has released a 7-song EP that is an unplugged departure from his Stratocaster-driven live shows.features the 24-year-old's singing and acoustic guitar playing on seven mostly original songs that harken back to the folk tradition — more Appalachia and British Isles than the electric blues he's known for playing.
"And it was totally ringing all my bells because the poems and the stories they tell are always so good and the phonetics and language is so good," he says."And then there are these great melodies. I've been exploring that stuff over the last couple of years and wanted to try my own hand at it.""I always considered myself a guitar player first," he says.
There was a time, he says, that if he found himself working on a song that sounded even remotely like another, he would toss it out. His song"Ballad of a Chore Boy" comes at least in part from a real-life experience. When money is tight, Bishop does yard work around his adopted hometown of Austin. Bishop occasionally plays dates in Dallas-Fort Worth with his longtime blues trio, featuring bassist Cadillac Johnson and drummer Dirk Cordes.