“...a study in the art of touch, tone, taste and timing. The compositions are exquisitely crafted scores with melodies that carry the listener on dreamy flights of fantasy, up and down the fretboards of various guitars that can only be made to sound the way they do in the hands of Richard Bennett.”
“Richard Bennett is one of my favorite guitar players of all time. Not just because he composed the back-track to our song “Forever in Blue Jeans” and not because of the inventiveness and clarity of his compositions but because of the rock and roll spirit which infuses every song he touches.”
“A hypnotic blend of rhythms, landscapes, tones, colors, styles and moods, with melodies leading the way to certain places that only songs without words can go.”
“Like the builders who’d etch a design, a gracing touch on the uppermost ledges of those first early 20th century skyscrapers, Richard puts something into his work that no one else may be able to extract or identify or even know exists. But something about its being there makes the end product complete, better, best. Yes, Richard Bennett is one lucky son of a gun but a spin of For The Newly Blue is all you’ll need to know he’s giving as good as he gets.”
“January, 1960 ... it was a hell of a winter. We piled into a drafty, black, 1954 Cadillac convertible, picked up Route 66 and pointed the Caddy west in search of a new life in Phoenix, Arizona...the Valley of the Sun. These eleven postcards are love letters, distant watery images...mirages of the Valley.”
“I believe these tracks might reflect the real ‘heart and soul’ of Richard Bennett. Of course, I think that about everything I hear him play, whether it’s jazz, blues, country, pop or rock and roll. And perhaps, as someone once said, he plays that way just because he can!”
“For almost ten years now I’ve felt very lucky having Richard Bennett as a pal and as a member of the band. His quiet, self-effacing manner hides an encyclopaedic knowledge of all kinds of roots and rock music, from Hillbilly to Hawaiian, played effortlessly on a variety of instruments which appear out of a flight case as big as an Airstream trailer.........May his cracking guitar playing find a place in your life as it has in mine.”
