Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Gabe Sullivan: Songwriting Machine!

Posted By on Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 3:49 PM

At the beginning of 2017, as winds turned cold and Mercury moved into retrograde, Gabriel Sullivan, Tucson guitar-slinger (for XIXA and Howe Gelb), record producer and prolific songwriter, embarked on an insane project; to compose, record and post a song a day for a year. 
It's a challenge he imposed upon himself once before in ‘14, in a project called The Crucible, completing an impressive 365 songs (that's right, 365 songs). Sullivan decided to bring back the project this year under the name The Resurrectionist. A creative undertaking not quite on par with the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus—where the legendary king of Corinth is condemned to roll a heavy rock up a hill in Hades only to have it roll back down again as it nears the top repeatedly for all of eternity—but damn close.

The setting is often sparse; most vignettes find Sullivan’s throaty voice alone with a nylon string acoustic guitar. Lyrically, it's all there, Sullivan touches on time honored themes: Pain, loss, separation, love, hubris, sin, redemption. And listeners will discover instrumental skeletons and etchings that only the darkness of late night and shots of mezcal may inspire. We here at TW have to take our hats off at the sheer aspiration of the endeavour.

At the outset, this project is much the same as a greenhouse used for cultivation. For music geeks, the type that titillates the imagination with possibility. A creative form of Darwinism, if you will, wherein the most robust of the seeds will continue to germinate then bloom in various contexts; finding their place on albums and setlists. The other seeds will inevitably freeze in the cold or wither under the mercurial sun.

Check out Song A Day Project: The Resurrectionist here.

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