2011's Dust Bowl is multi-talented blues-rock guitar hero and singer-songwriter Joe Bonamassa's twelfth full-length solo album. Produced by longtime collaborator Kevin Shirley, Dust Bowl was recorded in sessions at Black Rock Studios in Santorini, Greece; Ben's Studio in Nashville, TN; The Cave in Malibu, CA and The Village in Los Angeles, CA.

It combines the gritty, blues-based tones of Bonamassa's first albums with the fluid, genre-defying sounds he's mastered in the years since and adds a dash of country from Joe's collaborations with the best of Nashville including legends Vince Gill and John Hiatt. Premier Guitar's Oscar Jordan describes the album as a "widescreen John Ford-style panorama" with "ominous cinematic imagery of trains, cotton fields, heartache, alienation, evil women, and death."

Album opener "Slow Train" "explodes into a fusion of gritty blues and hard rock; Joe's blistering guitar and falsetto create both a haunting and electrifying start to an exquisite album," says American Blues Scene. Other tunes such as "No Love On The Street," "Prisoner," and "The Meaning of the Blues" "play like epics," says The Dallas Morning News. Standout originals include the "stomping blues" tune "Black Lung Heartache," the "moving" "The Last Matador of Bayonne," and "The Whale That Swallowed Jonah."

Bonamassa duets with Hiatt and trades licks with Gill on the John Hiatt/John Porter-penned "Tennessee Plates" which The Sun calls a "country romp." Other album collaborators include Bonamassa's Black Country Communion bandmate Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple) who lends his legendary voice to the Paul Rodgers song "Heartbreaker." Beth Hart and Blondie Chaplin can be heard on Michael Kamen/Tim Curry's desperate blues track "No Love On The Street."