Earlier this year, Ben Nichols and Rick Steff of Lucero issued the duo album Lucero Unplugged. A solo album from the band’s principal songwriter and frontman seemed like a logical next step, and hence we have In the Heart of the Mountain, Nichols’s second solo album and first in 16 years. Although it is not a concept album like his first solo effort, it draws inspiration from the Arkansas poet Frank Stanford’s “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford.“
Lucero found the material balanced between mythology and everyday life. He could relate to it, having also grown up in Arkansas. Nichols also claimed that the poetry caused him to write in a way he had never written before.
Nichols has a distinctive, yet love-it-or-hate-it,…
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