Eagle Rock Gospel Singers
Media Club
Sat Jan 30 | doors 8pm
"Will Wadsworth formed The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers in the winter of 2010 following a failed relationship, a band dissolution and a scary airplane ride. In order to respark his interest in music, he and his roommate, Jeremy Horton, gathered friends together to sing old Gospel songs. They sang songs inspired by their love of Washington Phillips, The Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe – you know, the real classics – and held house parties just so they could perform. Soon enough, a large, shifting group of people came each week to join in on the weekly jams. There could be anything from 8 to 18 participants, depending upon the night. Wadsworth and Horton, realizing this might work in a club setting, pared down the group to core members, and they began performing around Los Angeles. In 2014, they recorded their first album with Matt Wignall (Cold War Kids, J. Roddy Walston and the Business). Heavenly Fire is an explosive barn-burner, taught with electricity and highlighting Kim Garcia's remarkable singing. It provides an articulation of their sound, honed over those many group parties, into a band that has become a rousing celebration of traditional Gospel sounds with rock foundations." Media Club website
L.A. Weekly interview…
“We were covering stuff by artists who were doing it in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s,” says drummer-singer Will Wadsworth. “The stuff that resonated with us was coming from people who were singing out of a place of desperation, sometimes heartache, sometimes complete joy. . . .
The band’s debut album, Heavenly Fire . . . is a rip-roaring, soaring batch of rootsy-flavored originals written by the band’s individual members, who took their songwriting cues from the greatest and most venerable of American trad musical genres. . . .
“Gospel music for a lot of people is defined by the content,” Wadsworth says, “and that’s usually traditional stories that are based in what we have known as the Bible of Judeo-Christian beliefs. These orations wove themselves into music that was very white bluegrass music, very white folk and country music and very African-American blues gospel.”
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