Concerts

Blues guitar icon Eric Gales brings his reinstated self and sound to Boston

The artist, who writes about his drug addiction and the state of the world on his recent album "Crown," plays City Winery on Nov. 14.

Eric Gales. Guitar World Magazine

By Madeleine Aitken

2 minutes to read

Eric Gales is, in a word, prolific. He’s released nearly 20 albums between 1991 and 2022, plus a smattering of singles. On Spotify, he has over 175,000 monthly listeners and two of his top songs, “Carry Yourself” and “Steep Climb,” have garnered over 5.3 million and 3.04 million listens, respectively.

The blues rock guitarist first picked up the instrument at 4 years old, and signed a record deal and released his first album, “The Eric Gales Band,” in 1991 at 16. Now 47, Gales comes to Boston on Nov. 14 to play at City Winery Boston, in the midst of a tour that goes through December and includes states from California to Mississippi.  

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His latest album, “Crown,” which came out in January 2022, explores some of the struggles he’s experienced over the past 30 years, namely substance abuse. In 2009, he spent time at the Shelby County Correctional Center outside of Memphis for possessing drugs and a weapon, and his career suffered as a result.

“I put myself in the backseat through my drug addiction,” he said in an interview with Guitar World in February 2022.

In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, he said drug addiction “just took my career into a black hole that I lived in comfortably.”

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Gales, who celebrated being six years sober on July 15, is now reclaiming that career, and using his album “Crown” as a platform to discuss his experience with addiction.

“There’s a world out there that’s being heavily consumed by addiction, of many types and many forms. I think it is a large enough subject for the world to relate to – if not directly through one’s own struggles, then indirectly through the struggles of those around us,” said Gales in the Guitar World interview.

The album’s title track and lead single, “I Want My Crown,” documents Gales’ journey to regain his “crown” and honors his friend Joe Bonamassa (fellow blues guitarist, featured on the song), with whom he rekindled a friendship amid his sobriety journey. 

He also expresses feelings on the state of race relations in the United States on the album, saying to Guitar World, “I was overly compelled to touch on things of that nature because the day before we started writing for this record was the day George Floyd died.” 

Calling Floyd’s death “an event that unified the world,” Gales used it as a catalyst to write and sing about topics he’d been wanting to address. 

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“I need to let people know that I have a platform to get a message to people that I think they should hear,” he said to Guitar World.

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