G. Love

G. Love & Special Sauce sets front man G. Love's blues-laced raps and back-porch vocal stylings to semi-acoustic accompaniment--a unique fusion he calls "ragmop." The band is: G. Love (vocals, guitar, harmonica), Jimmy "Jazz" Prescott a/k/a "Marshmallow Man" (acoustic bass), and Jeffrey Clemens a/k/a "House Man" (fonky drummer). All songs were written by G. Love (with a couple of co-writes), and produced by Stiff Johnson and Special Sauce. This album was recorded completely and truly live at Studio 4 in Philadelphia, PA. G. Love displays an uncanny knack for distilling the essence of both the blues and hip-hop into his own personal story-songs. He'll take a single blues lyric riff like Guitar Slim's "The Things I Used To Do" and weave a wholly new and intriguing narrative from it. He can revel in the relaxed pleasures of "Cold Beverage" or get hot at the "Fat Man" who sold him a used van that went bust. Given the utter simplicity of the instrumentation and recording, G. Love & Special Sauce reveals a striking variety of emotional moods and musical moves in the course of its fourteen tracks. "It doesn't take long to tell that G. Love is one special find," wrote Tom Moon in The Philadelphia Inquirer. "He sings with a bluesman's authority, yet manages to avoid sounding like a student of the blues. His raps...are delivered with an uncommon confidence, as though the Philadelphia native knows the way to get attention is to whisper, not scream. And the supporting musicianship of Special Sauce adroitly follows its front man's stylistic change-ups."