Jeremie Albino was seven years old the first time he came down with a real case of the blues.
It was when his father—a Filipino mechanic who’d moved to Toronto to open a meter shop that turned cars into cabs—brought his seven-year-old son along on a trip to Best Buy to look for records.
“Being that young, I didn’t really know what style of music I liked, or the names of the genres, or any of that,” said Albino, who will be bringing his band to Healdsburg’s Little Saint this Saturday.
“But my dad, who was a big record collector, said, ‘Yeah, you like blues,’ and sent me into the blues section of the store. So the first CDs I ever bought were compilations by B.B. King and John Lee Hooker. They’re still like my favorite records,” he continued.
Albino’s fourth album, Our Time in the Sun, was released last year. It was recorded at Black Keys front person Dan Auerbach’s studio in Nashville. No Depression praised the album for its “heart-on-the-sleeve” intensity. The 12-song collection demonstrates the 32-year-old musician’s deep respect for not only the blues but also early R&B, classic country, old-school rock ’n’ roll and a whole lot of southern soul.
When he was 14, Albino started playing guitar, back in the early days of YouTube. He soon found himself going down the rabbit hole, guitar in hand, watching performances by legendary artists like Skip James, Big Bill Broonzy and Furry Lewis.
“I’d find all these videos and live footage of them that I would just watch over and over,” he recalled in an early January interview. “I’d be trying to pick up what Lightnin’ Hopkins was doing on the guitar and trying to emulate it. And that stayed with me for a long time. I still drop in those little licks here and there. I was also learning country picking, which kind of goes hand in hand, because it all kind of revolves around blues. And then on top of that, I was trying to learn banjo and fiddle. I was at that age where you’re like a sponge. You’re just absorbing everything.”
But it would still take a couple more years for Albino to discover the sound that would take his music to the next level. “I was working with my dad, and it was kind of slow, so he was like, ‘All right, just go take a break.’ So I ended up walking down the street, and there was this hat shop. I was looking to buy a hat—I don’t know why—I guess all the cool blues guys had a hat. So I walked in, and the guy who was working there was listening to Otis Redding. I said, ‘Who IS this?’ And he’s like, ‘You don’t know who this is? This is Otis Redding, man. He’s one of the greatest soul singers of all time.’”
Albino spent the rest of the day hanging out at the hat shop listening to records and walked out with a couple of Otis Redding mix CDs that the shop clerk had made.
Fast forward 15 years, during which time Albino busked on the street, moved out to the country, did farm labor, recorded a trio of albums and embarked on his first Canadian and U.S. headlining tours. But the biggest break came when Dan Auerbach tracked him down on Instagram and invited him to come record at his Easy Eye Sound studio.
Albino remembers the first time he walked through the door. “It was like going into a museum,” he said. “The whole studio is just full of vintage gear. He had this really beautiful guitar that I was playing, and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s one of Hound Dog Taylor’s guitars.’ And it’s on my record! And then there’s another one in there that was Mississippi Fred McDowell’s guitar, which was crazy, because I remember growing up watching videos of Mississippi Fred McDowell, and this is the guitar I’d see him playing. So that one is also on the record.”
In addition to producing the album, Auerbach co-wrote a few of the songs and contributed some astounding guitar solos that are matched by a Stax-worthy rhythm section. The first song they cut was the rollicking “Rolling Down the 405,” which Albino describes as “a groovy kind of Southern gallop of a song. A road-dog song, I call it.”
But as Albino and his band take the record on the road, their songs won’t all be cruising at the same speed, any more than they are on the record. A case in point is the plaintive title song, “Our Time in the Sun,” where the influence of smooth and soulful ballads by artists like Irma Thomas and George Jackson comes through loud and clear.
“There’s this Irma Thomas song, ‘I Wish Someone Would Care,’ and it’s one of my favorite songs of all time,” Albino said. “When she sings that line, it’s just so simple and powerful, and it means so much. I just wanted to write a song like that, where you just feel the heartache that the person is feeling. And I wrote ‘Our Time in the Sun’ hoping it could be something like that. I feel like I was finally able to write a song that comes straight from the heart and reminds me of the music that I’ve always loved.”
Doors open at 6pm, Saturday, Feb. 22. Benjamin Dakota Rogers opens the gig at 7pm; Albino performs at 8pm, at Little Saint, 25 North St., Healdsburg. Tickets are $25 and are available at bit.ly/albino-little-saint.
