Tom Russell

In March 2006 Hightone Records released Tom Russell’s acclaimed Love and Fear, eleven new original songs which explore the raw truth about love. International publications, from New Yorker, Village Voice, and Uncut have hailed it as Russell’s strongest in a career that has seen two dozen recordings which have ranged from folk, cowboy, roots, and rock, to the far reaches of outsider Americana. The “fearless story teller” brought his “raw nerved electricity” to TV’s the Late Show with David Letterman in April of 2006. Letterman expressed the desire to hit the road with Russell. Paul Schaffer remarked that it was the strongest musical piece presented on the show, so far, in 2006. Love and Fear was the number-one-played Folk Radio Record, and the number one FARR Report record in March 2006. The record also began to chart on AAA Radio. The Village Voice proclaimed: “Tom Russell is worth at least a dozen Toby Keiths.” The album created this impact within six weeks of it's release. In March 2005 Tom Russell released Hotwalker on Hightone. This “beat montage” on American culture featured the voices of Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Dave Van Ronk, and others, and served as a folk operatic memoir of the music and literary characters which influenced Russell’s childhood. The album made over a dozen top ten “best-of” lists in January 2006. It also served as a musical soundtrack for the published letters between Charles Bukowski and Tom Russell, published in Fall 2005. (“Raw Vision,” Mystery Island Press.) The Associated Press stated: Hotwalker is a sensory and ideological barrage, yet Russell”s songwriting maintains an uncanny sense of place that advertises him as one of the remaining guardians of a dwindling narrative sensibility . . . this is an ambitious album that ultimately manages to become something quite rare: a work of art.” Uncut remarked: “Hotwalker is a colossal achievement . . . they should seal this in a vault for posterity” (April 2005). Stereophile’s Robert Baird wrote: “In the lexicon of music business words and phrases, none inspires more eye-rolling and trepidation than ‘important record,’ yet that’s what Russell has made in Hotwalker. Tom Russell has recorded one DVD and 20 albums of original material. His songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Nanci Griffith, Doug Sahm, Dave Alvin, Joe Ely, Ian Tyson, and others. He is credited, along with Dave Alvin, with establishing the Americana radio format with their co-produced tribute to Merle Haggard, Tulare Dust, released on Hightone in 1994. The Columbus Other wrote: “Russell seems to have invented and keeps reinventing the Americana genre.” His songs have appeared in a dozen films, including Songcatcher and Tremors. Russell has appeared three times on the Late Show with David Letterman. Tom Russell was born in Los Angels in 1950 and now makes his home on the border of El Paso-Juarez. He graduated from the University of California with a Master's Degree in Criminology, taught school in Nigeria during the Biafran War, and then relocated to Vancouver, Canada. He began his music career in the bars of Vancouver’s skid row. He has since lived in Austin, San Francisco, New York and, finally, on a 2.68 badlands farm in the desert of West Texas. In 2005 Hightone Records released the DVD Hearts on the Line by Eric Temple, who has directed films for Public Television including “A Voice in the Wilderness,” on Edward Abbey. Also in 2005 Rounder Records released the compilation Raw Vision: The Tom Russell Band 1984-1994: Vintage Americana. Tom Russell has published three books: a detective novel, a songwriting compendium of quotes with Sylvia Tyson: And then I Wrote: The Songwriter Speaks, (Arsenal-Pulp Press: Canada), and a book of letters with Charles Bukowski: Tough Company. His paintings were recently featured in Paste Magazine and a major exhibition of his artwork took place at Yard Dog Folk Art Gallery, Austin, Texas from February to April 2006. (yarddog.com). 21 of the 24 paintings were sold within the first few weeks of the exhibition. Russell's record Hotwalker is the second stage of a three-part American Trilogy which will conclude with a film and CD on the American West though the eyes of a California woman, Claudia Russell. Filming began in January 2006. The first part of this trilology, The Man From God Knows Where, was termed “one of the most important folk records ever recorded,“ by John Lomax III. Rolling Stone and UPI journalist John Swenson noted: “Russell is one of America’s great songwriters . . . this record is as close to a Homeric treatment of American history as we’re ever likely to see . . . when somebody is looking for the equivalent to the Harry Smith anthology in the middle of the next century, The Man From God Knows Where is what they'll discover.” Russell also co-produces concert trains across Canada and Mexico with promoter Charlie Hunter. Past and current performers include Nanci Griffith, Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Gauthier, Ramblin’ Jack Eliott. and Peter Rowan. See rootsontherails.com for more information.