"Even formidable comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Lyle Lovett don't do Dudley Saunders justice. Heartbreaking and original, his songs are like musical cinematography, weaving an American landscape of love, loss, and bittersweet struggle." (Flavorpill.com)

11 MP3 Songs
FOLK: like Ani, FOLK: like Joni



Details:
Like k.d. lang and Laurie Anderson, singer/songwriter
Dudley Saunders began his music career as a critically-acclaimed
performance artist, only to find the "anti-folk" music he wrote for
his pieces began to take over.

The white-hot intensity of his frightening, emotion-charged pieces
had, as The New York Times put it, "a kind of hallucinatory power so
forceful that one admires him for surviving them," but the
tight-vibratoed, Jeff Buckley-like voice with which he hypnotized his
audiences brought a wide variety of New York's avant-garde musicians
calling.

Not only did he record obvious folk-based work like Brian Woodbury's
bizarre arrangement of "Shenandoah" for ReR Quarterly Records, but
also songs with the Indian-Rock fusion band, Church Of Betty and
Knitting Factory Records' Art-Funk artist Chris Cochrane, with whom
Dudley recorded an entire album as the band SUCK PRETTY in 1997. Most
importantly, Cochrane also produced Dudley's debut on Fang Records,
Restore, released in 1997.

Restore was critically acclaimed for its unsettling songs, which mixed
the traditional country-folk of his Kentucky childhood with decidedly
UNtraditional avant-garde dissonances. Ranging from the country-pop
of his radio-friendly Breath, to the Biblical, fuzz-box crash of
"Lebanon," to the strangely structured, Brian Eno-style "Down By The Bus
Station I Lay Down My Sword And Wept," the songs told modern folk tales
of conversations with corpses, of crazed women in rain-swept truck
stops of men calmly waiting on riverboats to be shot.