* From Katie Prout’s profile of Chicago blues singer Mary Lane…
The blues are not linear; they circle around the listener like smoke or spiral stairs, returning again to the same rounded corner, or what feels like the same. For that, they can sound repetitive, deceptively simple. But it’s not the same stair; you and your ghosts are one floor up. It’s not the same line; there’s a stronger chord, an “I said” where there wasn’t one before, which acts as a streak of lightning in the same dark and illuminates, briefly, the world around you and your place in it.
