Emma Beaton & Nic Gareiss (Next Gen Folk Series)
The Next Gen Folk Series is jointly presented by Hearth Music, Victory Music and Empty Sea Studios.
Tickets: $12 advance, $15 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
It is seldom that a young folk duo emerges with so focused a direction and critical regard. After their first show together, Emma Beaton and Nic Gareiss’ sound was lauded “delicate and broken and perfectly sweet.” Perhaps it was to be expected considering their respective burgeoning solo careers: Emma, a folk cellist, vocalist, and banjo player originally from Vancouver Island, has performed across North America and Scotland with notable musicians such Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, Bruce Molsky, Laurie Lewis, Crooked Still, and Back of the Moon.
Emma is also the front-woman of the Boston-based modern American stringband Joy Kills Sorrow. Her 2008 solo release, “Pretty Fair Maid” was awarded a Canadian Folk Music Award, naming her the 2008 Young Performer of the Year. Her singing has been described as “gorgeous and clear,” the music, “diverse and inventive”.
Nic, a dancer, singer, and bouzouki-player from northern Michigan has danced and played across Europe and the states with The Chieftains, Tim O’Brien, Footworks, and Uncle Earl. He has studied and performed music and dance internationally, including a year in Irish Music Performance at the University of Limerick in Ireland, where he is now studying to earn his Masters degree. Emma and Nic first met at several music camps and began playing together late at night after square dances and evening-long fiddle tunes sessions. The songs they sang became the last music of the night. Today, their music retains a sense of staid nostalgia and quiet, almost secretive intimacy, grounded in Celtic and Americana traditions, but ultimately all their own.
“I fell in love at once, their music reminds me why I listen to folk music in the first place.” – Cover Lay Down, 2008
The Washover Fans: Live CD Recording
Tickets: $12 advance, $15 at the door
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Please join us as the Washover Fans record a live EP at Empty Sea!
With a refreshing and original take on acoustic music, The Washover Fans bring together four accomplished musicians with decades of playing and performing experience each having written, recorded and performed with various and varied outside projects. Seattle musicians Colin, Gillian, David and Seth write songs independently, but edit and arrange as an ensemble, creating a broad but cohesively twangy set, full of interlocking vocals and lush acoustic instrumentation. April 2011, saw the arrival of The Washover Fans’ debut album That Habit Suits You. The album is currently an editor’s pick on the CD Baby website in the Americana genre.
The four musicians push each other creatively to write and perform songs that each deliberately evoke very different emotions and soundscapes resulting in a set list in which no two songs sound the same. The Washover Fans create an intimate live experience drawing from each of the four musicians’ dynamic musical backgrounds. A live show consists of original music as well as thoughtful renditions of various covers that pay homage to the diverse American music experience. Instruments rotate the stage and include guitars, mandolin, banjo, cello, percussion and harmonica. Lead vocals are shared among the three distinct vocalists and are supported with three-part harmony. “The Washover Fan’s CD Baby page recommends the band for listeners who like Gillian Welch, Laura Viers and Ryan Adams. Their debut,’That Habit Suits You’, proves that there isn’t all that much separating the Fans from those folk and roots icons except, you know, fame. Rich, moody songwriting brought to life by expert playing and harmonizing gives the band a sound that is at once instantly recognizable but also completely original.” – Drew Stoga, www.stateofmindmusic.com, www.flypmedia.com
With time well-spent stumbling through jazz charts, playing in rock bands and blending into Catholic school choirs, it has been a long and varied musical journey that has culminated in the Washover Fans’ sound, but it’s the years of soaking up the simplest rock and the sweetest church music that guides them to this day. Since forming in 2009 under the Washover Fans moniker, the four friends have focused on folk, alt-country and Americana, drawing on musical first loves from childhoods in New England, Washington, North Carolina and Georgia.
Beth Wood
Tickets: $14 advance, $18 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
There must be something in the water.
That’s the inevitable phrase Beth Wood hears any time she talks about growing up in Lubbock, a high plains Texas town with a uniquely rich musical heritage that includes Buddy Holly, Natalie and Lloyd Maines, Mac Davis, and Joe Ely to name a few. Beth doesn’t remember the water tasting particularly funny, so all she can do is nod her head in agreement and say…”indeed!”
