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What’s up Sorry State readers, I hope everyone has had a nice week. Last week I wrote about Howlin Wolf and today I’d like to talk about a band that takes heavy influence from him as well as a lot of other blues artists and an assortment of other genres: The Gun Club, specifically their album Miami. This is their first record under Blondie guitarist Chris Stein’s label Animal Records, which was a bit of a full circle moment for front man Jeffrey Lee Pierce, as he used to be president of The U.S. Blondie Fan Club. Debbie Harry also contributed backing vocals to the album under the pseudonym D.H. Laurence Jr. I really love the sound of a steel guitar on the tracks Texas Serenade and Mother of Earth. My favorite song on this album, though, has to be their sick rendition of John Hardy, a traditional folk song first performed all the way back in the 1920s (and still covered today, 100 years later, by artists like Billy Strings). The song is a tale based on the life of a West Virginia railroad worker who killed a man in a drunken dispute one night, went on the run, and was caught and hanged in 1894. Gun Club also throws a verse from another one of my favorite folk songs, Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down, into it and it makes me just love the song even more. It’s so cool to listen to all the different iterations of a song through time and how different artists play it and add different things to it. That’s one of my favorite things about music. The copy of this record I have is a recent pressing, which is actually a double LP that contains all the demos, so that’s pretty interesting to listen to. Anyone reading this has definitely already listened to this album before, but maybe you haven’t in awhile, so if that’s the case, this is your reminder to listen to this amazing album!