About this user
Freddie Stevenson is a different sort of songwriter to those you may have encountered in the last few years. For one, he really writes and he really plays. For another, he writes lyrics that you'll find yourself being absolutely affected by. That you'll find yourself piecing over in your mind. That his tales of displacement yet hopefulness, of loves lost and loves found express the feelings of a man often finding himself out of context and confused by the unexplained. Whilst he may never be really satisfied with the answers he finds, Freddie and his songs may just help you realise that it is worth struggling all the same.
Freddie has been writing songs since the tender age of eleven. 'I started playing guitar aged eleven after hearing some cowboys sing country songs around a campfire in Wyoming,' says Freddie, 'I taught myself to play by making things up, little melodies.' Freddie returned from Wyoming a changed man and from his home in the chilly whiles of Scotland started picking away.
Some years later Freddie, with a newly found love of Dylan and E.E. Cummings, moved south to train full time at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art in London as an actor. RADA provided Freddie with training in Elizabethan dance and sword fighting. A job well done and fast-forward through two years of intensive song writing, acting and touring, and you can find Freddie beavering away in a Withnail existence in North London. Those years on the stage have not entirely ravaged him yet.
By the summer of 2005, a band of fiery dogs had been gathered together to form Freddie's band. With assistance from Brady Blade (Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Dave Matthews), the troops gathered together in the dying embers of Stockholm's summer weeks to record what was to become Body On The Line. The sessions were rife with excitement as if the group of musicians just slipped together perfectly. No track illustrates this destiny more than the album's swirling epic centerpiece, St. Catherines Day.
'We played the song through a few times but left it open ended until we hit record. We played the last chorus and then just kept going; knowing; daring each other with our eyes to keep going. It rose and rose and then ebbed away. None of us had to say anything; we knew it was right.'
After the mastering was completed with Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound in New York, the album found its final resting place and Freddie is now ready to play his little melodies to all who care to listen. And if his early shows are anything to go by, following rave reviews from the diverse likes of Lucinda Williams, Tommy Stinson (The Replacements, Guns N Roses) and Spooner Oldham (Elvis Presley, Percy Sledge, Neil Young), Freddie and his band might just change the way you think of modern British songwriters.
