Willie Nile
House Of A Thousand Guitars

THE REVIEW

You can't help but feel a sense of affinity and curiosity toward this character dressed in black and as thin as a rail.

He embodies the archetype of the New York singer-songwriter loser by profession and by bad luck. Willie Nile has never known worldwide fame despite always receiving the blessing of critics and fellow musicians. Why is one of those questions that seems to have no answer. It's just the way it is.

His career is extremely troubled, hindered by record companies that sometimes seem better suited to destroying artists rather than helping them. In almost thirty years of career or rather since the release of his first album in 1980, Nile has released only about half a dozen records, including "Streets of New York" in 2006, which seems to have relaunched his career on a good path, though still distant from the media glitz. Unfazed by all this, our man in black continues to tour the world with his music, charged with electricity and yet romantic and melancholic. Recently, he toured Italy for a series of concerts that reached places and cities far from the mainstream media circuit.

Often compared to Dylan, Mellencamp, or the early Springsteen, Willie Nile over time has developed his own distinctive style which in this new work is highlighted in all its facets.

The title of the album leaves little to the imagination, House of a Thousand Guitars, which is also the title of the opening track, is a heartfelt tribute to his musical idols mentioned in the lyrics. We encounter Hendrix playing all night in the purple haze... Robert Johnson singing at the stroke of midnight with the Delta moon... and then Dylan, Stones, Muddy Waters... A rock song that reminds me a lot of the Clash's "London Calling".

The album, as I said, is divided between electric songs like Run which seems like it could have come from Springsteen's guitar between Darkness and The River, the almost southern Doomsday Dance or the punk-like Magdalena, and more melancholic songs where I believe Nile's true essence emerges.

The wonderful When the Last Light Goes Out on Broadway with its atmospheres that are so reminiscent of 1970s New York. For his more romantic compositions, he abundantly utilizes the sound of the piano, as in the evocative Now That the War Is Over which tells of how a war leaves nothing behind except the cries of those who have lost their loved ones or the little gem of the album The Midnight Rose that builds and builds to a crescendo, reminding me of the seventies E-Street Band. In short, if you want to understand what Nile is, you have to go back in time to New York in the mid-1970s, the years of Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Television, Springsteen, Bob Seger.