It was in Lubbock that this fiercely talented singer-songwriter began her musical journey. Beth’s family demonstrated extreme patience as they supported her classical studies in piano, violin, harp, and voice. With grandiose dreams of becoming a musician, a baker, or a cowgirl, Beth left west Texas to study voice and piano at Brevard College in North Carolina. She then moved on to another musically-blessed town, Austin, where she earned her degree in literature and picked up her first guitar. Living in Austin awakened Beth’s creativity, and it was there that she began writing songs and performing them in clubs and coffeehouses.
Inspired by an electric moment at a Rickie Lee Jones concert, Beth threw caution and her day-job to the wind to become a full-time musician. Twelve years, thousands of shows, seven albums, three cars, and numerous awards later, she has never looked back. Beth’s exceptional musicianship, crafty songwriting, and warm stage presence have been winning over audiences from coast to coast. “It’s really hard to not fall in love with Beth and her music,” writes one Texas music journalist. Thanks to a healthy obsession with words, an ability to drive long distances, an innate musical sense, and keen observational skills, Beth finds herself perfectly suited for the job of modern-day troubadour. This job has brought Beth many diverse opportunities beyond stage performance. She has taught creativity workshops to students young and old, shared her poetry at literary events, contributed to a literary journal, provided music for weddings, and done extensive vocal studio work. Beth also loves combining her love of sports and classical singing to perform our National Anthem for teams such as the Texas Rangers, Dallas Mavericks, Fort Worth Cats, and many others.
In February of 2008, Beth released her seventh independent CD Beachcomber’s Daughter aboard Cayamo, a seven-day Caribbean songwriters’ cruise featuring Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, John Hiatt, and many more. Beth collaborates with Dallas’s finest studio musicians on her self-produced Beachcomber’s Daughter, a mature work that elegantly captures Beth’s soulful and versatile voice, her thoughtful and thought-provoking songwriting, her knack for arrangement and song interpretation, and her musical versatility.
If you ask Beth to describe her music, she might just shrug. Some have called it folk, pop, folk-pop, country-folk, Americana, etc. Beth prefers to say it is soulful, organic, free-range, barefoot music delivered through a high energy communicator of joy. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram calls Beth “a superb singer-songwriter whose versatility discourages labeling. So, call it what you will, but listen with mind and heart wide open, and you may just find yourself transformed.
Misner & Smith
Tickets: $10 advance, $12 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
Just when you thought you’d heard all that the Americana/Folk revival could show you, Misner & Smith bring a freshness and lyrical vitality you won’t find anywhere else. When you hear these two performers you’ll think they were born to sing together, with an exceptional and indescribable vocal blend that cuts right to your soul. At moments raw and powerful, and at other times hauntingly subtle, extraordinary two-part harmonies anchor Misner & Smith’s unique and compelling original music.
Megan Smith plays the upright bass and mandolin while Sam Misner plays guitar, and with stellar award-winning songwriting to boot, Misner & Smith retain a connection to roots music that has been described as “the perfect balance between traditional and contemporary”. Paul Liberatore of the Marin Independent Journal called Sam “one of the most promising songwriters I’ve heard in quite some time.” Though it is not always easy to put their music into one category it is evident that the tradition of duets is truly alive and well in these two performers. You will be amazed at the fullness of sound and depth of songs from Misner & Smith.
The duo began their musical collaboration after working together as actors on a production of the musical Woody Guthrie’s American Song and immediately recognized a mutual love of Americana music, particularly focused on vocal harmonies. Since then, the two have been touring regularly and have built a steady and loyal following. They have performed on the main stages at both the San Francisco and El Cerrito Folk Festivals, and recently headlined at Berkeley’s famed acoustic venue, the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse. Hicks With Sticks Magazine described Misner & Smith as “a Bay Area treasure to be shared…with a touch for taking simple ideas and infusing them with unexpected meaning, metaphor and imagery.”
In 2007, “Madeline (Paradise Cracked)” won the West Coast Songwriters Association’s Song of the Year competition. The title track of their most recent release “Poor Player” (2008) was nominated in the New Folk category in one of the world’s largest international song contests put on by the Just Plain Folks music organization. It is the combination of strong songwriting and vocal delivery that drove RARwriter.com to declare “this is truly inspired vocalizing, this is ‘shivers up the spine’ singing!”
