53 Across return with more of their trademarked High Desert Blues as they ruminate on relationships with “Jerk My Chain,” the first single and video from their new EP, The Blue Bag. Picking up where their last album, The Bag, left off, the trio continues to fine-tune their sound and find new grooves to explore. Eduardo Barraza, Darrell Hall and Garrett Hobson all shapeshift as multi-instrumentalists, lyricists and singers (with the former mostly on drums & vocals and the latter two mostly handling the guitar and bass duties as well as vocals), but their collective strong suit is rocking blues.
From The Bag to The Blue Bag a theme has emerged, as Hobson explains: “We write all the time, but most of the songs on these records were written within the past two years. What’s In The Bag came first, then we started coming up with album concepts that would become a series of releases or a longer narrative; The Bag, The Blue Bag, The Grab Bag, and so on.”
While each Bag stands on it’s own, blues is the common thread that ties it all together. “All music comes from the blues in way or another, regardless of the genre,” Barraza notes. “The concept of a story, something that’s happened to you, whether it’s good, bad or ugly, the blues is a way to tell that story and have people relate to it.”
“Blues, to me, is life music,” Hall comments. “We write a lot about our lives and what happens. If you look at our songs with just a glance it might seem that all we do is get into trouble with badass women! But it’s well beyond that, it’s really about life.” Adds Hobson, “When we start putting parts of a song together, it literally cooks with all three of us stirring the pot. There are times when we get stuck, and then one of us will bring one little thing in and it will turn the song around.”
“That’s just because of our backgrounds,” says Barraza. “Garrett’s more of the rocker, but he does some blues stuff, Darrell is more of a traditional blues guy, and I’m more all over the place. I’m originally from west Texas, I was brought up on tejano and latin and country. So we take all that together and come up with what we call High Desert Blues.”
Weaving new threads into the traditional blues-rock power trio narrative, 53 Across create a ZZ Top-style sound – immediately recognizable yet weirdly different.
