Steve Balaskey
Steven Dean Balaskey waited 27 years after moving to Nashville to record and release his first CD, "I'm Goin Out Tom Catin",
and from the kick-off rocker, "I Love My Country" (talking music and homeland), the listener is in for a good-time ride. On the liner notes
Steven quotes his influences, and they are evident everywhere. From the story-song simplicty and Johnny Cash feel of "My Ma 'n' My Pa"
about a West Virginia boy and the loss he feels as his life unwinds to the unabashed sentiment of "What If I Lost You", a father singing to his
troubled teenaged daughter and then dedicating it, as he does the CD, to his own daughter, Natalie.
Steven mentions growing up listening to am radio when you could hear all kinds of music (before the days of format radio) and he's absorbed
elements of many styles: the girl-group sounds of early R&B, and the British Invasion music and early innocence of the 60s. His time in Nashville
has served him well also with such hook songs as "What You See Girl Ain't What You Get" and "Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is."
This music rocks and touches the heart in all its myriad styles.
The sound and production are vintage Sound Vortex. Excellent SV stalwarts/musicians like Tommy Goldsmith (Electric Guitar & Mandolin),
Rob Stanley (Electric Bass), Pat McInerney (Drums/Percusssion), Paul Niehaus (Pedal Steel/Tremolo Guitar),
and exuberant and fun back-up vocalists Mary Ann Chase, Carole Edwards, and Ann Schorr (among others) all add to the spontanaiety, groove,
and feel of this recording.
I've been friends and respected Steven's sincerity and heart since we were young, way back in Durham, NC a long time ago. This is a solid representation
of a good man's life and music. It deserves a good listen.
- Tom House
To the Top
Steve Balaskey's investiture into the crowded ranks of recorded music has been
greatly anticipated by witnesses of his venue-burning performances over a thirty year period,
as well as longtime casual observers.
His intermittent performances have occurred in and around Nashville, Tennessee since nineteen seventy-six,
when he first allowed himself to reticently infiltrate the various 'writer's nights" the city has always offered.
"I'm Goin Out Tom Catin" is the culmination of nearly thirty years' beer-guzzled Monday nights, whiskey-soaked Saturday nights,
and god-only-knows how much gritty allegiance and sturdy commitment that had to roll in and try to make their way
past Steve Belaskey in one piece.
This newly-released assortment of music carries a cargo-load of inspired commotion for the world's clueless.
Balaskey easily plants himself within the margins of several genres, while displaying his natural proclivity
to rock and roll. Despite the occasional sheltering of his lyrics in country-flavored settings, the playful rock and roll spirit
is what truly defines him as a vocalist and songwriter.
"I'm Goin Out Tom Catin" is an extremely well-produced album that feeds itself only when it needs to - and happily backdrops
Steve Balaskey's songs with deceptively simple arrangements that allow his voice to sweep along by nothing other than his own
unharnessed whims. "My Ma 'n' My Pa" pays tribute to Balskey's early West Virginia roots, chronicling the love and trials of family history.
"What If I Lost You" buckles down the concept of everlasting and unconditional love as well as it's ever been done.
"I'm Blue" is the embodiment of Balaskey's stylistic range, all in one song. "I Wanna Ride the Range" is the envelope being pushed, and the
tension, freedom, and R and B enclosure of "A Good Thing Better" bangs straight up against the beauty of its melody in a way that might be
found in a stack of Motown standards. It's all Steve Balaskey: tender, succinct, hearty and forever meaningful.
If there is a place for anything hypercritical with this great first recording, it may lie within limited subject or stylistic threading,
but even those wouldn't hold much water. When a man spends almost three decades atop an eight-to-twelve inch stage, presenting his music to
college students, winos, drifters, doctors, pool hustlers, politicians, hookers, thieves, poets, and a host of homeless wayward angels, then
he's automatically earned the right to do absolutely anything he pleases when he decides to step up to the line and make a record.
Only now, we're going to want another one...and another one...
- Mark Germino
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The Roses
The Roses is an early music project founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1994 by
Michael Rosa & his former wife, Laurie. The repetoire includes Medieval (13th c. - 15th c.) and
Renaissance(16th and 17th c.) instrumental pieces
from England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Old English folksongs & early
Celtic jigs & reels featuring Michael on cittern (Renaissance-era octave
mandolin), mandola, guitar and percussion, and Laurie (who currently performs
under the name Garreth Grey) on hurdy-gurdy (an ancient, hand cranked,
circular-bowed, fiddle-type stringed instrument), and flutes.
The Roses recorded four collections of music at Sound Vortex between 1994 &
2003 and performed at various Renaissance festivals throughout the
U.S. (including Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, New Mexico, Alabama, South Florida &
North Florida). They have also performed early music programs at schools &
universities, and played Irish & Scottish music at pubs and nightclubs in both
the U.S. and the U.K.
Over the years, The Roses have also included other musicians including Zina
Everton (vocals, violin and viola) Chris Gowan (bass and percussion) and Margaret
Rose McDougal (vocals).
