Shane Parish

In recent years, Athens, Georgia-based guitarist and songwriter, Shane Parish, has been performing a collection of original outsider folk songs that combine play-on-words about cognitive dissonance, personal excavation, sweet longing, subtle subversion, moral support, and mourning, with his singular and intricate acoustic guitar inventions. Like the scattershot trajectory of his career—free-folk improvisor, finger-style experimentalist, prog-punk shredder—Parish’s songs integrate a wide range of styles and techniques into well-crafted nuggets of sincerity and whimsy. A blazing country blues about apocalyptic forebodings careens into a mid-tempo minimalist pulse drone, ornamented by ethereal whispers of good intentions. An odd-metered contrapuntal prog-folk psychological thriller depicts the inner tension between multiple selves searching for authenticity. Delicately fingerpicked minor figures cascade beneath a deadpan spoken word poem about the futility of waiting to subvert the system from within. Harmonically rich and meticulously constructed musical eulogies mourn the passing of friends and loved ones, while basking in their eternal presence. The pieces move seamlessly in and out of Parish’s breathtaking instrumental flights of fancy, and candid extemporaneous musings.