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The original idea for Rainmaker was to throw a party in a Paris recording studio in honor of my 80th birthday. I saw it as a way to celebrate the survival of many things, including myself, a life without borders, and my friendship with so many musicians abroad.


I imagined that it would be a blues record, so I began by writing some original blues songs and revisiting some of my favorite classic blues too. But as often happens, what we discover is not necessarily what we were looking for, and in this case I found myself writing songs that felt dystopian, not all of them traditional blues forms, and not what you might imagine as “party music”.


By the time we finished recording at Studio de Meudon with new and old friends from America and France, the record had found its own sound. Somewhere between tragic and celebratory, shaggy and polished, broken and healed, I guess you could say that Rainmaker really is all about surviving in the modern world. - Ben Sidran, March 2024

1. bensidran.com