Less than two years following his Billboard #1 Blues album debut, Electric Church for the Spiritually Misguided (2023), New Orleans bassist, songwriter and producer Dean Zucchero is at it again with a collection of powerful and poignant original music. Song for the Sinners boasts 12 compelling tracks all written, arranged and produced by Zucchero himself.

This blues-inspired euphony is elevated by a luminary cast of guest vocalists and instrumentalists including the legendary Bobby Rush, Mike Zito, Victor Wainwright, Albert Castiglia, John Németh, Jimmy Vivino, Little Freddie King, John Boutté, Glen David Andrews, Sean Riley and more.

On the musical front, the record delivers enticing grooves and melodies from various genres of the 60s and 70s—Zucchero’s symphonic sanctuary. The lyrics of the songs traverse a varied poetic landscape, with destinations including the slide out of co-habitation, patricidal nightmares, Saturday night hookups, bereavement, centerfold romance, Taoist revelations, horny alcoholic wives, suicide and more.

Song for the Sinners—to be released for lovers, and their sins, on February 21, 2025 on Pugnacious Records. Do yourself a favor and snatch a copy of this seductive collection.

Back Story

Hailing originally from the streets of East Village, New York City, Zucchero cut his teeth in the bustling, industry-driven Manhattan music scene where songwriting and studio recording chops have long since been revered and rewarded. Cultivating these traits in the city’s local dive-bar and cabaret music incubators such as CBGBs, The Bitter End, Dan Lynch Blues Bar, The Bottom Line and Manny’s Carwash, with rock act Major Domo as well as local blues heroes Michael Powers, Popa Chubby, Sweet Georgia Brown and Frankie Paris, to name a few, Zucchero’s consequent appreciation for melody, lyrical craftsmanship, arrangement, improv and an overall connection with urban multiculturalism finds deep prominence in his records.

After a nine-year residency in Europe touring with NY blues act The HEALERS!, feat: Thomas Buck-Nasty and Italy’s premier pop- jazz group Sugarpie & The Candymen, Zucchero returned to the States in 2013 and set up shop in New Orleans where he has reconnected with urban diversity, but this time of a different flavor.

He passionately embraced the rich resources of the Crescent City through an ever-abundance
of local gig-work and soon-to-be international tour-work with the legendary Cyril Neville
(The Meters and Neville Brothers), as well as with other local giants such as Little Freddie King, Johnny Sansone, Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, Mason Ruffner, Mama’s Boys and Ghalia Volt, with whom he enjoyed production, bass and co-write credits on her first two albums for Ruf Records—the critically acclaimed Let The Demons Out and chart-topper Mississippi Blend hit #3 on the Billboard Blues Charts on three different occasions. Zucchero also added two bass tracks and one co-write on Volt’s top 10 Billboard Blues charting record One Woman Band and all electric bass tracks to her recent #2 Billboard Blues album Shout Sister Shout (2023).

Amassing such experience and exposure, Zucchero adopted the “New Orleans” slant to rhythm & blues, rock & roll and trad-jazz while also synthesizing the more indigenous genres of Louisiana music such as Indian funk, zydeco, cajun and most of all, Louisiana blues, with its stylistic tentacles extending east to neighboring Mississippi and as far north as Memphis and Chicago.

A newfound “gumbo” layered atop a historic base of exertive urban art and culture permeates Zucchero’s album with all contours of the musical melting pot set aflame; yet still there remains a calm simmer of the most basic ingredient we’ve all come to appreciate in music—“The Blues.” Whether it be New Orleans, Mississippi, Chicago or British derivation, all sub-genres are inherent and proper in his music.