Where others would break under the pressure of drugs and mistakes, John Murry was inspired, which resulted in a total package that reminds of mournful folk and blues with raw and hoarse vocals.
Tupelo, Mississippi is John Murry’s hometown, where the pharmaceutical speed he was given as a “slow” student at his Mississippi high school ended him up in a fundamentalist drug rehabilitation facility for eighteen months.
He immigrated to Oakland, California several years ago for the Mexican Coca-Cola. The albums Murry writes and records with Bob Franken is described by Jim Dickinson as follows: “The lost cry out in song. Cold as an assassin’s blade. Burning with the heat of a pistol’s breath.”
It’s a big sound at times – backup singers, panoramic guitar noise, sweet piano melodies, an orchestra of strings, bells and horns. But no matter how ethereal or expansive, at the heart of each song is something simple maybe written on an acoustic guitar or upright piano about loss and solitude and bad fucking-up, not always with a guilty conscience.
John Murry knows what it sounds like to be Elvis, alone in Memphis, bloated with pills and mistakes, about to hit the floor.
Paul van Hulten, the man behind Man From The South, wrote his first album ‘Koblenz’ in 2009, which was destined to never see the daylight. Half a year later the album was found again, covered in dust at the back of a shelf, and was released as a digital album. His influences consist of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Townes van Zandt, to name a few. These result in beautifully melancholic and bittersweet songs by this singer-songwriter.