By Fred Delforge
Randy Lee Riviere is an American singer-songwriter whose musical journey is rooted in the 1970s, an era when rock was raw, loud, and visceral. A Northern California native, he grew up listening to the Beatles, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Robin Trower, and Neil Young—influences that shaped his guitar playing and introspective songwriting. Initially a guitarist in several bands, he turned to songwriting in the late 1970s, developing a sensitive style informed by his personal experiences and environmental activism. Alongside his musical career, Riviere is a biologist specializing in wildlife conservation. He has played a key role in protecting over 40,000 acres of Native American land in the United States. Dividing his time between his ranch in Montana and a home near Nashville, he leads a rural life that imbues his songs with a raw authenticity and a clear-eyed perspective on the human condition. The artist no longer tours much, preferring to dedicate himself to creating studio albums surrounded by seasoned musicians. His discography explores the intricacies of blues, rock, and Americana with rare intensity. With “Farmhand Blues,” Randy Lee Riviere delivers his fourth solo album, a collection of fifteen tracks that resonates like a sonic logbook, somewhere between earthy blues and raw rock. From the very first bars, you sense that the man behind the guitar isn’t there to embellish reality but to dig deep into it. The album opens with earthy riffs, carried by Riviere’s deep and sincere voice, which evokes daily struggles, inner landscapes, and the scars of time. Far from the clichés of rural blues, “Farmhand Blues” is an album of poetic resistance, where each song seems to have been plucked from the soil like a tenacious root. Tom Hambridge’s production is both expansive and organic, allowing the guitars of Doug Lancio, Bob Britt, and Michael Saint-Leon to breathe, as well as Mike Rojas’s keyboards, while the rhythm section, with Robert Kearns on bass and Hambridge himself on drums, establishes a constant, almost cinematic tension. At times, one thinks of Neil Young during his “Zuma” era, John Mellencamp, or Tony Joe White, but Randy Lee Riviere doesn’t copy anyone; he prefers to forge his own path. Among the standout tracks, “Moonlight,” “If I Were King,” “December 1980,” and “Dovetail Joints” offer both soaring electric riffs worthy of the golden age of Southern rock and more introspective atmospheres that reveal a refined, almost literary songwriting style. Riviere speaks of solitude, memory, love, the land, and even the assassination of John Lennon, with a gravity that touches the heart. “Farmhand Blues” is a generous and dense album, which is listened to like reading a personal diary or a noir novel, with respect and attention. For fans of authentic blues-rock, this is a gem not to be missed.