One Friday night back in August, my phone lit up with Stephen Dale Petit’s caller ID. Nothing unusual in that: the Anglo-American bluesman doesn’t use press officers, has little regard for office hours, and by this point is almost a friend. He asked me to stop what I was doing, check my emails, listen to the six-minute track he’d just sent me, then call him straight back. Seems important, I thought.
The song was stunning: a stately slow-burn lament topped by a molten guitar solo, with Petit acknowledging a litany of fuck-ups over his 56 years, but always cycling back to the titular phrase: ‘I will do all that I can, I will strive to be a better man’.
