finetune artist: Richard Shindell

b. Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA. This eloquent US folk songwriter, practising Buddhist and self-confessed "couch potato" can trace his original musical inspiration to a Christmas gift, a copy of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, when he was nine years old. After leaving seminary college Shindell spent nine months at a Buddhist monastery in New York. This gave him the inspiration to write songs for the first time, and he subsequently joined John Gorka in the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. He was still terrified of performance when he went solo after leaving the band, armed with a set of songs he described as "ranging from the merely depressing to the truly bleak". This description does him small justice. Accompanied by acoustic guitar, his songs display a number of distinctive traits - the subject matter varying from religious imagery to personal relationships, trash television to historical biographies. Many are also starkly political, though he steers away from sloganeering: "They're not political in a kind of didactic way, in say a protest rally kind of political. These aren't the kind of songs once could sing at a protest rally and become emboldened to scale the walls. It's not the sort of thing that's going to lead anybody to revolution", he told Dirty Linen magazine in 1995. Yet they are certainly powerful enough to win him several obsessive fans, one of whom was stated to have taken his song "On A Sea Of Fleur-De-Lis" so literally that she followed its direction to live in an elm tree. Shindell's diverse reference points and third-hand perspectives, built around interesting characters, have ensured that his popularity within America's folk community is not limited to such extreme examples.

Listen to Richard Shindell at Finetune.

Are You Happy Now?
A Summer Wind, a Cotton Dress
Abuelita
The Next Best Western
Confession