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Road Less Traveled

by Points North

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1.
2.
High Wire 04:19
3.
The Phoenix 04:43
4.
5.
Barney 04:24
6.
Jubilee 03:41
7.
8.
The Source 04:35
9.
Delay Song 03:37
10.
11.

about

Who hasn’t dreamed of a classic rock band releasing one more perfect record at the peak of their creative powers? For instance, what musical masterpiece would have resulted had Eric Johnson continued in the vein of Ah Via Musicom? What prog/fusion-oid hell could have been unleashed had Rush focused on nothing but “YYZ”-like instrumental anthems?

With the release of their Magna Carta Records debut record, Road Less Traveled, the Bay Area-based instrumental trio, Points North, taps into our collective imagination and answers these burning questions by turning our sonic fantasies into realities.

Spearheaded by guitarist Eric Barnett, drummer Kevin Aiello and newest member, bassist Uriah Duffy (Whitesnake, Christina Aguilera), Points North stands on the shoulders of iconic artists such as The Police, Rush and Dixie Dregs, but, as the title of their debut album suggests, clearly cuts its own artistic path. Simply put, Points North is a leading light of modern instrumental guitar music, single-handedly helping to revitalize the genre through their technical prowess, superior musicality and compositional skills.

“We’re a three-piece instrumental band, and there’s not a whole lot of bands you could look at as precedents,” says Eric Barnett. “The Steve Morse Band is one of them. But we don’t try to imitate anyone. I was never a good copy guitar player.”

By his own admission, Barnett is an anti-shredder shredder – a circumstance that greatly suits the melodic musical setting Points North creates. “Some guitar players can play lots of notes, but it’s the guy with the signature, who you can identify with right away, that I think has the greatest impact on a listener,” says Barnett, who frets a Fender American “Texas Special” Fat Strat guitar.

“Eric has the ability to come up with nice melodies and at the same time be able to shred when he wants to,” adds drummer Kevin Aiello.

Ranging nearly every human emotion known to man, tracks on the band’s self-produced Road Less Traveled, such as “Vast Horizons”, “The Phoenix”, “The Source”, “Maiden Voyage”, “Sweet Solitude”, “Grace Under Pressure”, “Barney”, and “High Wire” speak to where the band has been as individuals (and a musical unit) as well as where they’re going. With themes such as rebirth and transitory emotional states, Road Less Traveled takes the listener on a kind of musical voyage.

“I think a lot of this music is about being on a journey,” says Barnett, who grew up in New Jersey and settled in the San Francisco area seven years ago. “You can take it in a literal sense and say that we’re traveling from Point A to Point B. Or you can look at it in terms of time and emotional growth: where was I and where am I going. Even the title of the album, Road Less Traveled, felt like a description to us. In this day and age of pop music, being in an instrumental band is, in and of itself, a statement.”

The track “Grace Under Pressure” (originally titled “Blue Zone B”) is a prime example of the band’s ability to time travel while (musically speaking) keeping one foot in the present. “Hearing Rush’s Moving Pictures, from 1981, was a turning point for me,” says Barnett.

The song reimagines Alex Lifeson’s 1980s guitar style as a 21st Century invention (think Rush’s “Red Sector A” with a post-Cold War twist). “The mid-period Alex Lifeson style is where he really focused on chord textures and inner voicings,” says Barnett, who picked up the violin at age five and switched to guitar in his early teens. “It’s not something you hear that often in an instrumental song, because so often those types of songs are about the lead line. In our song the bass is carrying the melody and root notes.”

“Steve’s Morsels” and “High Wire” demonstrates the kind of major impacts that the Dixie Dregs and Steve Morse Band have made on Points North. “I didn’t write the song thinking, ‘This is an homage to Steve Morse,’” says Barnett. “Sometimes, with instrumental songs, you write it but you don’t necessarily name it … Kevin [Aiello] came up with the title and I thought it was pretty clever. With ‘High Wire,’ however, I picked one note per string, which was influenced by Steve Morse’s ‘Tumeni Notes.’”

