I’m so excited to welcome back the hottest blues artist working today to the venue he considers his “home.”
Selwyn Birchwood’s new record is at the top of the charts, he’s touring nationally and internationally, and building a loyal fan base one show at a time. This Saturday (Aug. 5), he returns to the Palladium for an 8 p.m. in Hough Hall. For tickets you can follow this link.
While his last few shows have been upstairs, one of Selwyn’s first ticketed shows ever was in the Palladium Side Door in 2013, and he talked with St. Pete Catalyst this week about that show and how his audiences have grown here both here at the Palladium and around the world.
That year is also when Selwyn won the International Blues Challenge for his band and for his guitar playing.
To learn more about his music, his future and his history with the Palladium, read Bill DeYoung’s story, posted below. You can also read the story at the St. Pete Catalyst site by following this link.
The blues are treating Selwyn Birchwood Right
By Bill DeYoung/St. Pete Catalyst
Bluesman Selwyn Birchwood has paid his dues, working a seemingly endless stream of one-nighters for about as long as he can remember. He’s still paying them – on regular installments – but the dividends are starting to roll in.
“I’m tired as hell,” Birchwood says during a phone interview from somewhere on the road, “but there’s no job you’re going to do where you aren’t tired. At least I get to do what I want to do.”
With Exorcist, his sixth album (and fourth on prestigious Alligator Records) the singer and guitarist – who’s called Tampa home since 2010 – is in the Billboard Blues Top Ten, No. 1 in Australia (“some way or the other,” Birchwood marvels) and recently spent four weeks atop the North American College and Community radio blues chart. Alligator snapped him up after he won the International Blues Challenge, in Memphis, in 2013.
“It’s just been phenomenal,” reports the Florida native. “That’s the goal, to just get this music out there, just to write the best music we can, perform it live to best of our ability and have a good, loud show.
“And that’s been happening. It’s just growing more and more, and it’ll just continue to grow, I guess – that seems to be what’s happening.”
Birchwood and his band, which includes Regi Oliver on baritone sax, Michael Hensley on keys, Don Wright playing bass, and Byron Garner, drums – play a hard-charging hybrid of Chicago blues, St. Louis swing, funk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll. He calls it Electric Swamp Funkin’ Blues.
They’ve been traveling for a while – of course – and are coming back Aug. 5 to play the Palladium Theater’s Hough Hall.
Birchwood, 38, came to the blues in a roundabout way. As a teenage guitar player in Orlando, his hometown, he was all about tearing it up like Jimi Hendrix.
He had discovered his hero’s own back catalogue influences – “the old blues guys,” he says. He bought every blues record he could lay his hands on. “That’s when I felt like I found the sound I was looking for,” Birchwood relates. “And I haven’t turned back.”
Next came the lightbulb moment.
“I first saw Buddy Guy when I was 17,” he says. “I just bought a ticket blindly to his show in Orlando, and I didn’t know what I was in for. And I was just completely floored. I said whatever this is, that’s what I want to learn, that’s what I want to do. I spent literally every waking day since then trying to build myself up towards that.
“And it’s a cool. thing, because it’s kind of gone full circle now. His producer, Tom Hambridge, produced Exorcist – he also produced my last album, Living in a Burning House – and I actually even got the chance to perform onstage with Buddy. It was almost exactly 20 years to the day. I’ve still got my concert ticket for that original show.”
Birchwood came to Tampa in order to earn a Master’s in Business Adminstration from the University of Tampa (he may actually be only living blues artist with an MBA). “Music has always been in the forefront of what I wanted to do,” he says, “but you have to take a day job. And I hated my day job and decided to go back to school. Try to get a better day job.”
The degree, he admits, has come in handy as his writing, gigging and recording star grows brighter. “If you don’t treat it as a business, you’re already dead in the water. Because it is a business.”
The band has played in 19 countries around the globe. But Selwyn Birchwood’s got a particular fondness for Tampa Bay – and for the Palladium Theater, and its longtime director, Paul Wilborn.
“Paul hired me when I was still kind of just a local act, to play a Side Door downstairs gig. There might have been 40 people at the show. But he loves the sound of the band, and what I was doing, so he still hired me back. There was 80 people the next time, then we started selling out downstairs, then started doing two shows at a time downstairs. And selling that out. “Then we moved upstairs to the theater, and we’ll have 300-some people when we perform up there. And you know, it just keeps on growing. As more people talk and more people really seem to tune in, especially with this new album, man, it’s just a really exciting thing.”
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