Roky Erickson with Okkervil River
True Love Cast Out All Evil

"The asylum was saturated with strong odors. Many people urinated and defecated on the ground. Everywhere was chaos. People tearing their hair out, people tearing their clothes or singing obscene songs" from "The Other Truth - Diary of a Different", ALDA MERINI.

Perhaps Roky Erickson, whom fate decided to live through the same experiences as a young Alda Merini inside an asylum, sang songs sitting on his bed in the unreal silence of hospital-prisons, torn by screams and cries of people different from what or who, we do not know. Erickson, like Merini, experienced electroshock. Roky, like Alda, will be remembered as one of the most lucid (never has a word been more appropriate as in this case) examples of the emerging psychedelic rock of the sixties, with his 13th Floor Elevators and for records in which he described his parallel world inhabited by aliens and demons, where walking with zombies was routine, the devil was at home, and dogs had two heads, in short, get yourself his superlative "The Evil One" from 1980.

However, if you want to know beyond his parallel world also something about his real and more painful experiences, made of entering and leaving psychiatric hospitals and finally after years of oblivion, having regained and re-tasted a shred of life with reconciliation with himself and his loved ones, rush to get Erickson's new album, released fifteen years after his last studio work.

Assisted in production by Will Sheff and his Okkervil River as a backing band, "True Love Cast Out All Evil" is set to be one of the most heartbreaking yet hopeful autobiographies set to music. Composed of old songs written during the darkest periods of his life experience and new songs that through twelve episodes line up the thoughts of a man who lived his life on the margins of normality, when electroshock sessions were considered normal for those not considered normal. "...Electricity hammered me, through my head, until nothing at all..." from Ain't Blues Too Sad.

Far from the psychedelia of his 13th Floor Elevators and the hard blues of "The Evil One", this is a singer-songwriter's work that, however, does not miss the opportunity to reconnect with the past. The opening entrusted to the home recording of "Devotional Number One" immediately plunges us into an aseptic atmosphere made of only voice and guitar, an inner emptiness where the search for one's Jesus becomes fundamental (...Jesus is not hallucinogenic mushroom...).

The musical past resurfaces like in the electric and psychedelic finale of "Goodbye Sweet Dreams" or in the rock of "John Lawman". Touching and evocative is "Be And Bring Me Home", a piano ballad where Erickson focuses on how people's judgments can ruin the lives of the weakest, who, however, have the only weapon of indifference and thinking for themselves. The title track and the finale "God is Everywhere" are the manifesto of the new Erickson who has met God on his path, just as "Think of as One" is the manifesto that invokes the uniqueness of each man.

Almost intimate songs, recalling folk and blues, where the presence of his fellow Texans Okkervil River is limited to accompanying the master, leaving little trace of themselves, except in some episodes, because, after so many tributes from the most diverse musical worlds, Roky Erickson is back to stay, because music still needs "crazies" like him.

"...Marginalization is also a social right..." ALDA MERINI