Barton Carroll
Tickets: $10 advance, $12 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
“Let’s Get On with The Illusion,” sings Barton Carroll on his fourth album, Together You and I on Skybucket Records, out January 19, 2010.
It’s a song about love – but a shoulder-shrug type of love that resigns itself to “I guess this is good enough.” A cynical narrative runs through the album for sure, but Carroll’s sardonic wit is coupled with lightly shuffling horns, making for happy sounding songs instead of a somber ones. His tone and sleight-of-hand songwriting skill gained him critical acclaim for his previous release, The Lost One from Pitchfork, Harp, American Songwriter and more. Is Carroll is singing about his own experiences or smiling with a beer and watching others screw it up (and then taking home the girl)?
“I tried to think like Cole Porter when I wrote that song. He was a master at metaphor,” says Carroll. “His songs were sweet and dark, hopeless and happy, fresh and unashamedly cliché. Sounds a lot like love.”
A North Carolina native who now lives in Seattle, Carroll’s songs are structured in folk traditions he grew up with, but he trades in standard instrumentation for the west Coast horn sound of Craig Flory, and the production of Jazz bassist, Matt Weiner. The three bonded over a love of the Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond records of the 1960′s, and the influence comes through. He also sings his first duets with Seattle singer Anna Lisa Notter.
Carroll’s love for a previous era comes alive on the first track, “The Poor Boy Can’t Dance.” “I love how the band sounds on this one. They sound like a WWII era English Swing band: the kind of guys who are classically trained, but they have just been bitten by the Swing bug. Love that clarinet!,” says Carroll.
“Something Good” is the only song Carroll didn’t write, and it comes from an odd-sounding source for a Seattle based musician – The Sound of Music. “This has been a regular in my live set for the past few years. It was the first song that I decided to put on this album, and I think it sets the tone for the whole record. I think it lives beautifully between hope and sadness. And I thought the first line sounded a bit like a Barton Carroll song, ‘Perhaps I had a wicked childhood. Perhaps I had a miserable youth.’”
The title song is akin to a desultory short story – a follow up to “Burning Red And Blue,” a song of destructive love from the last record. But, with Notter’s vocal and traces of hope in the characters, maybe their ending will be okay after all. “The characters are a few years older. The man has been imprisoned, and the woman is trying to adjust to life alone in a foreign land. This is the conversation they have through the prison glass.” (MORE)
Barton Carroll grew up in Banner Elk, North Carolina. He has toured and recorded in Crooked Fingers, Azure Ray and Dolorean. “Together You And I” is his fourth solo album. He lives in Seattle.
Praise for The Lost One
“Putting his songwriting at the forefront, the straightforwardness of the arrangements make his character sketches sound believably plainspoken instead of clever. The Lost One is a fine way to spend 42 minutes, and probably best served with scotch.” Pitchfork
“While most folks are either struggling with something, creating tension in their music, and others are relying on more traditional methods and sounds to form their music, Carroll somehow makes it seem effortless… the beauty of his songs leaves a feeling of easiness…This is excellent Americana without a hint of twang, but so much soul and depth that it needs to be heard. Give your soul the dark light that it craves and give The Lost One a listen.” Hybrid Magazine
“One of the most stunning of these tracks, is “Burning Red and Blue”, built on a circling 12/8 blues riff that’ll put you in mind of “House of the Rising Sun”. There’s a menace in the verse, as the narrating character insinuates “I’ll be out back / In my blue jeans / And my gun” to a woman who is clearly not entirely free to make her own choices. It’s masterfully done, though, the whine of steel guitar, the deep baritone mutterings, the half-sketched portrait of destructive love.” Popmatters
Cahalen Morrison & Zoe Muth
Tickets: $8 advance, $10 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
Amongst red rocks, dry soil, and clear sky, Cahalen Morrison was reared on Hot Rize, Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Rory Block while running around in a diaper, trying (at times unsuccessfully) not to fall into patches of prickly pear. Now, he’s got the ears for roots music. Hopping effortlessly from fingerpicking to mandolin, clawhammer banjo to lap slide guitar, Cahalen’s writing encompasses everything from punchy political commentaries, to soul warming serenades, branching out into instrumental rags and fiddle tunes, yet still retaining his subtle musical signature.
