Jola Recchioni – Shine On Me (2026)
In January of this year, Polish blues singer and songwriter Jola Recchioni released her new album, Shine On Me – her fourth in the last two years (and she is already working on her fifth). Although she launched her music career late in life, she seems to be making up for lost time.
Recchioni grew up in Poland when it was still part of the former Soviet Union, and while she loved jazz, blues, rock, and heavy metal, American records weren’t sold on that side of the Iron Curtain. If one of her friends happened to get hold of a record, they would organise a listening party. “I remember to this day such Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, or Deep Purple parties”, Recchioni said of her formative relationship with popular music, a relationship that most people do not experience.
Recchioni’s take on the blues is electric and dirty, tracing her frontier with rock and roll with a stripped-down approach. For Shine On Me, Recchioni reunited with Oliver McKiernan, who produced and played guitar on her previous albums. Will Taylor plays the drums, and harmonica player Hector Ruano plays on ‘If Only You Loved Me’ and ‘My Heart is Mellow’. But for the most part, the album is as much a showcase for McKiernan’s guitar playing as it is for Recchioni’s singing.
McKiernan’s rhythm playing drives the songs ahead with Taylor’s drumming, giving the album a solid groove throughout. Standouts include ‘The Best of Our Lives’, ‘If I’m Your Fool’, ‘Gonna See a Gypsy’, and ‘My Name is Trouble’. McKiernan also plays a crunchy lead guitar with fills that aren’t too flashy, solos that expand the palette of the songs, and a tone that sits astride the border between blues and rock.
Shine On Me’s faults lie more with the mix than anything else. Recchioni’s dry vocal tracks sit too far forward, and the power of her lower timbre tends to squash the open, dynamic sound of the band. On earlier albums, the balance was a little more even-handed, more in the direction of making her sound like part of the band instead of a singer with a band.
Nevertheless, Recchioni displays no small amount of courage as a blues singer, if only because her heavy accent marks her as an immigrant to the style. The blues was born out of the experience of African-American people in the USA and carries in it the mark of African-American speech patterns and idioms. White American singers and, later, British singers wrestled their speech patterns and accents into approximations that listeners have long accepted. Something that was helped along, in no small way, by the influence of rock and roll.
Claiming her own territory in the blues speaks to the style’s universal appeal, but it also issues a challenge. Are listeners going to accept hearing the blues from a singer whose accent and speech pattern are well outside their expectations?
Find out more about Jola Recchioni on her Spotify.
This artist was introduced to us by Obsidian PR.
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