Still at university studying creative writing, Winter has released an elegant and emotive debut album drawing on the rustic instrumental genre of
American primitive
Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, but Eli Winter saw Steve Gunn on NPR. In 2013, Winter, now 22, was an anxious, antisocial 10th-grader (year 11 in the UK) at a competitive high school in Houston. Playing guitar provided a respite from his intense workload. He had been copying Elliott Smith and Nick
Drake songs, though he found it unsatisfying to play
music that was written to be heard as part of a group. But through seeing Gunn’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert, he became instantly possessed by the rustic, instrumental guitar music known as American primitive.
One name haunted his new obsession – the
Chicago guitarist Jack Rose, whose work acquired a mythic allure after his untimely death in 2009. On 1 January 2014, Winter made a ceremonial date to listen to his much-lauded album Kensington Blues. “Either it’ll click completely, or it won’t feel right and amen,” he recalls thinking, speaking the day before he flies home from Chicago for Christmas. “But, of course, it blew me away.”