Though only 24, he is quite well traveled, having toured nonstop for 2 years. In June of 2008, Cahalen debuted his first full length record. Subcontinent has been applauded by his peers, and by spun regularly by DJs and fans across the country. After its release, Cahalen hit the road hard, not spending more than two weeks anywhere for a solid 13 months before taking a break. From Santa Fe to Seattle, New Orleans to Minneapolis, Nashville to Boston, he has played most every nook and cranny of this fine country.
In November of 2009, Cahalen released his second record, a live album entitled Old-Timey & New-Fangled featuring his father Dave Morrison on guitar and fiddle, Santa Fe fiddler Andy Cameron, and Jenny Fisher on harmony vocals. OT&NF was recorded live on August 14th, at the historic Western Jubilee Warehouse Theater in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado by Butch Hause (engineer for Norman Blake, Don Edwards, and Waddie Mitchell.)
Joining Cahalen will be Eli West, former singer and guitarist of the bluegrass band Loose Digits, playing musical chairs on clawhammer banjo, flatpicking guitar, and octave mandolin.
Sharing the bill with Cahalen is Seattle’s own Zoe Muth.
Kat Eggleston & Robyn Landis
Tickets: $13 in advance, $15 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
Kat Eggleston is one of the most accomplished guitarists and singer/songwriters in the folk, Celtic and traditional music genres. Elating, moving, and amusing audiences with her beautiful blend of sweet melodies, gentle honesty and searing humor, Kat’s music reflects a wide range of life’s experiences with unusual clarity and authority.
In a clear alto with flawless intonation, Kat Eggleston goes straight to the lyrical and emotional truth of every word and every note. Her musings on home, childhood, and her father’s garden are gems of direct, unassuming plainspokenness. Her narratives push hard at our senses and demand we return again and again to pick up the pieces we dropped on first hearing, expanding our comprehension of difficult, personal and universal experience
Kat has released five CDs to date, three of which are available from Waterbug Music, one from Redwing Music, and the most recent – Speak – in August 2009 as an independent release.
Also an actor, teacher and hammered dulcimer player, Kat has been a lead singer with The Otters and with Bohola, and recorded a duo CD with Kate MacLeod. She has played live and on recordings with David Bromberg, Bohola, the David Munnelly Band, Niamh Parsons, Jim Tullio, Tom Dundee, Dennis Cahill, Michael Smith, Brooks Williams, Andrew Calhoun, and many others. She has toured in Europe, Australia, Ireland, England, and Scotland as well as the U.S.
Robyn Landis is a writer of unusual depth and literacy. Her distinctive, powerful command of songcraft garners repeated
comparisons to Richard Shindell and Dar Williams.
Writing poetry at four and her first published magazine piece by 19, Robyn had a full career as a writer and author (publishing two bestselling health books in her twenties) before turning her focus to music. Her gifts and skills as a writer, applied to songcraft, earned her quick recognition. Since 2005 she has accrued more than 40 songwriting awards and honors.
She has won Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, first place at Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, second place in the Unisong International Songwriting Competition, a Telluride Troubadors honorable mention, and was a Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Emerging Artist in 2009.
Robyn is especially respected for her unflinching honesty, vulnerability, and fierce intelligence. Her courageous, heartfelt songs tackle subjects ranging from war to weather to love; adoption and dementia, betrayal and longing, friendship, child abuse, old sitcoms, and the environment.
Unpretentious, wistful and intimate vocals infuse her memorable folk-pop-Americana melodies with warmth and feeling.
Her followup/solo recording Many Moons, released May 2009, has guest appearances by Michael Lille, Mark Graham, Kat Eggleston, Larry Murante, Joe and Karena Prater (Cat Loves Crow), and Hans York; and features Paul Elliott on fiddle and Cary Black on bass.
Mark Tucker of Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange (FAME) says of Many Moons, “Every cut here is a keeper, and Landis obviously either lavished a good deal of time on the arrangements or has a natural gift for it, probably both. Like David Wilcox, her work is rich with sympathy for human frailty and the thousand and one disappointments the flesh is heir to… Robyn Landis, I’m quite sure, waited until her art was fully matured and, man, does it ever show.”
