Problem Child

It’s very refreshing to see a performer like 28-year-old Dany Franchi keeping the Blues alive. When listening to him, at times you can easily forget he was born in Genoa, Italy, because on his new album Problem Child, Franchi sounds like a young Texas Bluesman. Although his vocal delivery is a bit Jonny Lang, the way he confronts his Fender Stratocaster comfortably sits between the tone and techniques of brothers Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

In the face of their own imminent mortality, our greatest singer-songwriters have pivoted towards that darkness to deliver some of their most profound lines. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” Leonard Cohen sang on last year’s swansong You Want It Darker. David Bowie portended: “Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter then stepped aside” on his final album, released two days before his own passing. Now in his early 80s, Willie Nelson too has his mind turn to the dwindling of days. “Well I woke up still not dead again today/The internet said I had passed away/But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay/And I woke up still not dead again today,” he deadpans on the boot-shuffling “Still Not Dead,” a sentiment to file alongside his 2012 collaboration with Kris Kristofferson and Snoop Dogg, “Roll Me Up.”

'God's Problem Child' is Willie s first album to debut all-new songs since 'Band of Brothers' in 2014. It includes 13 new songs, including seven recently written by Willie and Buddy Cannon, his longtime collaborator and producer. The album's title track, penned by Jamey Johnson and Tony Joe White, includes vocals by both writers and the legendary Leon Russell (on what may be Russell's very last recording). Closing the album is "He Won't Ever Be Gone," a song written by Gary Nicholson that pays tribute to Willie's outlaw country comrade, Merle Haggard.