The new album Blues With Friends is released by KTBA Records on Friday 5th June and is available for Pre-Order worldwide at: KTBArecords.com
Dion released his fifth single ‘Can’t Start Again’ with Jeff Beck today taken from the upcoming album ‘Blues With Friends’ released by KTBA Records on Friday June 5th.
10% of all profits from Joe Bonamassa’s new label KTBA Records (aka “Keeping the Blues Alive Records”) will be donated back to the Non-Profit for promoting music education to students and schools in need.
Says Dion about the song: “My earliest influences were country blues, especially Hank Williams. Any money I earned I took to the neighborhood record store, where the owner used to razz me about my “hillbilly” tastes. I guess I still have that hillbilly inside. For my last album I wrote a song called ‘I Can’t Go Back to Memphis,’ but I go back there with this number. It’s about love and loss and heartache, the classic themes. I believe it’s a true blues song. I asked Jeff Beck to play something on it, he said yes! What can I say, it’s Jeff Beck.”
“Blues With Friends” features 13 tracks with special guests including Billy Gibbons, Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Beck, Paul Simon, Joe Bonamassa, Van Morrison, Brian Setzer, Sonny Landreth, Joe Louis Walker, Samantha Fish, Stevie Van Zandt and many more.
For this outing, Dion worked with producer Wayne Hood in whose Florida studio the basic tracks were recorded. “From the first day, I was at home. We hit it off like brothers on a mission. We caught the same vision and sound and off we went.” Over the course of the last part of 2019 and the first part of 2020, the album began to take shape. Dion had the songs and the collaborators began to reveal themselves. As Dion tells it, he ran the album’s first track, “Blues Comin’ On,” past Joe Bonamassa. He noted, “It’s funny how a song evolves. For me it usually starts with a few words. In this case it was “If I didn’t know better” I wanted to sing those words, so I wrote a song around them. Joe Bonamassa is a monster and took the song to a whole new level.” Joe would be the first of many of Dion’s Blues With Friends co-conspirators.
