J Shogren Shanghai’d

Catawumpus American Music 2014

J Shogren and his long time collaborator multi-instrumentalist Jascha Herdt play hard acoustic music from lives lived in loud proportions. Their style of pulp americana is a modern interpretation of traditional music: an amalgamation of roots, popular, blues, old timey, folk, country/western, jazz, vaudeville, rockabilly, ballads, and polka. Their varied sound has a raw vitality reminiscent of old dancehall music filtered through a contemporary dissonant transmitter.

  Photos by Susan Moldenhauer and Leah Millis, Star-Tribune

“J Shogren bears the same approximate relationship to traditional music that the latter Bob Dylan does, namely as the major point of reference, not quite the thing itself…Like Dylan, Shogren is an intellectual dealing in pop music. He’s funny, but the jokes are wry and subtle, drawn from a wide range of high and low cultural references….Like traditional music itself, Shogren’s songs occupy their own other world.” J Clark (US)  http://www.rambles.net/shogren_bird10.html

“Brilliant storyteller from Wyoming. Hard Boiled, sometimes dark humorous stories delivered with a voice that clearly have lived through them.” Lennart Persson (SWE) Rootsy