For artistic creation, geography is not always destiny. Just one dissolute seeker who pursued kicks during late-1940s road trips went on to write On the Road, and Foo Fighters, after visiting musically vibrant cities in search of regional magic, produced nothing better than Sonic Highways.
Before Tangier Sessions, Richard Bishop—“Sir” is an affectation—crossed from one continent to another, buying a guitar of mysterious provenance in Geneva and taking it with him to Tangier. During relatively quiet Moroccan evenings, he then recorded inside a tiled room that was itself within a rooftop apartment.
While the backstory is more interesting than the information that Bishop, for the first time, tossed aside his guitar pick to play much of this record, it’s likely that, given the same instrument and a week of nocturnal solitude in nearly any other unfamiliar city, he would’ve generated similar material.
Bishop is more a musician than a world traveler: When he holds a guitar—solely acoustic here, although he’s also played electric and lap steel—that is his globe, and the strings and frets are the pathways and boundaries across which his fingers trace journeys.
Apart from passages that could be influenced by the proximity of Morocco to Spain, the music relies principally on a sense of a man alone, anywhere, with his thoughts and only one way to express them. Although Bishop has had an experimental streak both solo and in Sun City Girls, compositions like “Safe House” and “Let It Come Down” are spare and simple.
The listener who engages with Bishop’s dexterous devotion will not be transported someplace new or strange. Instead, he or she will experience an observer’s form of his contemplative isolation. It is a state, but not one found on a map.
