Summer Through My Mind

Richard Youngs presents his debut recording for Ba Da Bing Records, and the label is looking forward to a long relationship. For Summer Through My Mind, Youngs pushes himself into a challenging new sphere yet again. A renowned musician with over 40 albums to his name, he goes somewhere he never has before—to the heart of American music. Summer Through My Mind is a country music album, warped through Youngs’s ambidextral mind. A warning: it’s not like any country album one has heard before. There are familiar elements scattered about—slide-guitar, heartfelt vocals, dark lyricism—but these pieces exist like alienated rocks from a planetary explosion of long ago. The discomfited guitar lines create patchy connections, and Youngs’s unmistakable singing seals things right up. The album draws together a story Youngs wrote as a child, involving bad people and dark spirits (“Story of Jhon” which has a vocal contribution from Simon Joyner), with some lyrics written by his own six-year-old son. In a rare chance to see him perform outside of Europe, Youngs will be playing select US dates in 2013, including the Hopscotch Festival in Durham, NC, and at the ISSUE Project Room in New York.