I read something on Twitter not long ago about how The Beatles didn’t really even compare to Creedence Clearwater Revival and, you know, in a way they really don’t,” says Ian Noe, tugging on his baseball cap and smoothing out his blond moustache. “The Beatles didn’t have an ‘Up Around The Bend’. They didn’t have a ‘Bad Moon Rising’. It’s a whole different kind of thing, and they did that, most of the time, in less than three minutes.”
It’s fair to say, then, the Americana singer-songwriter is a bit of a fan. So much so, in fact, that when he was 18 and working at a local branch of Dairy Queen, he saved up for weeks to buy front row John Fogerty seats for him and his dad. That night, Noe wrote the start of what would become the atmospheric blues of “Burning Down The Prairie”, a tribute to the indigenous people of his home state of Kentucky. Fourteen years later, it’s finally getting to see the light of day on his new album, River Fools and Mountain Saints.
