Paul Burch - Light Sensitive (2020)

Plowboy Records proudly announces Paul Burch's 11th album 'Light Sensitive'. Recorded in Nashville with his longtime band the WPA Ballclub along with guests Luther Dickinson, Robyn Hitchcock, Amy Rigby, and Aaron Lee Tasjan, 'Light Sensitive' sounds both modern and instantly classic and punctuates Pop Matters' declaration that Burch is "one of the best damn songwriters operating today." Burch makes music for the here and now but the fervor of rock & roll is always just beneath the surface, as if the secret son of William Faulkner had traded his typewriter for an electric guitar.

'Light Sensitive' takes place in the modern south where past and present shoot dice on the future and just wishing for something good has spectacular costs. The album's spirit of dislocation and lost opportunities was inspired by a visit to Burch's one-time hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.

Co-produced with a light touch by Burch and Grammy winner and T-Bone Burnett collaborator/bassist Dennis Crouch, 'Light Sensitive' features Burch's WPA Ballclub, which can conjure beauty and bedlam in the same measure with a palpable chemistry that comes from two decades together.

'Light Sensitive' also continues the WPA Ballclub's long tradition of including guests who share their sense of musical adventure. Aaron Lee Tasjan harmonizes on the "The Tell" and Amy Rigby leads a chorus of ethereal sorcerers in "Prince Ali's Fortune Telling Book of Dreams." Luther Dickinson adds his trademark slide guitar to "Fool About Me" and Robyn Hitchcock provides harmony and disharmony to a hapless traveler's airport dystopia in "Flight to Spain." For the album's highlight ballad "Marisol," longtime music partner Fats Kaplin's viola takes the song's treatise on unrequited love to the edge of madness and back again.