Tomrush.com



Appleseed Recordings

Appleseed Recordings · APR CD 1115

The first new studio album in 35 years from a song’s best friend!

Tom Rush has been touring steadily for decades, bringing that voice and those songs to devoted audiences across the country. There have been a few live albums as welcome reminders of Tom’s relaxed, expressive baritone, skilled guitar-playing, droll humor and infallible taste in writing and choosing material (after all, he was virtually the first to record songs by then-unknowns Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor). Now there’s a new Tom Rush studio CD, What I Know, his first since 1974 and his debut for Appleseed, a musical quilt of original and carefully selected compositions that fully deserve “the Rush treatment.”

Tom’s voice and phrasing are what make every song he sings his own. He writes or selects songs shorn of elaborate metaphors, choosing graceful, evocative, straightforward emotional settings. Then his warm baritone, tanned by experience, humor and melancholy, shines right through the lyrics, illuminating them from within.

Emerging from the early Sixties Boston/Cambridge folk scene as a folk-blues singer and guitarist, Rush helped link folk to rock with his 1966 Elektra album, Take a Little Walk with Me, which included a side of electric cover versions of songs by Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, as well as Tom’s first self-penned song, “On the Road Again.” His next album, 1968’s The Circle Game, was singled out by Rolling Stone as the record that ushered in the singer-songwriter era with its debut of songs by Mitchell, Browne and Taylor before they had released any albums themselves. The album also featured what has become Tom’s best known song, “No Regrets,” which has been a hit for seemingly everyone (including Emmylou Harris and The Walker Brothers) except Tom; even U2 dropped in a few lines from the song in a televised 1994 Grammy Awards performance. Subsequent albums for Elektra and Columbia became showcases for other deserving songs by the likes of Bruce Cockburn, Guy Clark, Eric Kaz, and Richard Dean, who is also represented on What I Know by “All a Man Can Do,” which gives voice to a war veteran’s return to what’s left of his life.

Produced in Nashville by longtime Cambridge friend and musician Jim Rooney and his subtle crew of country-folk musicians, What I Know contains five Rush originals, his arrangement of the traditional “Casey Jones” (with guest vocalist Nanci Griffith) and nine renditions of mostly unfamiliar songs that become instant friends. Tom’s compositions range from toe-tappers (“Hot Tonight,” with guest Bonnie Bramlett on harmony vocals, “Silly Little Diddle,” “One Good Man” and the exuberant title song) to the wearily peaceful “River Song” (with Robin Batteau on violin). There are gorgeously regret-filled songs by Steven Bruton (“Too Many Memories,” with Emmylou Harris on harmony, A.J. Swearingen’s “You’re Not Here with Me,” Jamaican singer Mishka’s “Lonely”), the wonderfully tender “What an Old Lover Knows,” by Melanie Dyer and Kim Beard Day, and a velvety song of seduction – “Fall into the Night” – by Eliza Gilkyson. “East of Eden,” co-written by Jack Tempchin (“Peaceful Easy Feeling”) doubles as a frustrated love song and a commentary on US immigration policies. The best-known song covered is a reflective take on Mentor Williams’ “Drift Away,” a hit for Dobie Gray, Rod Stewart and uncountable others, performed here minus the “horn section, backup singers, smoke machines and pole dancers” Tom has heard in previous arrangements.

Tom Rush – the man with the golden ear, the comforting voice, the supple guitar and the craftsman’s pen – has given us a gift worth waiting for.

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What a resume! In broadest outline, Tom Rush was a leader in the Sixties/Seventies progression from performing traditional folk and blues to coupling folk and electricity into folk-rock, then to singing original compositions and outstanding songs by temporarily obscure young singer-songwriters. He formed his own record label way before it was fashionable, has been steadily touring for much of the last 40+ years, and, as in his repertoire, mixed well-known and fledgling songwriters in a traveling “Club 47” concert series for more than two decades. And we owe it all to testosterone: “I was inspired to start performing by the desire to meet girls,” says Tom.

