Ian Siegal - Candy Store Kid - CD

Life isn’t just one flavour. Music shouldn’t all have the same taste. In the right hands, the blues can be a rainbow, and with Candy Store Kid, Ian Siegal has just painted his masterpiece. This latest album takes its name from a line in the song Loose Cannon, and the thrill that Ian felt as he pick-‘n’-mixed some of the greatest players on the contemporary blues scene ("You get to feeling like the proverbial kid in a candy store," he recalls). 

In Britain, Ian Siegal might be rocketing towards the status of national treasure, but for Candy Store Kid, the 41-year old once again quit the motherland for the US Southern state that’s becoming his creative catalyst, Mississippi. Lest we forget, it was the North Mississippi hill country, and specifically the Zebra Ranch studio in Coldwater, that provided the backdrop to Ian’s celebrated 2011 album, The Skinny, and for this latest album, he returned to work in the same productive environment.

Killer songs were only half the equation. Spin Candy Store Kid and you’re also hearing chemistry. As Ian stepped up to the microphone at Zebra Ranch in May this year, he was flanked by his dream-team of local legends that he collectively coined The Mississippi Mudbloods. Back from The Skinny sessions producer Cody Dickinson is a towering presence on drums, percussion and piano. Dickinson’s multi-instrumentalist brother and Black Crowes sideman Luther Dickinson had joined Ian for a thrilling festival set in 2011, and naturally sprang to mind for guitar, bass and mandolin. Ian first met Alvin Youngblood Hart during The Skinny sessions, when the Grammy-winning guitarist swung by the studio and ended up tracking some guitar and backing vocals. There was a mutual desire to work together again, and for Candy Store Kid, he was welcomed back on bass, guitar and backing vocals.

Inevitably, when word spread that a limey musician was tearing it up at the local studio, Zebra Ranch became a drop-in centre, with cameos from Garry Burnside, who provides sizzling musicianship on four tracks and composition on Strong Woman; and Lightnin’ Malcolm, who penned So Much Trouble. Ian’s gravel-flecked voice was also supplemented on several songs by the soaring backup of Stefanie Bolton, Sharisse Norman and Shontelle Norman. The candy store was open for business.