Cory Chisel is an old believer. You can hear it in his music – there’s a wisdom beyond his years in that voice. You can see it in his story – the son of a preacher, sheltered from pop music, raised on hymns and Johnny Cash. “Mom played piano and organ, my dad did the preaching, the thing that my sister and I could add to the service was to sing.” As fate would have it, the kid was born to do it. He grew up in the iron range town of Babbit Minnesota, and the rural flatlands of Appleton Wisconsin. Along with the family’s spiritual doctrine came a musician uncle, who taught Cory about the blues: Howlin Wolf, Robert Johnson, Sony Boy Williamson.
This musical education put young Cory on a path that was well worn by the greats who came before him and influenced him. People like Cash, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding. For Cory, songwriting is a byproduct of existing. We all talk to ourselves. Cory does so with a melody. Those internal conversations are the seeds, the building blocks of his songs. “Where a painter, in order to express himself, would reach for a canvas and paints, I go to the guitar and try to build it out. Or sometimes songs just come fully formed, usually if I’m really sleep-deprived and driving for whatever reason, it’s like a radio station that my brain picks up.”
Old Believer, the second LP from Cory Chisel & The Wandering Sons, was recorded in Nashville and produced by a great singer songwriter in his own right, Brendan Benson (The Raconteurs). The two met while making Cory’s first album. “We had just such a common language in the way we attacked music making. Brendan is really great at bringing direction and bringing something out of me that is almost indescribable. He’s also the guy who can get behind the boards and pull it off.” What Benson pulls off is an album of rich, authentic, rock and roll, drawing a straight line between the gospel and the blues of Cory’s youth, and classic rock.
The sound is filled out by a great cast of Nashville players including Matt Scibilia, Jon Graboff and Brad Pemberton of The Cardinals (Ryan Adams) and The Howlin Brothers. But the thing that truly brings this record to life is Chisel’s long time keyboard player and singing partner Adriel Harris. Their voices fit together magically. “I think one of the best things about being a songwriter and about living a life as an artist is that you really don’t get rid of anything, you kind of just like drag it with you the rest of your life and hopefully you can feel that on this record. We’re still dancing with those same inspired moments. This record is a culmination of all that.”