Born in Portsmouth, NH, in 1941, Rush was forced to take piano lessons as a child and hated them. But his cousin, the wonderfully named Beau Beals, taught him how to play ukulele, and that’s when he “decided that music could be fun. . . . The ukulele morphed into a guitar during the high school years because it seemed more likely to impress girls.” Tom not only had a rock ‘n’ roll band, The Chasers, in school, but was also volunteered by his mother to lead a band of inmates at the local mental institution. “Everyone wore street clothes – the doctors, the patients, me – so you didn’t know who was whom,” Rush recalls.

Originally a fan of late-Fifties rockers Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Tom heard a recording by the great folk-blues singer Josh White on a family trip through Wyoming, a transformative experience. “I knew I had to become just like him. Then came the Kingston Trio, but I didn’t like the shirts; then Odetta . . . Basically I picked up a little from just about everyone I listened to. Eric von Schmidt was a major influence once I got to Cambridge,” where Tom had enrolled, and eventually graduated, as an English Lit major.

Rush became an integral part of the Boston/Cambridge folk scene of the very early Sixties, recording his first album, Live at the Unicorn, in 1962 on a tiny label that almost immediately folded. He played the coffeehouse circuit in the Boston area, becoming a regular at the seminal Club 47, and recorded two albums of folk-blues standards for the Prestige label in 1963. After commuting to New York’s Greenwich Village to perform, Rush moved there around 1966, after the release of his self-titled 1965 album for Elektra. In 1966, Elektra issued Tom’s Take a Little Walk with Me, with its influential mixture of mostly traditional folk-blues songs on one-side and an electric band featuring Dylan sidemen Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne and Harvey Brooks that rocked up songs like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” and Tom’s first recorded original, “On the Road Again.”

Tom’s next album for Elektra was a turning point for him and for the entire contemporary music scene. The Circle Game (1968) showcased the first recorded versions of three songs by then-unknown Joni Mitchell, two songs each by the equally unsung rookies Jackson Browne and James Taylor, and what remains Rush’s signature song to this day, the grave, brave, regret-filled “No Regrets.”

Moving from Elektra to Columbia, Rush continued his pattern of recording distinctive vocals and personalized, definitive arrangements of original and “discovered” songs, expanding his pallet into country-rock in some instances. In 1970, Tom and his backing band joined the rock ’n’ roll circus known as the Festival Express, a brief tour-by-train through Canada in which concerts were almost an afterthought to the hard partying aboard, whose participants included the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends and future Appleseed label mate Eric Andersen, among others.

By 1974, after the release of his Ladies Love Outlaws album, Rush decided to drop out of the touring/recording cycle for a while – after catching his breath, he soon resumed touring, but his only recordings for the next ten years were a pair of live albums recorded at Boston’s Symphony Hall on his own Night Light Recordings (while Columbia and Elektra issued various “best-of” collections). These concerts, first staged in 1981, were so successful that they became annual holiday events – “the Club 47 series” – in which Rush invited old and new musical friends to join him on stage, mixing established stars such as Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez and Richie Havens helping to introduce newcomers Nanci Griffith, Alison Krauss, Shawn Colvin, and Mark O’Connor, among others, to wider audiences. Some of the concerts were broadcast by NPR and PBS. Rush took the show on the road, selling out Carnegie Hall, Washington’s Smithsonian Institute and Kennedy Center, and many other prestigious venues. Tom still tours the country regularly with his own solo shows, and a live clip of him on YouTube performing the hilarious “Remember Song” has drawn more than 3.5 million plays, so he’s reaching a wider audience than ever.

Relocating to New Hampshire in 2008 after stints in California and Wyoming, recording What I Know, his first studio album in 35 years, keeping the musical torch burning with his generous folk spirit, what Tom Rush knows is how to write, choose and sing a song, how to make an audience believe every word he sings, and how to make everywhere feel like home.

For more information, please contact Alan Edwards at Appleseed Recordings:

(Email) HYPERLINK "mailto:Joevinyl@" Joevinyl@ • (phone/fax) 215-628-4562 •

CD Release Date: February 24, 2009

Contact: Alan Edwards • Joevinyl@ • 215-628-4562 (phone/fax) •

Appleseed Recordings • P.O. Box 2593 • West Chester, PA 19380 • 610-701-5755 •

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