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Artist
Dudley Saunders
12+ albums
singer-songwriterfolkmale vocalistsUSAexperimental folk
about
Dudley Saunders began his music career first as a performance artist - only to find the "experimental folk music" he wrote for his pieces take over his career: in 2009, he won the Outmusic Award for "Best Album" and in 2011 he won the Mountain Stage NewSong Contest for the Western Region. Described by critics as “surreal, modern folk tales” (VILLAGE VOICE), Dudley’s performance art told stories about strange, haunted characters, usually the social rejects who congregated in New York's East Village during the 1980s. The pieces were told in an evangelical mixture of text and song, much like a southern "tent-revival meeting," but with the aggressive surrealism William Burroughs. As the years passed, his Jeff Buckley-like voice and emotive folk melodies began to attract a non-art-world audience. Dudley recorded his debut, RESTORE, for Fang Records in the mid-90’s, with art-funk artist Chris Cochrane producing. The sound, subject matter and feel was a precursor to the as-yet-undefined “New Weird America” or “Freak Folk” category, moving from surreal acappella songs like BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON I DROVE MY CAR (detailing, in quasi-Biblical terms, a man’s descent into dementia, blindness and death) to driving Neil-Youngish country songs like GUTTER BROKE (about a woman losing her mind in a rainswept truckstop). Reviews were strong but Fang Records lost its distributor just before release, keeping RESTORE largely under the radar (although it received a GLAMA nomination for “Best
