Fred Gillen Jr.

An acclaimed singer-songwriter and busy independent music producer, within the last ten years Fred Gillen Jr. has established himself as a force of nature in the Hudson Valley, New York folk-rock music scene, earning praise for both his solo career and involvement in two of the area’s rising new groups, the Woody Guthrie-inspired Hope Machine and a duo act with Matt Turk known simply as Gillen & Turk. Gillen has released eight CD recordings of original music to date, and his new collection, Coney Island, shows a willingness to use new technologies to update the folk-rock subgenre, much in the manner of Beth Orton and Suzanne Vega. Having self-produced his previous recordings, Gillen turned to producer-engineer Koji Mabuchi for Coney Island and the results are hypnotic and compelling. As usual, Gillen’s songs are filled with messages of hope, love and spiritual transformation depicted in everyday details of the human condition, but the arrangements buttress Gillen’s stark acoustic guitar and plaintive baritone singing with drum programming, keyboards and electronica. While his tuneful gifts have long been admired and appreciated, Gillen’s work in support of the music community deserves credit as well. A past president of Tribes Hill, the Hudson Valley, NY-based singer-songwriter collective, Gillen continues to serve on the organization’s board of directors, and has served as a mentor to countless aspiring musical artists, including folk music phenom Anthony da Costa. And after engineering and producing countless independent recordings, Gillen opened his own state-of-the-art recording studio, Woody’s House, in 2006 and has since helped notables like Red Molly, Work o’ the Weavers, Julie Corbalis and Hope Machine colleague Steve Kirkman cut new albums. A Hudson Valley native, Gillen traces his love of music to the time when he was 5 and his mother brought him to hear Pete Seeger perform on the sloop Clearwater. Country music, folk and jazz records around the Gillen home provided other important reference points, and by the time he was 16 Gillen was already proficient on bass and guitar. In the early 1990s he helped form the Rain Deputies, an alt-rock quartet that gained a good deal of notice around New York until its 1996 demise. By this point, Gillen’s literary interests were becoming increasingly manifested in songwriting, and he decided to pursue a career as a songwriter, releasing his solo debut, Intentions as Big as the Sky, in 1997. Gillen’s next CD, the stirring Tales of the Misplaced, appeared the following year and served notice that a new songwriting voice had arrived. The album’s opening track, “Face of Love,” recounted the AIDS-related death of his foster sister. “One day I visited her in the hospital, and she told me how happy she was because so many people loved her,” says Gillen. “Seeing her experience and speak of this joy while dying turned my thinking right around.” “Face of Love” became one of those touchstone hits on the folk circuit, and Gillen’s reputation as a gifted singer-songwriter grew. Personal elements and unique storytelling remain strong on his fourth CD, Grace, which was finished a few days before the 2001 terrorist attacks, but from then he began to mix a more politically derived and socially conscious message into his work, emanating Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan in a way that few musical artists dared to. He put together Hope Machine with Todd Giudice and Steve Kirkman after performing together at a hootenanny organized by Woody's granddaughter Anna Canoni, and after two years of bandstand experience they released their debut, March, in 2006. Gone, Gone, Gone, Gillen’s seventh CD, appeared later the same year, and he also won his third consecutive citation as “Best Folk Artist” in the annual Westchester Weekly Readers’ Poll. As always, new musical horizons awaited Gillen. On numerous occasions over the last five years he’d shared the stage with fellow singer-songwriter Matt Turk, who had some success with the jam-rock band The Hour in the 1990s, and the two troubadours became close friends. In early 2007 they joined forces as Gillen & Turk and immediately won worldwide notice when the Associated Press featured them in a newspaper article on artists auditioning for the Music Under New York program sponsored by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. (G&T got the job and have been playing for the commuter audience ever since at various subway and train stations around New York City.) The debut CD from Gillen & Turk, Backs To The Wall, was released in April 2008, and the duo supported the release with successful midwest and west coast tours. Audiences have taken to the duo’s energetic and earnest performances, where Gillen (guitar, bass, harmonica and washboard) and Turk (guitar and mandolin) complement each other’s musical gifts and personalities. A New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient, Gillen is also a poet and spoken word artist. In December 2007 he was invited to recite his work at a New Year’s Eve concert hosted by U. S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich in Manchester, New Hampshire, and ideas are fermenting for a spoken-word recording. 2009 will see the release of a new Hope Machine CD "Big Green Hope Machine," as well as continued touring and a busy studio schedule.