stuart pearson

I’m originally from Long Island and I have been writing songs since I was seven, when there was little life experience to inform my material, other than dealing with childhood epilepsy and maybe Bugs Bunny.  I would watch my father play our family upright piano and it hit something in me that said “you can do that too”.  So I poked, single-fingered on the piano and found my first primitive melody.  We would spend summers on my grandfather’s farm in Wisconsin, where I would feed chickens, get chased by cows and listen to the curious music the 1960’s midwest would listen to; Johnny Cash, Bobby Gentry, Charlie Rich.  Music that sounded rusty and full of weeds.  As much as I liked playing in the corn field, I was always  impatient to get back to that piano.

Meanwhile, back at home, my surfer brother formed a band and that lit sparks in my head.  They played songs by The Rascals, The Beach Boys and other 60’s bands that made sounds I didn’t understand but wanted to.  A truly terrible guitar followed and so did terrible songs.  An annoying amount of them.  They kept coming.  When the city’s punk scene blossomed, I would absorb every issue of  Creem Magazine and discovered the noise made by the NY Dolls, Television, the Ramones and ultimately the Velvet Underground.

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Lots of bands followed, as did lots of towns and instruments.  By 1995, my band Through the Woods was voted Band of the Year by the National Academy of Songwriters.  We were a five-piece band that would use 19 instruments on stage - things like bicycle wheels, bowed guitars, tuba, glockenspiel, hurdy gurdy, squeezebox, banjo, hubcaps, sax, clarinet and on and on.  Described in local magazines as “Dixieland Deathrock” and “The closest thing to vaudeville Los Angeles has”, the songs reached back to the 1800’s, 1930’s and 1960’s.  We were playing what is now called “Dark Americana”.