NEWS: Rose City Band @ The Cluny

Ripley Johnson, guitarist and songwriter (Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo) serves up bucolic country psych with Rose City Band when they come to play The Cluny on Tuesday 6^th September. We can expect pedal steel tinged and wistful meditations, played out in a classic, but highly personal, reflection on West Coast Americana. Johnson’s an assured storyteller and a songwriter who traps heart tugging moments and emotions in amber like golden treasure.

On his most recent album Earth Trip, written and recorded mid-pandemic, he plaintively covered everything from summers with friends, the vastness of space, curiosity in nature’s cycles and life ‘off the road’. Sounds ‘far out’ right? But it’s deeply immersed in the human experience, in his understanding and questioning; full of wonder and hope lyrically, it shines through with brightly chimed riffs and melodies. The fuzzy feeling of warm sun on the skin, the peace affords you that time to pause.

Now very much back in the touring saddle again, Johnson ventures out like a troubadour comet orbiting the globe to share a set filled with gentle trippy odes to his Pacific North West home, nature, beauty, love and fascination with earth’s shifting rhythms.

Rose City Band play The Cluny, Newcastle on Tuesday 6^th September.