No shit! The Colored Parade is here to shake, rattle and roll the city, the streets and the stages from Nashville. The whole world is fully aware of the music of Nashville… or at least they think they are. But, man I gotta tell ya, it’s not all glitzy glam I love my truck new-country. Far from it, as a matter of fact. If you get to town and start checking out the music goin’ down, you’ll learn that real quick-like. The Mid-Tenn area is filled with every style of music you can imagine and it blasts from cars and bars and coffee shops on every block. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a musician that will knock your socks off.

Let me introduce you to one of those Nashville cats that’s making big noise.

The Colored Parade is the musical brainchild of Nashville, TN-based songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Adkins. Mixing tapestries of sounds, atmospheric textures with lush vocal ambience and a wide array of musical styles, flavors and elements all add up to create this fresh, new sound and vision called The Colored Parade. “I basically locked myself up in my studio with a few guitars, synths, keys, an assortment of percussion, an 808, a banjo, a sampler and a mandolin and this is what happened!” says Adkins. “I wanted to make an album with lots of shades, emotions, colors and moods constantly moving and shifting. That is where the name ‘Colored Parade’ came from.” The songs from The Colored Parade’s debut release, “…And The Walls Of The City Will Shake” blends and uniquely combines rootsy Americana with currents of electronic-synth, obscure samples, wailing undertones of pedal steel guitar, a barrage of horns with Brian Wilson-esque stacks of vocal harmonies. Ladies and gentlemen, The Colored Parade has arrived. Listen up and take notice.
credits
released 01 April 2014

I can only imagine the work that went into “And the Walls of the City Will Shake.” Andrew Adkins of The Colored Parade has put together a real masterpiece work, here. He has definitely achieved his goal, if you ask me (and at least one person did). You don’t hear musical arrangements like these often. It’s like he was working with George Martin or something.

I can’t quite figure out how he pulls off those “Brian Wilson-esque” harmonies with a voice like a cross between Robert Plant and Jack White, but he does it. And he uses that voice (and the voices of all sorts of instruments) to weave stories and anthems and thoughts on all sorts of things into a beautiful tapestry of a record. This one is going in the “play it daily” list and I expect it to remain there for quite a while.

Folks, I’m not going to try to walk you through this one. I just don’t have the words… Just listen and love it. That’s all.