made me feel, what shook me was not knowing what was happening,” Turchi recalls. “I was getting steadily worse and worse despite new prescriptions, and so it seemed like my time on earth was running out.”
The looming specter of death rewired Turchi’s brain and upended his entire world.
“My perspective on everything just completely changed,” he explains. “I knew I needed to transform my life, and I felt I didn’t have the luxury of time, so I set it all on fire at once: divorce, leaving Nashville, moving to New York to pursue something new even though there was no certainty, or insurance, or savings, or back up plan.”
When doctors finally diagnosed Turchi with a rare form of Crohn’s Disease, they prescribed a mind-bending steroid regimen to help heal the open wounds and ulcers that had wrought havoc on his intestines.
“When you lie awake from pain that many nights in a row, you start to ask yourself what really matters,” he reflects. “You start to get down to the core of the human experience and what it is you want to communicate.”
That sense of clarity is striking on World On Fire, which opens with the plaintive “Walk With Me.” Like much of the album, it’s a direct, plainspoken reflection on loneliness and isolation, on the search for comfort and connection in a world that feels colder and more uncaring by the day. “Don’t leave me alone, Lord / Don’t leave me alone,” Turchi begs, repeating the line like a prayer. The forlorn “When You’ve Got A Good Friend” wrestles with the guilt and regret of hurting a loved one, while the chugging “Get Back Train” longs for the familiarity of a home that may no longer exist, and the brooding “Don’t Leave Me Baby” surrenders to the void.
“Every sonic decision on this album was made to create and preserve a feeling of emptiness and solitude,” says Turchi, who worked with engineer David Turk on the sessions at Second Take Sound, a state-of-the-art studio Turchi now runs in Manhattan. “We spent a long time on microphone placement to get the atmosphere right, and once we nailed it, those were the mixes. We didn’t have to change a thing.”
It’s a production approach Turchi learned in part from listening to Big Joe Turner, whose voice, in a way, is directly responsible for Turchi’s existence.
“My parents met while studying abroad in Oxford,” Turchi recalls, “and the story goes that my mom was out walking one foggy day when she started following the sound of this amazing voice. It led her to my dad, who was not singing, but rather playing a Big Joe Turner album with the window open. Years later, Joe would perform at their wedding, and now here I am full circle, drawing on a similar vein of old songs that brought my parents together in the first place.”
It’s not the only full circle family connection on the album, either. Turchi plays his stepgrandmother’s Harmony H162 guitar throughout the collection.
“My stepgrandmother moved from Ireland to Chicago in the early 1960s to become a nun, and for her first Christmas at the convent, the parish priest gave her the money to buy a guitar,” Turchi explains. “She picked this Harmony acoustic up at the same time and on the same side of town that RL Burnside and the Staple Singers and all these artists who would become so formative for me were performing and recording. Now here I am playing it on an album that’s indebted to all of them.”
Perhaps it’s those family ties that keep Turchi hanging on here, refusing to give up on the hope of better days to come. The resolute “Lay My Burden Down” looks ahead to a time when all our earthly trials and tribulations come to an end; the playful “Backdoor Man” finds humor even in the hardest of times; and the pensive “Someday Baby” promises that “someday, baby, I ain’t gonna worry my life away no more.”
“In a lot of ways, this record feels like the culmination of everything I’ve done so far,” Turchi reflects, “but it also feels like a new beginning. I can hear myself turning a corner and, for the first time, knowing who I am and where I’m headed.”
With World On Fire, Reed Turchi hasn’t just found his voice, he’s found himself, too.