Ears Wide Open: War & Pierce

Kevin Bronson on January 14th, 2016

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Sunny War is a 25-year-old punk-folk singer and guitarist extraordinaire. Chris Pierce is an L.A. blues luminary and multi-instrumentalist who has dispensed six albums of soulful sounds over more than a decade. Theirs is a collaboration made in pun heaven — War & Pierce — and the music gods might be smiling, too, upon hearing the EP the duo will release on Jan. 22. The pair, War from Nashville and Pierce a native of Pasadena, were brought together by a mutual friend, producer/songwriter Jared Faber. The trio’s first session in Faber’s Silver Lake studio yielded the song “Any Day Now,” so they kept rolling, with drummer Michael Jerome Moore joining on the recordings, which were mixed by Dave Way. The EP features five originals plus a very distinctive take on Iggy Pop’s “Search & Destroy.” The harmonica-laced, finger-pickin’-good first single “I Lived to Tell About It” is a rootsy stomp about survival, with the vocalists conversing, then harmonizing, in timeless storytelling fashion. Maybe there is something in a pun.

||| Stream: “I Lived to Tell About It”