Singled Out: The Jeremy Edge Project's The Black Sheep

Keavin Wiggins | 07-30-2024

The Jeremy Edge Project just released their new single "The Black Sheep", as the lead single to their forthcoming album, and to celebrate we asked Jeremy to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

The Black Sheep started out as me simply experimenting with open D tuning and slide guitar. We don't do a lot of traditional blues per se, but this riff just seems to have a great, foot stomping vibe. I often strive to write things that have a bit of complexity and the simplicity of this one appealed to me.

I came up with the lyrical concept, "The Black Sheep" simply because we have been releasing music that seems to be lost between the worlds of rock music and traditional blues music.

Although we are not the only artists having that struggle with the rock industry wanting a typical rock sound and the blues industry wanting something that is more "pure blues", we've had a lot of fun creating music that spans different genres and styles.

I thought it would be neat to touch on that subject in the one song that we have written that is more traditional blues. It's sort of a fictional, yet a non-fictional character.

The lyrical concept came from me reading stories about Willie Dixon persuading Muddy Waters to sing songs like Mannish Boy, and Hoochie Coochie Man.

These songs were bold and with Muddy proclaiming his prowess and persona.
I think the original blues guys were the first ones to kind of own their confidence and I felt like this song was written during that era it would be all about turning negative into a positive. Like "Yeah I'm that guy: and what are you going to do about it!?" At the same time having a lot of fun with something that's very tongue in cheek with a bit of humor.

We are releasing a music video and the director Lee and I agreed that it would be more original: instead of having us be 1950s era blues image, why not portray the band as 1930s prohibition gangsters?

We're big fans of shows like the Peaky Blinders and a lot of the great movies about the Al Capone era so it seemed to have a great fit. We had a lot of fun with this one and we hope listeners do too.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here