Steve Marion lends his considerable guitar skills to artists who need virtuosity tinged with eccentricity. Over the years, artists such as Paul Simon, The Black Keys and Miley Cyrus have utilized those skills. As Delicate Steve, he leads his own muse, and band, which occasionally ventures into covers, including his amazing “Hallelujah” that we covered a few years ago. His new album Delicate Steve Sings subversively does not contain vocals, while packaged as a classic standards album from the likes of Chet Baker or Willie Nelson. Where Frank Sinatra used his voice as an instrument, Marion uses his instrument as a voice. The album includes a version of Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.”
The song was Redding’s breakthrough, and his first opportunity to harness the classic Stax band. It shows a singer in transition, with the raw power of a great R&B voice, awaiting the polish that would come in subsequent years working with, and becoming, the best in the business. There have been some instrumental covers of the years, from the bland to the left field (check out the Art Ensemble of Chicago), but Marion provides something new.
The joy of vocals is that they bring the lived human experience to a song, in addition to the songwriter’s words. Like a suitcase that’s well-traveled but well-maintained, it bears the small marks of all the trips it has taken. The same can apply to a guitar. An individual instrument may have had different tunings and been used on different musical journeys. The marks and history are different than on vocal chords, but some sustain is in there. Marion and his collaborators, Jonathan Rado on bass, Kosta Galanopolous on sticks, and Renata Zeiguer on strings, create emotion without words. They call up the feelings that we all know, that of being apart from a loved one. Perhaps their inamorata or inamorato is not a person, but a feeling, or a musical moment. It is all captured well.