The current performing band consists of Michael Rosa (cittern and mandola),
Jeanine Yeager (flutes and percussion) and Teddy Johnson (Renaissance lute and mandola).
Releases:
Your Day's Delight(cassette only) 1995
Grutch Who Lust (cassette only) 1995
The Underhill Road (CD) 1999
The White Flower (CD) 2003
Plans are in the works for a CD to be released towards the end of 2004.
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Tom House
Like Gillian Welch, Tom House mines the deep roots of
country music, bypassing honky-tonk and all the various 20th century sub-genres, starting instead with the Carter Family and working backwards from
there. Unlike Gillian Welch and her stately, poised recreations of pre-war folk, Tom House mines these roots with ferocity and abandon, leaving the blood
and dirt on his hands for all to see. His new and fifth album, That Dark Calling, embraces the fear and strangeness of American folk while filtering
this tradition through his own verbose, poetic sensibility, a Docks Boggs of the Beat Generation. This could easily make for songs far too self-aware and
deliberate -- many are the artists who've tried to achieve synthesis and drifted into awkwardness or overkill. Somehow, Tom House makes it look easy,
and he's crafted a record both radically traditional and deeply personal, with stories of murderers on the run and preachers overdosed on holiness sitting
side by side with "All Fall Down", a cantankerous lament about the current state of popular music ("Now it's all about stars and hits / And who's sold more
and who's got tits / And none of it means two shakes of shit / Let it all fall down").
The melodies, and Tom's adept, banjo-like guitar picking, recall the time-haunted folk styles of Appalachia, but the backing -- supplied by members of
Nashville supergroup/collective Lambchop -- is noisy, percussive kitchen-clatter, an uneasy, hectic, backwoods bebop that House rides effortlessly,
playing off the changing rhythms with the peaks-and-valleys of his cracked, powerful voice. It's the voice of a bluegrass singer who spent the night before
screaming Bible verses at the moon. A woman with a voice that's far prettier but similarly all over the place sings with him on most of the songs, and they
find crazy, reckless harmonies. The songs usually begin with House picking uncertainly at his guitar and finding the melody with his most unique vocal habit,
a sort of hillbilly scatting made up of gasps, yelps, whines, and moans, until a rudimentary rhythm-section kicks in and the lyrics, delivered with
disconcerting passion, start flowing, by which time it's too late for the listener: Tom House has got you by the leg and he ain't gonna let go.
About the lyrics: the man can write. You can listen to these songs all through the day and not get to the bottom of them -- the listener is endlessly
rewarded by the sheer denseness of the lyrics and the depths suggested by his turns of phrase and compelling stories. You're taken into another world,
or led to see this one in a new way, to see it as a world where everything is called into question and ordinary things are made strange. The time-worn theme
of the ramblin' man is taken to almost metaphysical heights in "Exile", a sprawling freight-train of a song that traces the wanderings of a fugitive who starts out
"Eighteen and in love with the whole world / One girl in particular but you know how that goes." Before you can nod sympathetically -- don't we all know how
that goes? -- the narrator has sliced the throat of his girl's father ("He never cared much for me", he explains) and taken off, beginning an aimless journey
which, as the song progresses onward, effects in him a kind of total disconnect from the human race, and we watch him gradually transform into some
other kind of creature.
Not every song is so dark. "Bake My Beans" is a frantic, catchy celebration of food and family dysfunction, "Hey Tom" is a fun song about picking up and
leaving, and "Susan's Song" is a tender, heartbroken paean to a lost love. Even in those, though, an undercurrent of discontent and darkness remains.
The most beautiful song, perhaps, is "Too Close to God", which features House alone with his guitar, telling the story of a preacher, "Brother Michael",
who was found by his congregation, fresh out of the wilderness and "Stumblin' around / Leaves in his hair, dirt caked to his neck", wounded by grace, a
casualty of prayer. Some were sure he'd gone crazy, but others, more intuitive, "had their doubts". House tells us exactly what happened in the song's
chorus: "He got too close to God / And his eyes were touched with light / And he could not hide his nakedness / Not in the darkest night". In the second
verse he forsakes conventional life and returns to the woods where he "Laid down in the grass / And he let the wind flow over him / And he let the seasons
pass" proclaiming that "This world ain't mine / And it's all there is / In all its grandeur / And its emptiness".
The title song, "That Dark Calling", is among the most chilling. A major-key waltz featuring just Tom's guitar, a loan, sobbing fiddle, and harmonies by the
aforementioned woman, it's a pitiless, unflinching self-examination by an angry man, looking back on his life without judgment or excuses. "And the wind
blows so hot", he sings, "And the wind blows so hard / And dry my face, become like me / All beaten, mean and scarred / I've been studying my life / Some
reason, even there / I was damned somehow to start / I'm so angry and don't care / It's that dark calling in my blood".
The song also provides what has to be the best summary of the record, with all its panic and fire, gentleness and beauty: "I signed my name / I swore an
oath / To God or Satan / Maybe both." It's difficult to tell who Tom House is working for, but he's doing it well.
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