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He's already achieved more as a songwriter and instrumentalist than most musicians could do in a lifetime. His sound is familiar, with ties to practically every Western genre and many that lie beyond our horizons, yet also unlike anything else you've ever heard. His colleagues, ranging back to Jimi Hendrix and up to today's young giants, unify through time in admiration of his accomplishments.
And so it is hardly surprising that Richard Thompson, nonpareil guitarist and perceptive observer of life's persistent ironies, has produced another masterpiece -- The Old Kit Bag, scheduled for release in Spring of 2003 by iMUSIC.
What's perhaps most remarkable about this album -- by one reckoning, his twenty-fifth, without even counting the six he recorded as a member of Fairport Convention -- is its distillation of all that precedes it in his catalog. For more than thirty years Thompson has grown as an artist by carefully paring his work down to its essence. As a culmination of this process, Kit Bag, recorded in spare trio format with minimal overdubs, is a textbook lesson on how to convey layers of meaning with minimal gestures.
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