BELLOWS FALLS — Jon Dee Graham has played around, as it were.
With eight or nine solo albums behind him, he's made at least that many records in collaboration with a who's who of indie royalty. Born in 1959 in Texas near the Mexican border, Graham has spent his life immersed in the Austin music scene.
He was named Austin Musician of the Year during the South by Southwest music conference in 2006, and Austin Artist Of The Decade in 2009.
The Windham Ballroom hosts Graham for one show: on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m.
Back in the mid-1980's, Graham left his band, The Skunks, and joined the True Believers, pioneers in the genre of cowpunk. Teaming up with Alejandro and Javier Escovedo, Graham brought smarts to the art form.
Despite mountains of promise and brief deals with Rounder Records and EMI-America, by 1987 the band drifted apart and Graham went on as a sideman.
Legend has it that, after nearly a decade of that, Graham took his smarts back to Austin and got a construction job. That could have been the end of it, but no.
Somehow, in 1997 he released “Escape From Monster Island,” his solo debut, an astute and mature observation of the world and our place in it.
Then, as now, the gravel in his voice and the rawness in his playing mask a tenderness and a quiet intellectualism and let his songwriting masquerade as rootsy, Waitsean Americana. He's Texas twilight, he's fireflies, he's thunderstorms.
There's a lot of press written about Graham, and most of it talks about the prevalent ideas of loss in his oeuvre but in that depiction, the point is lost. Whether or not he looks for hope, he seems to often find it - so why isn't that's what's noticed?
In an interview with the Houston Chronicle in 2010 he's quoted as saying:
“...[W]ith all the frustrations, obstacles, disappointments, injustices … we still get Texas twilight, babies, thunderstorms, friends, dogs, second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth chances, fireflies; if that was all we got, you'd still have to admit it's a pretty good deal, all things considered.”