‘Through A Crooked Sun’ is the follow up album to ‘Paper’ and see’s Rich’s use of the term ‘sun’ as a metaphor to examine his life. “I was living this life that was askew. My relationships with the people that were supposed to be my closest seemed damaged. My marriage was not a good fit for either of us and we weren’t facing up to that. Though I love my brother, the fact that my working environment can be challenging has been well chronicled. Nothing was working like it should have been, but by many people’s standards, it was a dream come true.” It would take an unexpected (at least by Rich) band hiatus, financial difficulties and most devastating of all, a painful divorce to push him to the point of re-evaluation.
‘Hey Fear’, the lead single from the album, looks at the duel nature of fear. “Fear can be a healthy, natural, protective response to your environment, but it can also be debilitating,” says Rich. “In many ways, continuing the unhappy life that I was leading was a response to the fear of what lay beyond it.” The song recognizes that, though fear will remain a part of one’s everyday life (“Hey there fear/You’ve been there for me/A familiar voice/In a raging sea”), it cannot be dispatched by flailing away at it, but by embracing a quiet mind and a more simple life. “I wanted this song to be sparse to represent simplicity, and then add in the more frenetic production at the end to represent the onset of fear,” Rich says.
Rich is an American musician and a founding member of the rock 'n roll band The Black Crowes. Over the course of 9 albums the band has delivered hit after hit including ‘Twice As Hard’, ‘She Talks To Angels, ‘Remedy’, ‘Wiser Time’ and ‘High Head Blues’. The band has sold over 30 million albums worldwide and is listed at 92 on VH1’s 100 greatest artists of hard rock.
‘Through A Crooked Sun’ finds the musical gifts that have propelled a major career fully intact, but joined this time by a more sentient, holistic outlook: that of a father, a son, a husband, a spiritual being, a musician, fully integrated and more comfortable than ever in his body, mind and soul.
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