Gold Star's Marlon Rabenreither grew up in L.A. with a native son's sense of what's real and true and a childhood fascination with the Beatles, teaching himself to write and play a special kind of stark guitar-noir Americana that soon got him opening for Ryan Bingham and an admiring Lucinda Williams. On his new Autumn Tone release Big Blue-named after the ramshackle Hollywood home where he produced and recorded the album-he shines and redefines the sound of his self-titled 2013 EP and his 2015 full-length Dark Days to reveal an autobiographical work as influenced by writers like Fante, Baldwin and Chandler as it is Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Wilco or Elliott Smith. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was one of those lost classics-but really it's just a long letter from a young singer/songwriter both weary and wise beyond his years.