radical druid

Glimpse at the surface of one of my songs, and I hope you'll see a new American tradition being born. The authenticity is there --- farmland and family and tales from fly-over country. My roots are showing, and there's no mistaking the fruits from the tree I've been watching over for the better part of twenty years. It's what I like to call "Country and Midwestern," a melting pot of sound and history bubbling up from a triangulated area of the United States that runs from Detroit to Chicago to Nashville to New Orleans, from Memphis to Bakersfield to Austin and back again to Memphis before winding its way right here to Natchitoches, Louisiana --- south of Stonewall, Kickapoo and Cow Patty Junction, north of the Gulf of Mexico, between Dallas and Jackson. East of the Sun and west of the Moon. Where they don't manufacture the stuff dreams are made of, they grow it from seed.

I've tried in my songs to incorporate a mixture of the lyricism of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, the clever touch of Tom T. Hall and Roger Miller, and the straight ahead no nonsense of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. While I'm not sure I completely agree, some have said my voice combines the drama of George Jones, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley, yes, particularly Elvis, with the sensitivity of Gram Parsons and Willie Nelson. Dig below the surface, though, and I hope you'll hear Otis Redding, Ray Charles, the second-line funk of the Meters, and the smooth rumblings of Curtis Mayfield. Maybe the Dead, the Band, the Allmann Brothers, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong. It's a sound raised on radio in America, from blues to jazz to folk to bluegrass, with R & B and soul thrown in for good measure. I think you'll hear the Beatles and the Byrds, the Boss and the Godfather, Country Joe to David Allen Coe, Hank Williams to Henry Rollins, the country fair and the corner barbershop.

There's a risk, though, that you'll have to open your ears to pick up on it all. I don't believe in playing just what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. All music, and my music too, is about choices, and cooperation, and considerations, but it's also about commitment, character and accountability. When I take an old Led Zeppelin song and turn it out like Hank Williams Jr., anything can happen. You'd better have your boots on, because it's a long road from Vermont to Arizona, and we're likely to cover every square mile. From Ellis Island to the Oregon Trail, there's a lot of room for everything in my Country, from the cradle to the churchyard to the grave and every gin joint and disreputable establishment in between.

I've played in all kinds of bands over the years, writing songs in the style of every album that ever hit my turntable, from outlaw to biker to poet to politician. My songs are about love and war, rednecks and revolutions, blue suede and blue ribbons, longnecks, longing and lonely old souls. Whether on guitar, piano, bass, dobro, mandolin, fiddle, lap steel, harmonica or anything else I pick up, I try to make each note tell a story. Like my life, I feel my songs are part of a larger American fable that reaches out to folks in the urban jungles of Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle and says, "Look here, ya'll, this is a thing I picked up where the concrete ends." It doesn't lie, and I hope it'll grow on you like home cooking.

I was born in 1965 in Royal Oak, Michigan. I grew up on a family farm in northwestern Ohio, then spent 12 years in southern California. From there, it was a voice scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston. After parting ways with formal education, I began the long journey back to my roots --- Memphis, home of Sun, Hi and Stax Records. Marriage led me on to Seattle, where I expanded my Americana vocabulary playing guitar with Jean Jacquette and the Blue Threads, and eventually back to rural Ohio, where I kept writing through cold winters and divorce. At that point, having lived East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, Pacific Northwest and Midsouth, I imagined my choices to be Alaska, Maine or the Deep South. I chose based on the music, and relocated to New Orleans, where I met my true soulmate, painter, master chef, ex-sommelier and consummate Aquarius, Starlight Dances. She and I and her daughter have survived Hurricane Katrina and each other, so far, and are now located above sea level and back in the country outside Natchitoches in northwestern Lousiana. I'm playing with some friends locally, still immersed in the country folk blues, still writing what I hope is unmistakably my own music, and looking forward to rebuilding a home studio where I can record and share the soundtrack of my life.

Bright Blessings, Good Roads and Accurate Directions to ya'll.