David Olney - This Side Or The Other - [CD]

Nashville, TN – One listen to the brand new album, “This Side or The Other,” and you’ll know David Olney is a man familiar with the wandering life and yearning heart of a poet. After more than 30 years in music, he’s had as many incarnations as you can imagine. His resume has expanded to include acting, poetry and a popular weekly stream cast. All of this adds to Olney’s strength as a songwriter’s songwriter, and one of Nashville’s founding fathers of Americana music. While “This Side or The Other” is not a concept album, there are some recurring themes. The frequent reference to walls in these songs – walls being built and tumbling down – will suggest that while Olney has encountered more than his own share of walls, he is still trying his best to understand them. “I wanted to explore the idea of walls,” says Olney, “What does a wall mean? What does it mean to be an immigrant who comes upon that wall as a wanderer, someone lost and alone?” A wall in song can be the symbolic blockage from one place to another, or the flat finality of something coming to an end. In life as in art, Olney has scaled walls and torn them down. Yet, it’s not his own path he is particularly interested in exploring. David Olney has always been an observer, a student and writer of life for as long as he could hold a pen. The other musicians on “This Side or The Other” are Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Charlie McCoy, The McCrary Sisters, Fats Kaplin, Anne McCue and Olney’s regular band: Daniel Seymour on bass, Ward Stout on fiddle and Justin Amaral on drums.