“The Source” encapsulates some of the album’s most soulful moments. Barnett won’t reveal what challenges he faced when he wrote it, but the raw emotion is obvious, as we hear his guitar scream, cry, testify and whisper. “When I wrote that song I was feeling intense pain and sadness,” says Barnett. “The song reflects this but also a feeling of learning to move through all of that. It also speaks to the ultimate inspiration, the heart, what’s underneath, why you get up in the morning and do what you do. This personal and musical journey I’m on is, hopefully, embodied in the composition.”

We experience painful rebirth in “The Phoenix”, a song, which opens innocently enough with subtle bass-strings harmonics. The music soon erupts into an emotional episode of catharsis when Barnett switches gears from dreamy volume-controlled riffs to a fiery soloing style complete with an “over the top alternate picking” technique. “The Phoenix, of course, is the story of the bird that burns itself and the new one rises from the ashes,” says Barnett, “ and there’s definitely a feeling there, in that song, that matches its title.”

Road Less Traveled wraps with titled “Sweet Solitude”, the most recent composition written for the album. It’s a brilliant original tune, with just a hint of Rush’s “Natural Science”, that you’ll swear you’ve heard before. Good tunes will do that to ya: the melody so immediately gloms onto your DNA it’s as if it has been a part of you forever. “Sweet Solitude” could very well be Points North’s “Trademark” (Eric Johnson pun intended) – a lyric-less radio hit, if ever there was one, defining the band’s sound and mission.

“The song is about transition,” Barnett says. “A lot of things in my life were changing in pretty dramatic ways, and I think that’s reflected in my playing. Sometimes I’ve been little ‘buttoned up’ both personally and in my phrasing, and my playing in that song feels kind of symbolic to me. It pushes my personal boundaries with regards to time, tone, and tonality.”

The members of Points North often equate their musical experiences with being on a journey, literally and figuratively. Not surprisingly, the band describes the recording of Road Less Traveled as a kind of odyssey. The tracking sessions for the album were spread out across several months; the band stole studio time as schedules allowed. “Road Less Traveled is the first instrumental record I’ve ever done,” says Barnett. “It was the also first instrumental record I’ve ever produced, so there was a lot to learn. What was good about the process was that it really gave us an opportunity to record until everything was right and what we felt was the best representation of our music.”

The three original members found one another through Craigslist “musicians wanted” ads, putting a 21st Century technology spin on an old music industry story. Prior to forming Points North Barnett had lived on both coasts, performing as a session guitarist; Aiello was a journeyman drummer, who’d knocked around for years in the Northern California music scene as the skinsman for original and cover bands.

As a result ofan early opportunity at the Last Day Saloon, in the mid 2000s opening for Michael Schenker, Points North cemented their approach and discovered there was an audience for their brand of original instrumental guitar music. Later, in 2008, Barnett became a finalist in the Guitar Player magazine Guitar Superstar competition, raising the band’s profile.

“I was shocked at the reaction we were getting,” says Aiello. “I didn’t think people cared about instrumental music anymore.”

After the tracks for Road Less Traveled were finished, bassist Damien Sisson had the opportunity to join veteran thrash metal band, Death Angel, leaving Barnett and Aiello to recruit bassist extraordinaire Stu Hamm for a few gigs until finally inviting longtime Whitesnake bassist, Uriah Duffy, to become a permanent member.

“Uriah brings the funk and really knows how to keep the bottom end and add on top of it,” says Aiello. “Uriah knows where the groove is.”

“Uriah is a rock star in his own right,” adds Barnett. “We’re honored that he’s has chosen to join us on a full-time basis.”

Things appear to be looking “up” for Points North. With a can-do attitude, a growing fanbase, a diverse band lineup, and a sure handle on the melodic instrumental guitar music genre, the band seems poised for greatness. “Points North was never designed to be what it is today,” says Barnett. “It was always just the three of us getting together to play music we wanted to play and have fun with it. What Magna Carta saw in us spoke volumes about what our potential might be. I have to sometimes pinch myself that I get to play this style of music to audiences.”

credits

released March 13, 2012

Eric Barnett – guitar
Kevin Aiello – drums
Damien Sisson - bass

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