Monte Montgomery's guitar-playing is so distinctive, dexterous, and seemingly ingrained that it sounds like he might have had the instrument in his cradle. So it's surprising that he could have just as easily played the trumpet.
His first instruments were trumpet and piano, and he said he only took the guitar seriously "when I no longer had a piano or a trumpet at my disposal, and my Mom had an extra guitar. That's what I had. I often joke about, 'Mom, what would have happened if we hadn't lost that trumpet?' ... I think fate had other things in store for me."
He's similarly matter-of-fact about his decision to abandon electric guitar for an acoustic. "I could do a lot of things on acoustic I was relying on electric for," he said in a phone interview earlier this week. "So why not leave the extra guitar at home and the additional two heavy amps I was carrying around for my electric, and just play acoustic? It really was kind of just that simple."
The playing by Montgomery, who will be performing at the Redstone Room on November 17, is anything but simple. In 2004, Guitar Player magazine named him one of the 50 greatest guitar players of all time, and he's been called the acoustic Hendrix.
It's been more than two years since Dick Prall released his last studio album, Weightless, and while that's a typical gap in the music business, the Iowa-raised, Chicago-based singer/songwriter doesn't believe it works for independent artists generally, and him particularly.
"If you're gonna tell it, tell the truth and tell it all!" was an adage I heard often as a child growing up in rural North Carolina, where hard work, honesty, and generosity anchored our deep, abiding family and community values. Entering adulthood, I learned that living this seemingly simple conviction is much more complicated than the phase itself appears. "If you're gonna tell it" implies that you've made a choice, a conscious decision to speak truth, while "tell the truth" suggests that you have knowledge or understanding of what the truth is, that you know right from wrong and fact from fiction. Finally, "tell it all" reveals that the truth cannot be selective, and you cannot conveniently or deliberately omit facts or tell part of the story. When my siblings and I sometimes landed in trouble, as children often do, my mother admonished, "I don't care what you've done or how bad it seems, I need you to tell me the truth. I can deal with the truth, but there is nothing I can do with a lie!"
The typical aspiring singer/songwriter gets started by playing hometown open-mic nights. Danika Holmes is not typical.
When his band Harmony Riley called it quits in 2004, Miles Nielsen took a yearlong break from songwriting. "I couldn't write anything because I didn't know what I was about," he said in a phone interview last week. "A huge part of my life just ended. I sort of looked at it a little bit like, 'Okay, we sort of failed at the music thing.' I was really trying to figure out what to do. And then once I realized that was all sort of not the case ... it made me focus on writing again."
On the song "Superstar," Regan sings that "I'll pay the price for fame / I'll even change my name" and "I've worked really hard and I've paid my dues."
