Seasick Steve

About

Also known as: Steve Wold, Steven Gene Wold, Steven Wold

Seasick Steve plays battered, personalized guitars with names like the Three String Trance Wonder and the One Stringed Diddley Bow, and his raw, road worn blues sound caught fire almost overnight after a 2006 appearance on Jools Holland's Hootenanny on the BBC. Before that, he had spent decades working as a session musician and studio engineer across the US and Europe, playing bass in the Indian rock fusion band Shanti alongside Zakir Hussain, fronting a French disco group called Crystal Grass, and producing an album for Modest Mouse. That is quite a CV for someone the world only really discovered in his fifties. Since the breakthrough, albums like I Started Out with Nothin and I Still Got Most of It Left, Man from Another Time, and Sonic Soul Surfer turned him into a festival favourite on both sides of the Atlantic. His songs tend to circle around hard living and hard travel, often delivered through instruments most people would throw away, and that gap between the humble setup and the sheer conviction of the performance is a big part of what makes him so compelling.