Trent Hill’s musical life has taken him places he hardly imagined. As a teenager, he picked up the guitar for the first time in the summer of 1977 in Kannapolis, NC, a working class mill town. Since then, he’s played and recorded with a variety of arty and eccentric alt-rock combos, like Blue Chair and Feliz Gomez (in his old stomping ground of Durham, NC) and Seattle’s unsung prog-punk rebels, Stem.
Some of the alumni of those groups went on to play in Shark Quest, Spatula, and Some Velvet Sidewalk, while Trent taught college for a spell in Deliverance country, experimenting with Gypsy fiddle before packing it all up to move back to Seattle in 2000. Soon, Trent dropped the fiddle, picked up his old guitar, and started working again on the folky, bluesy, jazz-tinged songs he’d started out playing in coffeehouses and vegetarian greasy spoons back in Durham. That is, when he wasn’t working on cultural theory, writing record reviews for Rolling Stone, or selling guns at Best Products.
For inspiration, Trent credits the gospel he grew up listening to on Sunday morning TV in Kannapolis in the ‘60’s; the Piedmont blues of Gary Davis; the sounds of the Near East and Eastern Europe; the classic works of Elvis Costello and Tom Waits; and the psychedelia-tinged folk of John Renbourn, Davy Graham, and Bert Jansch. Trent says, “I want to write songs that sound like they could have been co-written by both Robert Johnsons: the Delta blues guitarist and the Renaissance English lute composer.â€
You can hear some of the results of Trent’s experiments on Amsterdam, the five-song EP he recorded and self-released in February, 2008 with help from friends. Recorded in his palatial townhouse in the wilds of Lake City, Amsterdam will be available via digital download from iTunes, Amazon, and all the other usual suspects – as well as in a limited-release CD format from CDBaby. You can also find it at Trent’s shows, and find out how Trent works with lyrical songs of love, longing, black humor, and occasional mayhem (mostly of the emotional variety). On the CD, Trent’s accomplished, sophisticated acoustic guitar work is accompanied by Constantin Parvulescu’s shreddin’ fiddle, and the occasional sampled cello. Reflecting the spirit of his favorite artists’ tunes, the virtue within Trent’s sense of musicality is that it’s not afraid to be sophisticated, funny, heartfelt, and crude – sometimes all at once.
Trent’ll be gigging around Seattle and the great Northwest in 2008 to support Amsterdam's release and simply to have a good time. For booking information, contact him here on MySpace or directly at [email protected]