Indie-Music.com says, “Smooth vocals, like an earthy Laurie Lewis…Landis has won a lot of songwriting awards, and it’s easy to see why…Her writing is like a good short story.”
Nancy Vivolo, VICTORY REVIEW: “…smooth vocals caress the sensitive poetry and bittersweet sorrow…With each literary illustration, the landscape blurs by around another winding curve and bump in the road; another set of headlights grow then disappear in a flash, and yet a ghostly image remains…she can put you behind the wheel with her cohesive words and melody. Landis has been turning heads at many songwriters’ contests and festivals and as a result has chocked up her share of nominations and awards. Listening to the content and production quality of Many Moons, there is no doubt as to why…Many Moons is a brightly polished piece of work that will capture and carry you gently along on an intricate narrative adventure; an exceptional release.”
Sarah Sample & Kate Graves w/ Michael Connolly
Tickets: $10 in advance, $12 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
Sarah Sample dishes up a plate of acoustic folk rock that is salty and sweet. In an era littered with shoegazing introverts, tragically detached hipsters, and overly stylized pop tarts, she stands out like a big, beautiful sore thumb. She lets the audience in by witnessing to what is known and felt by most of us. And wrapping it up in a way we may never have heard- or felt- it before. Engaging, witty, real. The songs and the moment become everyone’s. Just ask audiences from Austin, Texas to Logan, Utah where Sarah has played coffeehouses, concert halls, amphitheaters, and street corners with artists like Stacey Earle & Mark Stuart, Peter Breinholt, Julie Hill, and Colors.
The last thing Sarah Sample wanted to make was just another folkie -girl-with-acoustic-guitar album. Sure, the songs were born as just an acoustic guitar and a voice. And, in the folk tradition she loves and respects so much, would likely be taken across America that way. But she didn’t want to document them that way. At least not this time. Enter Scott Wiley (Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman, Elliott Smith) and a new sonic palette. With plenty of reverence for the songs– because, after all, it’s all about the songs– they set out to take Sarah’s music into new territory. The album Never Close Enough is to Sarah Sample as “Flaming Red” is to Patty Griffin: a marked departure from a promising, acoustic debut but never too far away from her soulful folk roots.
Kate Graves writes little songs….little songs that are raw. She tries to spread them around like wildflower seeds. She likes wildflowers. If she could be a plant, she would be a thistle branch. She sometimes worries that by saying she would be a thistle branch, she is saying that she symbolically pricks things, but she still picks the thistle branch as her flower totem.
Kate Graves is neurotic. She’s okay with this term and generally uses it as a term of endearment…or when somebody is really bugging her.
Kate Graves likes kissing. And singing. And trying to explain to the world that her chihuahua is just scared and not really cold-hearted.
Appearing with Kate is Empty Sea’s own Michael Connolly, a versatile southern-born multi-instrumentalist whose fiddle, mandolin, and accordion have shared the stage with Coyote Grace, Captain Gravel, Korby Lenker, the Barbed Wire Cutters, and the Indigo Girls.
Kate and Michael share tight harmonies, beautifully understated phrasing, and the love of a good novelty song.
Coyote Grace – Double Header
Tickets: $10.00 advance, $12.00 at the door
Click here to purchase advance tickets for either date.
Coyote Grace was the first group to grace the Empty Sea stage when we opened this May. Now they’re back for two consecutive nights: Friday, September 4th and Saturday, September 5th. Both are at 8.00 PM.
Coyote Grace
Girl meets Girl. Girl becomes Boy.
Girl and Boy become a band.
Meet COYOTE GRACE.
If you want a lesson in organic chemistry, take notes as you watch the sparks fly between the acoustic downhome duo, COYOTE GRACE. This folktastic phenomenon is the result of combining one guitarist Joe Stevens, a transman from Northern California, with one upright bassist Ingrid Elizabeth, a sassy femme originally hailing from the hills of Southeastern Ohio. Together, they capture the eyes and the hearts of live audiences nationwide with their bluesy folkgrass sound, sweet harmonies, poignant songwriting, and mid-song dance moves.
