Event

KEVIN GORDON

A Louisiana native, now 20-year East Nashville resident, Kevin Gordon is a touring recording artist and songwriter. His latest release, Gloryland, garnered high critical praise from The New York Times, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and many others. His songs have been covered by Keith Richards, Levon Helm, Irma Thomas, Ronnie Hawkins, and more. The title track from his Down to the Well CD, a duet with Grammy winner Lucinda Williams, was featured on two prominent compilations: the Oxford American Southern Music Sampler, and No Depression: What It Sounds like, Volume 1. Also a published poet, Gordon earned an MFA degree from the renowned University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Gordon's own narrative begins in Monroe, Louisiana, where he "grew up the son of well-intentioned, but backsliding parents. I was a very confused young man."

Like many other children of the 1970s who fit that description, Gordon wrote poetry and discovered skate-boarding and punk rock despite being weaned on the region's early rock, blues, honky-tonk and rockabilly sounds. He sang in a high school band whose repertoire was entirely Ramones and Sex Pistols covers. But his own fusion of words and music ignited after a girlfriend's parents gave him a guitar and he discovered the more literate and worldly compositions of the influential Los Angeles roots- punk outfit X.