Nick Shoulders (USA) pond hopper tour...

Arkansas songwriter Nick Shoulders Americana roots music, ultimately encapsulates everything that makes Shoulders’ inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre. With a singing style inherited from his family’s vocal lineage, Nick’s songs achieve the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyful abandon, balancing a sound forged by years of hard travel with a heartfelt reverence for the origins of country music .

At age 13, Shoulders got a Walmart drum set and spray-painted it pink, then spent much of his adolescence playing drums in metal and punk bands. But after discovering the original blues, folk and country recordings of the 1920’s and 30’s, he found his perception radically altered. “In those records I was hearing about a world with endless wars, bank failures, crops drying out in the fields—and that was the same world I lived in,” he recalls. “I felt something click, and it led me toward reclaiming these rural singing traditions from a space of commercial propaganda that’s intent on selling a lifestyle we don’t actually live.”

You may also like the following events from Jumpin' Hot Club:

• This Friday, 2nd May, 07:30 pm, Jeffrey Martin (USA) + Memphis Gerald in Newcastle Upon Tyne
• Next Friday, 9th May, 08:00 pm, Country Double Bill - Austin Stamburgh (USA) + Ags Connolly in Gateshead
• This month, 27th May, 07:30 pm, Mama's Broke (Canada) + Kari Mcleod in Gateshead

Also check out other Music events in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Entertainment events in Newcastle Upon Tyne.