Lyrical Acoustic Indie Folk Photo by Dennis Bowlin  Photo by Randy Cain |
 Photo by Chris Hjelmfelt I was born in Reno, NV in those crazy times when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Nam was going on, and we were walking on the moon. I moved to California as soon as I could, and stayed there for 11 years before moving here to South Dakota. I am fascinated with the world - it feels like a really big playground to me, and I am inundated daily by the beauty of it all. I think there's beauty in just about everything, including pain and suffering. I travel a lot, and some of the songs I write are about that, or about the people I meet and what I feel like they said to me with words or otherwise. Some of the songs are about frustration with myself, with the world of human chaos and how insane I think our culture is. Some are about communication and how hard it is to connect across the barrier of the abstraction of language. Some of the songs are just landscapes with all the intricacies of the valleys and peaks and lakes and sky. Some people say I don't write love songs, but I happen to think all of them are about all different kinds of love. I love singing. I can't remember when I didn't sing to myself. I sang while I fished for crawfish in the in-between spaces of rocks at Lake Tahoe when I was a kid. When I got a car, my singing temple changed from the Lake to the inside of my vehicle. I started writing poetry when I was a teenager, and being that I was a total freak as a teenager (who isn't?), I wrote some pretty awful stuff that had few gems of genius in them. But I was encouraged by friends and teachers, and soon after I left home at 18, the poems turned into songs. I couldn't find anyone to form a band with in time to play the songs that were coming from all over the place and blowing through me. So I bought a guitar and began to accompany myself so I could get the songs out. I play a 12-string guitar partially because I don't know how to play anything else. Originally, I picked one up at a garage sale and strummed it and realized that some of the instruments I was hearing in my head with my music were represented a little bit in the extra six strings I had, so I never put it down. The 12-string challenged me to try to bring the things I heard in my head out of myself and into the music, and I got to be fairly good with the instrument. |
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When I am with a band, I don't have to work as hard to make the drum, bass, cello, violin, flute, wind, rain, or ocean noises with just the guitar. When I perform as a solo artist, I become much more frustrated with my inability to include all that I hear. I have never believed that I actually create the songs that come to me. I feel, rather, that they are floating around out there in the Grand Symphony that is life itself, and that I am lucky enough to hear some of them long enough to write them down. For me, being a songwriter is about being emotionally open to feeling whatever is around me such that I become inundated by it all to the extent that I can hear the details of a moment as a song. Most of my best songs were written in 10 minutes or less. The ones I had to work at seem less genuine. I have been playing music for over 20 years, and have had some amazing experiences at shows, with other musicians, and recording in the studio. If you are interested in purchasing the cds I have available for sale, check the Discography page of the Music section on this site and you can order them immediately with Paypal. Please also email me at dray@andreapotts.com and let me know that you made a purchase. Thank you for visiting my site! |