Rick Carroll
Prodigal Son
Prodigal son? What's a prodigal son?
Okay, let's say that a rich man has two sons, and they both get a trust fund when they turn 21. One son takes it and invests it, finishes college and even joins the family business. Good kid, that one.
The other son takes his cash and hits the clown circuit with all his might. Booze, drugs, wild women; he does it all. What's more, he flips off everyone who reaches out to him to try and bring him back into the family fold. This kid's a friggin' mess.
So, years later, after the wild child runs his future into a ditch, he wanders back home again. He's learned a few things about what it means to lose, and now he just hopes that the old man will hire him to clean out the barn with the rest of the slaves. No special treatment; just a job and a place to sleep. Of course, in the original take, the old man sweeps him back into the fold; no hard feelings.
Nice guy, his old man is, and happy that the kid came back. Naturally, the other son is pissed to no end, but that's to be expected.
I call this project my Prodigal Son project because I walked off on the blues in 1999, and just when I was getting some acceptance in the Boston blues community. In the years since, I did a lot of other stuff, including authoring a few books, and even devised a pretty ingenious physics structure that just might accurately depict how physical reality emerged and evolved into what we have all around us today. Check out the bio page. It was all pretty fascinating, but just like the Prodigal Son in the story, nothing came of any of it, and here I am, back home again with hopes for just a bed and a few nickels for whatever hard work is in the offering.
The blues is my long lost home. Been that home since I was orphaned as a teenager, and now it's where I've returned to see whether there's still a place for me after so many years away. I'm not looking for much; just a few moments here and there with the family and those folks who've found their center within what the blues offers those of us who are vulnerable to its charm.
My blues are ragged, real, and relentlessly personal. No gimmicks. No bullshit. Check out the tracks and see what you think. Check out the gig calendar, and see if any of it aligns with what you got planned. If so, then I look forward to seeing you out and about. I guess that's all I got to say about any of this.
The thing I really like about doing music in the 21st century is that literally anyone can toss together a really good recording of the songs they play in their show. Back when I started in this business, it took a healthy chunk of change to get something that was clear and didn't sound like an embarrassing mess of rookie confusion. A good recording, something you might feel good about sending around, could cost you a lot more than that. Now days, a guy sitting in his living room can construct a masterpiece without so much as calling up a lifeline cohort, and that brings me to the two playlists I put together here.
The cuts I have featured here are songs that I recorded right here live with my machines, and that means that when I play out live, this is exactly what these songs sound like coming through the PA speakers.
One of the playlists here is original songs and the other one has cover songs that I do in my show. Y'know, a lot of people don't realize that you can learn a lot about a band or an artist by checking out how they interpret other people's material. It's true, though. My original stuff is pretty good, but listen to the cover material if you want to better understand the kind of stuff that runs free there between my ears.