Hoey, Gary Neon Highway Blues

Starting with 2013's 'Deja Blues' and continuing with 2016's 'Dust & Bones', Gary Hoey has tapped into his early musical influences and applied his own feral skills to take the Blues format in a unique direction. He stays in the same lane on his latest endeavor, 'Neon Highway Blues', steering its 11 tracks with the confidence and assuredness of a veteran and the freshness of someone who's still in the process of discovery and refinement -- with the help of famous friends such as Eric Gales, Lance Lopez, Josh Smith and Hoey's 17-year-old son Ian.

"I really wanted to make sure this album had a lot of blues on it," says Hoey, who self-produced 'Neon Highway Blues' and recorded it at his home studio in New Hampshire. "It's funny because sometimes you can set out to do a blues record and halfway through you realize there's not actually that many blues songs. So I keep sticking to the blues and tried to get that to be a strong part of this record -- and still put some other songs there that the die-hard, long-time fans would like, some instrumentals and some rockin' stuff. There's definitely a variety here."