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Blues guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd makes his singing debut this week with the release of The Place You're In. Singing was a longtime aspiration for Shepherd -- it just took the combination of confidence and circumstance to get in front of a microphone.
"When I made my first album, I was seventeen years old and I had the voice of a seventeen-year-old," Shepherd says. "Rather than sacrifice the quality of my music for the sake of singing, I started taking over background vocals, and that's where I started gaining confidence."
But Shepherd's growing confidence as a singer doesn't mean he'll abandon his primary role as the guitarist. "I still consider myself to be a much better guitar player than I am a singer," he says. "But now that I've stepped up to the plate, [my singing] is something that will evolve over time and will get better and better."
The other factor informing Shepherd's decision to sing was artistically rooted. "I've written all my material over the years and nobody can -- unless they wrote the song themselves -- relate as personally to the song," he says. "One day, I just had this vision: I just saw myself up there doing it." The Place You're In might surprise longtime fans with its rock leanings. Songs like "Ain't Selling Out" feature flinty guitar licks and hard-rocking rhythms. And the playful "Spank," a sexually charged duet between Shepherd and Kid Rock, finds the two trading lines over unbridled rock & roll. "You can hear a lot of influences on this record, some that people probably haven't heard come out of me before," Shepherd says.
As a singer, Shepherd's worn voice may remind listeners of Lenny Kravitz. "I think that my vocal ability tends to lean more to rock than blues," he says. "That's one of the reasons for making a solid, straight-ahead, modern rock-sounding record."
"I don't have the voice of a fifty- or sixty-, seventy-year-old black dude," Shepherd continues. "And though I love to play that music -- and I can play it like nobody's business -- as far as singing, it's gotta be rock."