GILL Landry, former frontman of Old Crow Medicine Show, plays a solo show at The Crescent, York, tonight promoting his album Love Rides A Dark Horse.

"A little over two short years ago, I was set to be married to a woman I loved very much, had just won my second Grammy with Old Crow Medicine Show, and life was good by all perceivable standards," says Landry.

"However, I was deeply unsatisfied artistically and needed to leave the band. After the first year of touring my last album, I swore to myself I wasn’t writing another goddam broken-hearted love song, but then my lover took flight and I found myself alone, worn out, disillusioned, and heartbroken in a way I hadn’t known before.

"The future was looking like an exhaustingly long walk through a knee-deep tunnel of s**t ending in death, so, it seemed like it wasn’t going to be an overly joyous next record after all. But, I wanted to find a light in the darkness. This album is more of ‘a map out of the darkness’ than ‘an invitation to it’."

In December 2016, Landry spent two weeks on the Washington coast at a friend’s place where he wrote more than half the songs, whose tattered narratives cast aside romanticism in favour of reality. "I was alone with the cold wind and rain pounding in from the North Pacific. Then I ended up back in Nashville living above my friend Nikki Lane’s for a few months where I wrote the rest of them," he says.

"I moved to a cabin in the country outside Whites Creek, Tennessee, to record the album and then took it on the road where I finished vocals and bits in Stockholm, the Isle of Skye and Blue River, Oregon."

Released in 2017, Love Rides A Dark Horse breaks new ground for Landry with contributions from fiddler Ross Holmes, keyboard player Skylar Wilson and drummer Logan Matheny, as the songs explore a more seductive, stripped-down sound built on a hushed sense of intimacy that recalls Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits.

Tonight's 7.30pm gig is promoted by Please Please You and High & Lonesome. Tickets cost £9 in person from The Crescent, at Earworm Records, off Goodramgate, or at seetickets.com or more on the door.