Blues Boy Beats Music Industry Superstars

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla., Oct. 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- In an incredibly competitive release week with 15 new entries in the top 30, blues-rock guitar hero Joe Bonamassa was able to outsell and beat multiple superstar artists on the Billboard Top 10 including Lenny Kravitz, Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp, and Gary Clarke, Jr. with his brand new solo album Different Shades Of Blue (J&R Adventures) debuting at #8 on Billboard's Top 200. This is Bonamassas's highest charting album, first top 10, and biggest sales week ever.

The album also earned #1 spots on Billboard's Indie Chart and Blues Chart. This is Bonamassa's 13^th #1 Blues album – more than any other artist.

Bonamassa's Top 10 Debut was engineered by J&R Adventures, the label Bonamassa founded with longtime manager, Roy Weisman. It has divisions in publishing, management, and memorabilia and is branding itself as a disruptive and independent entity in the music business. By vertically integrating its business to meet the needs of the artist and the fans, it gives control to the artist and its management directly, rather than to a handful of outside individuals. From this, J&R Adventures has been able to compete against the major labels in the record industry to generate Bonamassa's current top 10 chart position.

According to Billboard, "Different Shades of Blue is the highest-ranking blues album in almost two years."

Buy Different Shades Of Blue here:
http://shop.jbonamassa.com/collections/different-shades-of-blue/products/different-shades-of-blue-cd

Download title track here:
http://joeb.me/JBfreesongUMG

Different Shades of Blue is the first album of Bonamassa's career to feature all original material and his first solo studio album in two years. He wrote it in Nashville with Jonathan Cain (Journey), James House (Diamond Rio, Dwight Yoakam, Martina McBride), Jeffrey Steele, Gary Nicholson, and Jerry Flowers (Keith Urban). The digital album is distributed worldwide by INgrooves Music Group, as well as physical in the US.

The result is a record with more of an experimental edge than previous Bonamassa records. It's a blues record that explores the outer reaches and the many different sounds that shape the genre.

Praise for Different Shades Of Blue:

• MOJO: 4/5 stars, "[Bonamassa's] most cohesive and satisfying artistic statement yet."
• Uncut: "The best yet and then some from an artist whose vision continues to expand with every release."
• Wall Street Journal: "Bonamassa takes charge on 'Get Back My Tomorrow'… a hard-hitting tune that showcases Bonamassa's voice and muscular guitar work."
• USA Today's Playlist: "Piercing guitar notes and punchy horns drive home the despair on this track ['Heartache Follows Wherever I Go'].
• American Way: "A career high…America's biggest guitar hero since Stevie Ray Vaughan."
• Christian Science Monitor: "Full of catchy songs… and air-bending guitar work."
• Grammy.com: "A hard-hitting set of tracks that showcase Bonamassa's blazing guitar work and plaintive vocal style to great advantage."
• Vintage Guitar: "Bonamassa takes familiar blues tropes, polishes them to perfection, then serves them in a pristine package for the 21st-century blues fan."

About Joe Bonamassa: As Joe Bonamassa enters his 26th year as a professional musician, he continues to blaze a remarkably versatile artistic trail, and amass an authentic, innovative and soulful body of work.  Bonamassa's career began onstage opening for B.B. King in 1989, when he was only 12 years old.  Today, he is hailed worldwide as one of the greatest guitar players of his generation, and is an ever-evolving singer-songwriter who has released 15 solo albums in the last 13 years, all on his own label, J&R Adventures.  Bonamassa's tour schedule consistently hovers at around 150 shows worldwide each year, and a heaping handful of markedly diverse side projects keep him thinking outside the box and flexing every musical muscle he's got. He founded and oversees the non-profit Keeping The Blues Alive Foundation to promote the heritage of the blues to the next generation, fund music scholarships, and supplement the loss of music education in public schools.  He earned his very first Grammy nomination for Best Blues Album in 2013 and this summer played his biggest show in the U.S. to a sold-out crowd of over 9,000 fans at Red Rocks Amphitheater. His DVD Joe Bonamassa: Live At The Royal Albert Hall featuring Eric Clapton recently earned platinum status.

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Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141002/149906

SOURCE J&R Adventures