Rich instrumental flourishes-keening fiddle, solemn organ and bar-band piano boogie-add further depth and resonance. Songs hew toward easygoing roots-rock ("Run Away From It All") and Southern rock stomps ("The Crooked Kind"), as well as stripped-down acoustic numbers ("I've Got This Song") and bruising alt-country ("Nobody Gives A Damn"). (For good measure, the latter also topped Billboard's Americana/Folk album chart.) Find A Light, Blackberry Smoke's sixth studio album, doubles down on diversity. This fluidity has paid off handsomely, in the form of two Billboard chart-topping country albums, 2015's Holding All The Roses and 2016's Like An Arrow. Since emerging from Atlanta in the early '00s, the quintet-vocalist/lead guitarist Charlie Starr, guitarist/vocalist Paul Jackson, bassist/vocalist Richard Turner, drummer Brit Turner and keyboardist Brandon Still-has become known for a singular sound indebted to classic rock, blues, country and folk. He walks hand in hand with the girls to meet the Feds, turns the girls over to them, then walks away.Pigeonholing Blackberry Smoke has never been easy. The young girls shout to the meth-cooker, who comes out of the shack and hands one girl an old polaroid of a boy and a younger girl, on which he has scrawled, “you are not your brother’s keeper” (apparently a message to his sister?). A young woman (apparently the mother of the young girls, and the sister of the meth-cooker?) points the Feds into the woods. Two young girls (the meth-cooker’s nieces, apparently) go running through the woods, while two city-slickers who look like Feds roll up in a big SUV to a nearby farmhouse. There is a guy apparently cooking meth in a shack in the woods. The band has also just released a new video by JuddFilms for one of the more country offerings from the albums called “Too High.” READ: Album Review Blackberry Smoke’s “Holding All The Roses”
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Paired with Grammy Award-winning producer Brendan O’Brien, for the first time we find the band totally unfettered from superfluous obligations to labels and overbearing business lackeys, and in this space they’re simply allowed to be themselves. Holding All The Roses finds Blackberry Smoke forging a definitively more rock sound than on previous efforts. They are establishing a body of work that will serve as validation for a long time to come, but having a number one album sure helps.” “They know their fan base, and who supports them.
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“Blackberry Smoke continues to be one of the most hardworking, accessible, and engaging bands working today,” says Trey Wilson of Vector Management.
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“Their continued growth and success are a true testament to the deep connection they have with their fans.” Blackberry Smoke moved to the legendary Rounder roots label after Zac Brown’s Southern Ground dissolved. “All of us are very proud and thrilled to be partners with Blackberry Smoke,” says John Virant, president of Rounder Records. The band’s previous album The Whippoorwill peaked at #8 upon debut. It also showed up on the Billboard Rock chart at #7, and the all-encompassing Billboard 200 at #29. Holding All The Roses shipped 19,614 copies in its first week of sales, which is good enough for #1 on Billboard’s Country Albums Chart. You had a sense going into Blackberry Smoke’s new album Holding All The Roses that this could be a big one for the Atlanta-based band, and now were seeing all of the hard work and the good will they’ve sewed with their fan base over the last 15 years or so paying off big.