STEVE GUNN

Pennsylvania-to-Brooklyn guitar adventurer observes to transcend.

Steve Gunn is hanging back. His band are cruising with wise authority through a languid, mystic groove titled Ancient Jules, one of many standout tracks on his new set of swirling, transcendental road songs, Eyes On The Lines. The song centres around Gunn’s ruminative vocal and bright, pealing guitar riff, but up on the stage of north London’s Lexington, the composer/singer stays in the stage’s grotty shade, better to bask in the brotherly glow created around him by his tight-knit touring band, James Elkington (guitar), Jason Meagher (bass) and Nathan Bowles (drums). “I don’t want to go up and posture and pretend like some… dude,” says Gunn, in a gentle Pennsylvania drawl, discussing his serene stagecraft, backstage, prior to the gig. “I love poetry, and I enjoy reading Buddhist poets like Gary Snyder writing about nature, and as I’m growing into being a songwriter, I’m trying to be a bit more transcendent.” On paper, Gunn has been on this path of groovy poetic enlightenment in song for three-plus years, ever since the release of 2013’s Time Off, a gently euphoric collection of six long-form, rambling journeys into a spiritual Americana. However, the roots of his sound go back further than that. A self-taught guitarist from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, raised on his parents’ ’60s soul and ’70s rock and his elder sister’s ’80s indie, by the age of 11 Gunn was playing to such a standard that a Pittsburgh hardcore band, Reveal, asked him to tour with them. “I approached my parents and they let me go. It was mindblowing.” Introduced to the sounds of Coltrane and Stooges“in the