Brody Buster’s career seems to be almost the archetypical ‘Life of a Bluesman’.
Picking up his instrument – in his case a harmonica – at a ridiculously young age – 5 yrs old – and picked for success by a veteran Bluesman, in this case the master himself B.B. King. You could almost plot the rest from there, the rise and demise and finally ‘Redemption’.
It all may be a cliché, but in the case of Buster Brody, at age 40, he has lived more life than a hundred of his contemporaries and come out of it all with an album that kicks some serious ass.
After winning plaudits and many awards, Buster hit Covid and Lockdown hard, developing some bad addiction and abuse habits, until finding sobriety and resuming his career in 2023. He locked himself away with some of Missouri’s best musicians and produced this, a superb example of electric Blues.
Buster is a superb harmonica player – as well as a fine guitarist and drummer, as shown by his award winning one man band – and it shows at its best on this album. He is also possessed of a classic Blues and Soul vocal style, not a tuneful voice necessarily, but he has that deep sense of loss and desire that really encompasses great Blues vocalists.
The band around him are top notch, the production is raw and has some edge so the sound is natural, there is nothing here that you would say was over-polished, altogether it has the feel and tone of a real Blues band.
His song titles reflect his emerging from dark days and trouble. ‘Born To be Bad’, ‘Protection From Your Affection’, ‘Wish These Blues Would Stop’, all alluding to problems in his past, but the overall feeling is escape from the darkness and there is a lightness in there as well.
Blues is all about suffering and pain, either reflection or Redemption and Mr Buster seems to have found his redemption and emerged with a terrific album to boot.
