Steve Gunn – Other You review

For Steve Gunn life is best kept simple. Once a member of Kurt Vile’s backing band and then launching a solo career as far back as 2007, his vision now is that “I just wanna be this guy with my guitar, traveling around”, an idyllic vagrancy that in the super complicated twenties seems less and less achievable.

On his last effort – 2019’s The Unseen in Between – he ruminated on amongst other things the recent death of his father and a world in the shadow of a President-as-maniac, but Other You finds him on a very different page, working with collaborators such as Juliana Barwick, Mary Lattimore and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, taking it’s predecessor’s relatively in-line formula and bending it appreciably.

The outcome is even by the standards of a twelve month period filled with excellent American singer-songwriter releases from likes of Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus a work which ushers Gunn into the highest echelons of the craft. Lattimore‘s angelic harp on Sugar Kiss is a revelation itself, but on Morning River, Protection and Good Wind the wandering storyteller’s gift he confers is honed into a newly sharpened and highly impressive focus.

You can read a full review here.