CMA Writers Series at Joe’s Pub

Kevin Trudo is a singer, songwriter, and musician from Aurora, Illinois who hates singers and songwriters. The idea of a passionate and sensitive writer sharing his songs with an acoustic guitar is nowhere in here. Sure, he writes insightful and occasionally heartbreaking songs; those songs have been hummed into a few thousand hearts over the last 15 years and of course he’s a sensitive artist and passionate performer – but ask Kevin and he’ll tell you that it’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to rock, it’s supposed to make you move. The singer/songwriters stopped where they should have started. You take that Great American Song and you give it legs: you make it dance. In his own words:

“I am a songwriter and musician from Aurora, Illinois.

I write loud folk songs.

I sing, play guitar, mandolin and bass.

I love mandolins and guitars, dogs, my mom, knives, all that time after midnight and before dawn, well written songs and better books. I love Aurora. Old buildings. Lenny Bruce, Steve Earle, and Blossom Dearie. I love pickup trucks and Miles Davis, John Steinbeck and Kate Hepburn. I like the way mechanical things work. I like the clavicle and the part on a woman between her ribs and hips. Polenta and calamari. Whisky, ghost stories, yo-yos, handmade cigarettes, chess, Flannery O’Connor, and wood. Almost anything made out of wood. I thinks birds are great and wish my dogs didn’t hate birds so much. I never want to keep a bird, though; the great thing about them is that they make shitty pets. It seems as though I have to add kitty cats, too. they’re better than I thought they were.

More than anything I love Jenny and Maddie and Huckleberry.

I’ve been playing since I was a kid. I think I maybe started at 8 on a piano and I know my 7th grade year I talked my mother into a guitar of my own. I’d been making her crazy playing hers. She played guitar, but more to the point she played music in the house I grew up in. Leonard Cohen, Cream, and Peter, Paul and Mary. I grew up on that.

At some point in high school I started to make songs up. I couldn’t really consider it writing, but throwing things together and recording them on a dual tape deck…recording one part and then playing it back while the other tape deck recorded the next track. The first tracks would fade to almost nothing and the machine sounds of the heads spinning would take over the mix. I became very lean in my arrangements, one or two tracks…I gave the tapes to girls in an effort to trade them a song for their hearts, or their bodies. It didn’t work out very often.

I studied vocal performance at St. Mary’s University of MN. I wanted to be a fireman, English teacher and librarian in addition to musician at some point in my life. I never became any of these things. I left college to play with a bunch of friends in a band named Five Year Jacket. We toured and made 4 albums. We got sort of close to the big ‘Deal’ and played every shit-hole from LA to NYC.

It was fun…until it wasn’t anymore.

I’d always written for a band and I’d always been in a band. The democratic process ruled and I was like the girl who got married in high school and I just didn’t know how to be alone. So I worked for a few years as a sideman playing bass or mandolin. I figured out what I like out of a band leader and what I hate. I started a band, was a good leader for a little while and then life got me distracted. Got married. I started a family. All that. Now. I’ve decided it’s time to do the thing I haven’t done for almost ten years: make an album. I put myself in the middle, then got everyone from all of the groups I play in to show up and asked some folks I don’t play with regularly to sit in. That is Water Bears Vol I. There will be three in the set and the first one will be out this summer. It’s got ten years of writing and playing in it.”