Roland Baxter is an interesting dude. His dad played for Dylan and REM (among many others). He grew up in Nashville. And he’s a guitar-playing songwriter. From all that you have him immediately pigeonholed as another Nashville country singer, boring as the rest. But then in an interview he says that unfortunately Nashville has been churning out “shit music” for decades, and at the moment the younger people in Nashville are rebelling and forming indierock groups. He says country music is very limiting.
He was broke in small town Colorado
He also came to music only in his twenties, after being an athlete (Lacrosse, of all things). He was broke in small town Colorado and started busking. Out of work and looking for a job, his musician dad took him as a guitar tech on tour through Europe, where he fell in love with various French women (see his first single ‘Olivia’) before ending up in Israel, staying with an old friend of his dad’s, and funnily enough, despite his musician father and his childhood in Nashville, it was in Israel that he received his musical education, staying up late in a barn near the Mediteranean and listening to Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen and the like. Which is why his second album is called Ashkelon, after the Israeli town where he became himself.
So now, with his second album under his belt, this interesting, funny and down-to-earth man is playing live in Monarch on the 3rd.
We have two tickets to give away – write to win at indieberlin.de
