Like k.d. lang and Laurie Anderson, singer/songwriter Dudley Saunders began his music career first as a critically-acclaimed “transgressive” performance artist - only to find the experimental folk music he wrote for his pieces take over his career.
Described by critics as "surreal, modern folk tales," Dudley's performance pieces were a fixture on New York's East Village scene in the late '80s and 90s. But as he began to merge the Appalachian music of his native Kentucky with the post-modern art-rock and jazz he heard at New York’s Knitting Factory, he began to draw an entirely new audience who convinced him to pour all his surreal images into the songs.
THE SOUND AND THE SONGS
With its emotional tight-vibrato and effortless range, Dudley's voice is often compared to Chris Isaak and Jeff Buckley, and MuzikReviews recently declared it "one of the best voices on the alt-country scene."
The songs, though, operate more in the scene-painting mode of Leonard Cohen/Tom Waits, and tell disturbing tales of bohemian life, darkly detailed and sometimes hallucinatory. In MUSHY-HEADED KID, for instance, a frightened man is "merging with the cracking wall/the
crack extends into his face/the girls are bickering in the hall/yeah, he says, I guess/you do belong/in this place." Or witness the "buck-tooth call girls on the corner" in THE RAIN ON 8TH AVENUE, "like red-haired roses in the rain/dropped off by a drunken mourner/on the wrong grave." |
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