Tim Easton & Patrick Sweany with opener Ken Morton – Blues-country/ Americana / Folk – Friday, November 1, 2012 | Best of Atlanta Concerts | Atlanta Concert, Tickets & Performing Arts Resource

Tim Easton

Like the bristly critter of its title, TIM EASTON‘s album Porcupine has some spikes in its hindquarters. And the Ohio-born, Joshua Tree, California-based singer-songwriter says the primarily aggressive style of the record was definitely by design.

“I wanted to make some noise again,” Easton explains. “I’d been making some sonically conservative albums out here in California, with a little less of that Midwestern bite that was part of the sound I had been making with my band when I was growing up.”

Easton describes Porcupine – his fourth New West Records album, succeeding The Truth About Us (2001), Break Your Mother’s Heart (2003), and Ammunition (2006) — as “not a ‘coming full circle’ kind of thing, but more the center point of a figure-8 where I am passing back through on my way to many other directions.” The collection reunites him with producers Brad Jones and Robin Eaton, who played an important role in the early stages of his recording career.

“Brad Jones recorded my first album, with the band the Haynes Boys,” Easton recalls. “He called me out of the blue and left a long message on my machine, back in Ohio. He was the first person in the music business that owned a studio and was a producer who reached out to me and said, ‘I want to work with you.’ It was just a matter of time before I got back to him, because he really helped me get started.”