Vancouver Sun
August 31, 2010

Rating 3.5 out of 5

You wouldn’t think of British Columbia’s Okanagan region as a hotbed of blues, but it will be as long as Les Copeland lives there. Copeland, who was born in Kelowna, grew up on Vancouver Island, and now lives in Vernon, is a master of the slide guitar, which he shows on many of the 15 tracks here, all but one written by him.

That slide-guitar fire flares on opening track That Needing Time, where he sings, “You can call me when that needing time sets in,” and on the instrumental, Ry Cooder, an ode to a favourite musician. Copeland shows he can fingerpick his instrument, as he does on Riding the Sky Train, or lay down a jazzy style, which happens for Ginseng Girl. Although his chosen genre is the blues, his approach can be tongue-in-cheek. Singing to an abusive woman in Wet Paper Bag, he tells her, “Wet Paper Bag, that’s what they’ll call you / When they find my body stiff and blue / They’ll take one look and say / He couldn’t punch his way through.”

Honeyboy Edwards, the ancient Delta Blues musician that Copeland often tours with, appears on two tracks, challenging the structure of the 12-bar blues.

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