Rolling Stone magazine describes Butch Hancock as "a raspy-voiced West Texas mystic with an equal affinity for romantic border balladry and Zen paradox." A world traveling troubadour with a long string of recorded songs and albums, Butch has been called "one of the finest songwriters of our time" and is acknowledged by his peers and critics alike as one of the premiere singer-songwriters Texas has ever produced. His tunes evoke mystical visions of wind-swept dry-plains and his lyrics are profoundly imaginative, often displaying for his listeners the miracles that occur in the ordinary through creative irony and metaphors. His lyrical style has often been compared to that of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and his record Own and Own, released in '91, contains his "If I Were a Bluebird" a song later covered by Emmylou Harris.
Hancock is also one third of the renowned alt country super-group, The Flatlanders, along with his lifelong friends, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a band they formed in 1972.
During his acclaimed career, Hancock has written and recorded several landmark albums, some of them sparse and simple, others as big as the West Texas sky. After moving to the progressive country hotbed of Austin in the mid 70s, he started his own label (Rainlight) and released the quintessential West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes in 1978. In the years that followed he continued to release albums steeped with meaning and memory, a foundation that cemented his world-wide reputation as a master wordsmith. In 1990, Hancock and more than two dozen musician friends staged a Guinness Book of World Records worthy event entitled No Two Alike and played six straight nights of live performances in Austin's famed Cactus Café, recording 140 of his original songs without repeating a single song. He released the staggering output later in the year as the No Two Alike Tape of the Month club. In 2010, Butch reprised the event, this time entitling it No Two More Alike. Fans from as far as Tokyo represented a measure of the devotion Hancock’s singular compositions inspire.
Butch will be performing on Thursday, May 19th at The Coffee Gallery in Altadena.
www.butchhancock.net
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