Search - Steve Pride & His Blood Kin :: Pride on Pride

There is a Steve Pride in Everytown: a once auspicious, renegade singer-songwriter, years ago the talk of the town, now with a vastly different career path and a shoebox full of demos, live performances, and after-hours stupors. The difference? This Pride of Illinois has Wilco's Jay Bennett, who played with Pride's Blood Kin in the early '90s, to catalog the basement tapes (indeed recorded in a basement) into a tidy anthology of two-dozen folk tales, traveling country shuffles, and flat-out rockers. Pride obviously aced the late Townes Van Zandt's storytelling songwriting tutorial, then kicked life into the lo-fi recordings with a throaty Midwestern whine that echoes Peter Case (sometimes chillingly). The irony is that Pride's songs fit snug-tight in an alt-country genre that didn't exist when he penned them. --Scott Holter