Press

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Lee Shupp’s lustrous baritone is an ideal vocal vehicle for conveying his songs about preserving through the slings and arrows of life’s outrageous fortune. Lee Shupp’s Rise Up is a thoroughly satisfying musical experience with tremendous heartfelt appeal. Moreover, it reveals an artist engaged with important songwriting themes worth exploring. He performs each of the album’s eight songs with an audible sense of stakes guiding his art. To put it bluntly, Lee Shupp means it.

Lee Shupp’s Rise Up has an exhortative quality befitting the album title. The eight energetic performances he’s written for this collection have varying textures while engaging listeners with gut-level immediacy. These are songs about flesh and blood life lived, not ideas or cliches, and he crouches them in everyday language that his target audience will understand.

Lee Shupp is a bit of a throwback. His new album Rise Up makes his retro music allegiances abundantly clear. Nonetheless, Shupp doesn’t use his chosen genres as a vehicle to travel back in time but instead modernizes them for modern audiences. The blues, jazzy influences, and rock threads running through the album’s eight songs are thoroughly fresh and invigorated. He doesn’t treat those styles like butterflies pinned under glass. Instead, Rise Up lives and breathes its music and emotions in the here and now. It’s irrepressible and teeming with life.

You can consider San Francisco’s Lee Shupp to be one of the keepers of the blue flame. He has a natural affinity for blues that announces itself on many of Rise Up’s eight tracks. However, Shupp does not restrict himself. Strands of R&B, funk, rock, and even country music present themselves throughout the album. The Texas-born vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist synthesize these threads into a cohesive musical experience that’s personal, yet accessible.

The bluesy spirit pervading Lee Shupp’s songwriting doesn’t consign him to a purist vein. He smooths over the rugged edges of his new collection Rise Up with flashes of pop sensibility that never threaten to dilute the gravitas underlying each of the album’s eight songs. It’s a brief release by modern standards. However, the condensed focus and impassioned songwriting present throughout Rise Up deliver a fulfilling experience that many longer albums lack.