TOC Portland

"It's Like The Guitar Has Been Given Free Reign To Play It's Self!"

French-Algerian acoustic guitar virtuoso, vocalist and composer Pierre Bensusan, surnamed "Mister DADGAD", has taken his unique sound to all corners of the globe.

Winner of the Independent Music Award for his triple live album "Encore", voted Best World Music Guitarist by Guitar Player Magazine reader's Poll, winner of the Rose d'Or at the Montreux Festival for his debut album, Pierre is recognized as one of the greatest guitar players of the 21st century.

“Amongst all these villains, I will be your friend,” Luca Fogale sang on his 2016 single “Villains,” and all these years later, he’s stayed true to that mission. It’s fitting that the debut album where that song originated was called Safety, because that’s always been Luca’s mission in music: to provide comfort and sanctuary, not just from the cruel world that can so often bring us down, but from the dark thoughts and messy feelings that can plague us in our most insecure moments. Raised on a steady diet of Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell, the singer/songwriter from Burnaby, British Columbia possesses a voice that seems soft and gentle on the surface, but cuts deep to reveal hidden truths and suppressed emotions. “I grew up in not the most expressive family,” Luca reflects, “and we were conservative both in the way that we interacted with each other and the way we all bottled things up.” He’s spent his musical career making up for lost time, creating songs that aren’t afraid to be tender, vulnerable, and brutally honest.

With Safety, we were introduced to a songwriter with a fine-tuned ear for warm, wool-sweater melodies, richly rendered narratives, and intimate autumnal ambiance, like Jeff Buckley timewarped into Bon Iver’s wood cabin. That album—and its gospel-gilded 2017 follow-up single “I Don’t Want to Lose You”—pegged Luca as an indie-folk phenom on the rise, with streaming stats well into the seven figures. But his 2020 follow-up, Nothing Is Lost, revealed there was a whole lot more to Luca than prettily played serenades on acoustic guitar and piano. Through a broader palette of synth-washed atmospheres, orchestral flourishes, and lush ‘70s soft-rock arrangements, the album sees Luca graduate from the proverbial coffeehouse to the concert hall, recasting his private conversations as cinematic set pieces. 

However, his musical vision expands, Luca’s songwriting keeps drilling down into the deepest corners of his soul, as he reckons with crises both spiritual and existential in search of inner peace and redempetion. But  “Something I've really struggled with my entire life is feeling worthy and purposeful and that my life has value,” Luca admits. “A lot of these songs are meditations and reminders to myself of how I want to live my life: the ways in which I want to think about myself and think about the people in my life, and how I want to be seen. I'm still learning about what sort of music I want to make and what kind of artist I want to be. Obviously, it's a lifelong process.”