Coyote Grace has shared the stage with such folk icons as Indigo Girls, Melissa Ferrick, Cris Williamson, and Lowen & Navarro. They can also be found wooing the crowds at colleges, festivals, conferences, coffeehouses, pubs, house concerts, farmers markets, and community centers alike. Although they spend most of the year on the road, the duo now resides in Sonoma County, California.
Spring 2009 brings the release of Ear to the Ground, the duo’s long-awaited sophomore studio album. In this latest evolution of their unique Americana/roots sound, Coyote Grace displays a striking musical maturation from their debut effort, filling out the duo’s sound with guest musicians on fiddle, mandolin, guitar, keys, and drums. Ingrid Elizabeth shows a stronger songwriting & vocal presence, while Joe Stevens continues to wear his heart on his sleeve with his emotionally charged, raw lyrics. The album’s mood ebbs and flows, winding from a sparse banjo/vocal duet, through a slow bluegrass ballad, to blues-driven full band sound to swinging country fiddle tune to pensive piano-kissed lullabye — a soundscape as tangible as the duo’s newfound home in the rolling hills of Sonoma County.
The two met while living in Seattle, and have been performing as a duo since December 2004, sharing the stage with bluegrass, old-time, folk rock, jazz, and cabarets alike. Coyote Grace spent the entire year of 2007 touring the country in their 1978 Chevy RV (Harvey), promoting their debut studio album, Boxes & Bags. Aptly titled, the album pays homage to the trademarks of their nomadic troubadour lifestyle, featuring 12 original tracks of acoustic alt-folk sounds, weaving fabrics of upbeat folkgrass, front-porch blues, lovesick serenades, broody funk, and freight train folk rock into a curious tapestry conveying themes of transformation, introspection, and the impermanence of identity.
Ben Mallott & Chris Marshall
Tickets: $13 advance, $15 at the door.
click here to buy advance tickets.
Roots formed in old standards, a juvenile heart, and his mother’s Ray Charles albums, Austin’s Ben Mallott uses his grainy timbre to remove the punctuation between singer and songwriter.
For his first solo release, Look Good, Feel Good, Mallott’s songs range from sentimental to sad to what he calls “unpredictably genuine”. A songwriter who admits his journeys have taken him from window seats to bathroom floors, he sticks to what works and in turn churns out his distinctive brand of Americana confession.
“I’m strange about where and when I write,” Mallott explains. “I try not to move my residence too often, because it usually takes a couple of months for me to find the place in the house that sounds and feels right. Where I live now, I stand about six inches from the back door and sing into it. It didn’t take me long to have a glass door installed.”
Personal as they are, Mallott confesses that his songs don’t distinguish between the literal and metaphorical. A blend of Americana heart and soul, each are shrouded in a little mystery to both the listener and the creator.
“I don’t know what they mean to me. I think if I really ever figured that out, I’d have to stop writing. I love the art of songwriting. I love the struggle involved. The songs are just windows. Some let in more light than others.”
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Chris Marshall followed a fairly typical adolescent path. He found his mom’s acoustic guitar, taught
himself to play, then worked his way into what he calls “many short-lived punk, hardcore and emo bands.” He also honed his skills by playing in the church his dad founded when he was 14.
Then Marshall discovered the gospel of Willie and Johnny—as in Nelson and Cash—and the spirit of Elvis, as well as the poetic and literary influences that infuse the thoughtful songwriting found on his new EP, Starting Out.
The five-song collection is an exploration of life experiences: physical and metaphysical journeys, passion, pain, friendship, faith. It’s the work of a man who found his songwriting voice when he unlatched his cerebral cortex from the process and engaged his heart instead.
“I tried so hard in the beginning to write songs that would honor the tradition of the artists I admire, namely songwriters like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson,” Marshall admits. “They possessed such an unaffected, uncomplicated writing style.” His own lyrics frustrated him at first because they weren’t as simple and clearcut. But once he let go of expectations that he should write or sound a certain way, Marshall freed his muse and let in all of his influences, including writers and philosophers like Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis and Soren Kierkegaard, as well as musical icons like Dylan and Kristofferson.
In the process, he’s developed a sound he describes as “uniquely American.”
“My generation seems interested in redefining what it means to be a member of the American musical heritage,” he explains. “That is precisely what I am doing with my work: borrowing and borrowing until we find something new.”
