​Rick Shea (from the album Smoke Tree Road

​Rick Shea (from the album Smoke Tree Road

​Rick Shea (from the album Smoke Tree Road available on Tres Pescadores Records) (by Bryant Liggett)
Rick Shea has made a great road album. Smoke Tree Road is also a record of storytelling, personal reflection, and, at times, protest songs, in a release that comes in a package of American Roots music. Rick Shea’s warm voice is ripe for a front porch picking or a late-night hang around the fire. His songs are perfect for a score of the wide-expanse of the American West, the kind of record that’s built for driving across any vast spaces on the left side of the mighty Mississippi River. He captures that moving score right out of the gate via album opener, “A Week in Winnemucca”, a bouncy cut that is Country and Western.
Rick Shea hits us with a dose of history, and a nod to the immigrants that were. and always have been, crucially important to the United States, in “An Irishman’s a Laborer at Heart”. “Midnight Shift” is a groovy parlor cut and there’s a blast of ol’ Mexico in “El Diablo Manda” via the guitar and accordion work, a stark statement of things right at home as he warns us ‘all bets are off when the devil rules the roost’. It’s a protest song without coming right out and saying it. Rick Shea does a killer job turning in the longtime favorite “Long Black Veil” into a rockabilly mover, and “Trailrider” brings us right back to the West in a cut that could have been dropped by Marty Robbins himself.
Warm vocals and harmonies, exceptional picking and playing, make Smoke Tree Road a modern take on a classic album of the U.S. West states. (by Bryant Liggett)
Listen and buy the music of Rick Shea from AMAZON
 
For more information, head to the Rick Shea website