Darren Watson sings John Hiatt Darren Watson

• 1 All The Way Under 03:29
• 2 Damn This Town 06:17
• 3 Like A Freight Train 03:36
• 4 Lincoln Town 04:01
• 5 Mr. Stanley 04:00
• 6 Nothin’ I Love 04:18
• 7 Ride Along 03:04
• 8 Thing Called Love 04:21
• 9 Thirty Years Of Tears 04:28
• Total Runtime 37:34

Info zu Darren Watson sings John Hiatt

Accomplished blues man Darren Watson returns with a new release this month, a complete album of John Hiatt songs reinterpreted – Darren Watson Sings John Hiatt. Watson has been pushing out quality material for the best part of 40 years, beginning in the 80s as frontman of Chicago Smoke Shop (which supported the Robert Cray Band, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds), and continuing since the early 2000s as a solo artist with six albums released to great acclaim, including a bunch of NZ Music Award nominations.

I first became aware of John Hiatt in the middle of nowhere and the middle of 1988. I was a fresh-faced twenty one years old, living the dream, on the road with my blues band Chicago Smoke Shop. Our tour bus had stopped after a tyre blowout twenty minutes outside of Palmerston North, a provincial city in Aotearoa's Manawatu region. Resigned to an hour or two of stationary momentum while the tour manager located the jack and figured out how exactly one replaces a tyre on a big, old Bedford bus, I watched my buddy Dave Murphy insert a cassette into the player that fed Rob Morrison's black behemoth of a PA-hauling crawl-wagon's awesome stereo system. Hearing the opening bars of Memphis in the Meantime my ears did more than prick up! Bring The Family well and truly had it's hooks into me before John Hiatt even sang a note. By the time Learning How To Love You was over and the bus was moving again I already considered myself John Hiatt's biggest fan. As a songwriter there are few who can cut straight to the point with pathos and humour in equal measure, never mind the ability to make old chord sequences sound like they're brand new, and the soaring, biting vocals just burn.

This album is my tribute to one of my musical heroes, and as such I'm bound inevitably to fall short of his greatness. I have tried to do my own thing with these songs 'cause I really don't see any point in just doing 'em the same way John did. I really hope, if he gets to hear this album that he can appreciate how everything is done with love and deep respect for his immense talent.

And I hope you, be you a fan of my previous work, or a John Hiatt fan hearing me for the first time, enjoy my original interpretations of John's music. (Darren Watson, Pōneke, Aotearoa, September 2025)

Darren Watson, vocals, acoustic guitar, resonator guitar, bass guitar, percussion, pump organ, melodica, Hammond organ
Steve Moodie, double bass
Chris Armour, electric guitar
Delia Shanly, drums, percussion
Matt Hay, harmonica

Recorded and mixed at Lamington Recording, Pōneke, Aotearoa
Mastered by Josh Llewellyn at Downbeat Mastering, Aotearoa
Produced, recorded, and mixed by Darren Watson

Darren Watson
is a New Zealand singer, guitarist and songwriter known for his soulful blend of blues, roots and sharp-edged songwriting. After early success with Chicago Smoke Shop in the late '80s, he built a respected solo career, most recently with powerful and original acoustic blues albums like Too Many Millionaires (2018), and the Tui-nominated Getting Sober for the End of the World (2020).

Whanganui and the Hutt Valley are a long way from the Mississippi Delta, but they both have rivers, and stories. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Darren Watson grew up in these places and caught on to the blues as a teenager in the early 1980s, after seeing Muddy Waters in the movie The Last Waltz.

Watson was already performing blues and rock in high-school bands, but something in Muddy’s performance and guitar playing inspired the budding bassist (and trumpeter) to take up the electric guitar and develop his singing style. Buying records was out of the question for the teenage Darren and his mate Terry Casey, so in those pre-internet days they hit the Wellington Public Library blues section and took home supplies of Muddy, and the three Kings – BB, Freddie and Albert – stuffed tightly into green canvas library record bags.

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet