Roots Music Report

About the Album

On their debut album, Folie a Deux, Brandon Hudspeth and Jaisson Taylor put a new spin on acoustic blues by bringing in elements of classic rock, soul and so much more. Guitarist Brandon Hudspeth and singer/percussionist Jaisson Taylor have known each other for almost 20 years from the Kansas City blues scene, but the two didn't begin to collaborate until 2015. "A place here in Kansas City asked me if I could do a duo," Hudspeth explains, "so I asked Jaisson. That evolved into a weekly thing, we got a following and it went from there. We started doing pretty heavy Hill Country stuff, lots of distorted guitar. After about a year we just switched to the all-acoustic thing, there was no real reason behind it, it just worked out that way." While Huspeth handles all the guitars, Taylor employs a diverse array of percussion from cajon to washboard to add multiple dimensions to their sound. "The way we ended up using different styles and keeping it acoustic at the same time just seemed to happen naturally. There's definitely some modern tendencies to it, and I think that's important. All the different percussion is one of the things that lent itself to being all-acoustic. Jaisson's played all those things from the beginning and our sound has just naturally evolved. There's one thing replacing something else every time we play, its ever-changing. The cajon was always there, that's where it all started."

"There is a lot of cajon on this record," Taylor comments. "Cajon literally means box. It's a pretty a ubiquitous form of African drum that got adapted through the African diaspora into Cuban music and a lot of other cultures. Taking modern accoutrements and turning them into instruments is pretty universal, and that's the way I approach drumming in this project; just wanting to have more sound, give it more dimension."

The final dimension that sets the duo apart from so many others is Taylor's dynamic, four-octave voice. "I like to think about the lyric and color it from different points in my voice. I do a lot of my own harmonies and try to get different characters with things like the bass parts and falsetto, even get a feminine tone to avoid repetition. A lot of it comes from interplay with what Brandon's doing on guitar."

If you look it up in a medical textbook, Folie a Deux is a shared psychosis or a group hallucination; in the hands of Hudspeth & Taylor it's an excursion into musical passion.