Music |
The Hologram Cowboys Lay Down With Their Horses
Julian Summerhill
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Rock
Bob Lugano is a persistent guy. He wrote me about Julian Summerhill. I expressed modest interest. (I’d never heard of Summerhill.) He offered to send me a CD. (He has three.) I said I’d buy it and give it a little listen. He wrote back to say it needs a big listen.
And it does. Oh, you can hear your echoes of other singers — but only echoes. Julian Summerhill is an original, and then some. He couldn’t get back “inside the box” if he tried. All he can do is make challenging, exciting, deeply enjoyable music.
It’s always exciting to be on the ground floor, to hear greatness early, to be the one who pushes greatness on friends. That’s one of the special pleasures of Head Butler for me. And how much nicer when I’m not the one jumping up and down. Thanks twice, Bob, once for the encouragement and now for this Guest Butler recommendation….
The Hologram Cowboys Lay Down With Their Horses
Julian Summerhill
I used to play open mics at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. Almost every show there was a performer or two who did something original, but one night a new fellow with straggling hair went up on stage in an old army trench coat and sat down at the grand piano and began a song that turned me inside out — his plaintive voice easing out haunted lines that I only half understood, over unexpected chords accompanied by startling single notes appearing suddenly out of the mist and bespeaking some greater musical intelligence, echoes of the New York streets of Basquiat, of Dylan, of Thelonius Monk, of a different world, of a truer world. All conspired to overwhelm any other thought I might have, and I said to myself,
