MP3 There Is No Underground - FOLK: Folk-Rock

The bastard son of folk and jazz.

15 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Folk-Rock, JAZZ: Soul-Jazz



Details:
Becoming a prolific songwriter would mean nothing at all if the songs were bad.__Andy Eppler, 21 and the walking, talking portrait of confidence, is very aware of that and didn't let the warning bother him one iota._
_In fact, he is taking a short break from songwriting this month precisely because he does not want to burn out.__
Earlier this year, he called The A-J and announced that he was going to write and record one album of original songs every month for six consecutive months. He wound up recording for five, rather than six, months.___
He and his girlfriend decided to get married, and a wedding demanded a lot more time-consuming planning than he had expected.__(The joy was short-lived after their honeymoon. They returned home and discovered their apartment had been burglarized.)__Eppler has a commercial music degree at South Plains College in Levelland.__
More than anything, though, Eppler is a creative writer, a poet and a lyricist. And he writes a lot.__In fact, SPC songwriting professor Jay Lemon applauded his songs' quality._
_"Andy is the most prolific writer ever to attend this school of songwriters, and everything he does is far above average," Lemon said.__
I'm not sure how Eppler's dad, a local pastor, will take all this, but the songwriter cracked me up with recollections of early songwriting when performing at church.__
He explained, "You just mix words like holy, blood, river and spirit, and you have a song." Adapting a song just involved "taking out 'baby,' and substituting 'Jesus.' "_
_He annoyed venue owners until they booked him. Then he'd let his original jazz-inspired folk work its magic. The young musician said that he can perform four hours of original material. One would assume that he has great memorization skills. Not so. Eppler keeps spiral song books close at hand for referral purposes. "My memorization is so bad that I had to cheat at school when we had quizzes about Bible verses."_
_If he could make a living with poems and stories, he would pursue that. He said, "Lyrics are the new poetry."_Eppler owns quite a bit of music equipment, records about eight tunes to a CD, burns about 50 of them, rubber stamps an image on the outside and sells them for $5 each at his gigs._That's a bargain for friends used to downloading whatever they want to hear off the Internet for $1 a song. The response has been great. His CDs sell._
_As for recording 40 originals in five months, Eppler freely admits, "I did that as a promotional stunt."__The stunt worked.__But it's not like he's trying to land a recording contract. Rather, his dream is that his songs will be discovered and others will record them. "I'm just proving my chops, showing people what I can do."_

_- William Kerns