Doug Powell

about

A protégé of Todd Rundgren, Doug Powell is a more straightforward musician than his muse, more along the lines of XTC's Andy Partridge. Like Rundgren, Powell had a run of bad luck with record companies early in his career, but it's easier to carve out a place for oneself away from the major labels than it was in the late '60s and early '70s, so Powell has been able to find a ready audience in the American power pop underground. Raised in Oklahoma, the son of a physicist and a professional flutist, Powell grew up as a fan of XTC, Rundgren, and Jules Shear, whom he approached at a solo gig in Chicago with a home-recorded tape of 22 songs. Taken with his young fan's work, Shear shopped the tape around to various labels and produced a more professional demo that landed the young singer/songwriter a development deal with Elektra Records. The A&R executive at Elektra who liked Powell's songs then ended up at RCA, for whom Powell recorded his first album, Ballad of the Tin Men. Unfortunately, by the time the album was ready, the A&R executive had jumped ship to Mercury Records, which finally released the finished album in 1996 just as Powell's mentor was fired by an incoming label president, immediately stopping the album in its tracks. By this time, Powell had met and toured with Todd Rundgren, who agreed to produce his second album. After Mercury rejected the demos for the album and dropped Powell, the singer/songwriter (who had settled in Nashville by this time) placed one of the