Meet Swamp Boogie: singer-guitarist-lyricist Brian Ellison, slide guitarist Tino Arana,

bassist Woody Thomsen, drummer Bob "Clem" Smith and accordionist/ keyboardist Rhett Card. The two-and-a-half-year-old band, whose official bio consists of "It's just Swamp Boogie!," was formed by Arana and exists to sing about food and other stuff. "It all comes down to the fact," says Ellison, "some great American novelist said 'write what you know. We know about food and sex." And so it is that Swamp Boogie's debut disc is called Food and Sex. Of course, in the context of the band's bayou-inflected blues-singing slide guitar, joyous and dirty rhythms, carnivalesque accordion, and Ellison's ebullient, innuendo-laden vocals, food and sex seem pretty much the same thing.

Well, Smith, better known to local music fans as T. LuDit of avant-weird jazzers Thirsty Alley, jokes if Swamp Boogie wrote what he knew, they'd be singing about "picking up dogshit in my yard." Ellison, whose mother might want to skip the rest of the paragraph, admits to writing some "really raunchy" tunes that were left off the record, like "Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama and Me" (use your imagination), "Your Blow Jobs Won't Mend My Broken Heart" and "Kill A Cat Today." Well, perhaps it's better left at food and sex. Even as Swamp Boogie says its next album may be about booze and cars, they can't seem to buck the impulse to create in response to their urges. This, as they discuss album titles that got away.... "Wasn't one Foreplay and Etouffee?" asks Thomsen. Sure enough, it was. Ellison brings up Andouille (an-doo-wee) and the jokes fly: "Do we rock? Andouille! Do we f*#%? Andouille!" ~ Review by Randy Harward of Salt Lake City Weekly

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