Richard Buckner

All Music Guide:

This husky-voiced country-folk singer/songwriter is very much in the mold of the Lubbock, Texas, school of mavericks, including Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Richard Buckner is actually based in San Francisco, but the Lubbock connection is no accident. His debut album, Bloomed, was recorded in Lubbock, for one thing, with producer Lloyd Maines, who has also worked with Hancock, Allen, Joe Ely, and Uncle Tupelo. Maines himself plays several instruments on the record, and Buckner's band is fleshed out with several other Texas musicians, including Hancock (who adds a harmonica cameo) and accordion player Ponty Bone.

Buckner's principal following, however, is not with the country audience, but the alternative rock one. Like Allen and Hancock, the guitarist's work is based in rootsy country traditions, but his lyrics are far too personal and ambitious for those who think of country music as virtually synonymous with Nashville. So, like those Lubbock musicians, he tends to appeal to open-minded rock fans, or adventurous general music fans, more than country ones. The alternative rock thread has been strengthened by Buckner's leadership of a San Francisco country-rock band, the Doubters (who do not appear on his album), and a support slot on a Son Volt tour in early 1996.

Appearing on a small Texas independent label, his album won good critical notices, and his signing to a major company for 1997's acclaimed Devotion + Doubt seemed to signal that both rock and country listeners would be much more widely exposed to him in the future. Since followed in 1998 and The Hill, an interpretation of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, was issued two years later. Recorded at his home studio in Canada, 2002's Impasse was next, and was his first CD of all-original music in over four years. The next year, Buckner returned with a self-titled release, a divine set of songs that was limited to 2,000 pressings and previously available only as a tour item. Dents and Shells followed in 2004, along with Meadow in 2006, both of which were released on indie rock hotshot Merge Records. Buckner was absent for five years after Meadow; though he tried to record, he was prevented by various circumstances including writing a score for a film that never happened, and being briefly detained and questioned in a murder investigation in a small upstate New York town where he was living. He relocated both home and studio, and began work on a new album, only to have his analog tape machine die. Eventually finding new means to record, he invited pedal steel boss Buddy Cage and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley to record, but the laptop storing all the mixes of his new songs on it was stolen and he was once again deterred. Buckner finally completed work on the nine songs that make up Our Blood, and released the album via Merge in the late summer of 2011.

Wikipedia:

Richard Buckner is an American singer-songwriter born in California. After living in Edmonton, Alberta for a number of years, he currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. A critically acclaimed artist hailed by Bon Iver as a big influence and most often associated with the alternative country movement, Buckner had in recent albums eschewed his initial acoustic approach and displayed an increasing interest in more abstract music styles until reintegrating his acoustic approach on 2011's "Our Blood".

Buckner's career began with Bloomed (1994), a lyrically-dense suite of songs recorded in Lubbock, Texas (produced by Lloyd Maines) and heavily influenced by that state's tradition of whiskey-soaked poet/troubadors, probably best embodied by Townes Van Zandt. (Since 1999, the album has been kept in print (with additional bonus tracks) by Rykodisc offshoot Slow River Records at Buckner's request, the artwork on the back cover was edited to remove his then-girlfriend from the picture.) In January 1996, while living in San Francisco, he recorded an album's worth of acoustic songs, all of which would reappear in more fully realized forms on his second and third albums. This CD was self-produced and self-released, and was sold exclusively at his early shows.

Later that year, he signed with MCA Records, for whom he recorded two albums, both produced by J.D. Foster. Devotion + Doubt was released in 1997, displaying a more adventurous, almost avant-garde approach to songwriting and arranging, and featuring backing from members of the band Giant Sand, as well as Maines and Marc Ribot, among others. Its follow-up, 1998's Since, continues in this style, with an even greater emphasis on detailed production, this time featuring contributions from John McEntire, Dave Schramm, David Grubbs, Syd Straw, and others. Although these albums garnered considerable critical approval for Buckner, they did not perform well enough for his label, and he was released from his contract with MCA (whom he then nicknamed 'Musical Career Assassins') shortly thereafter.

Since then, he has returned to recording for smaller labels, to continued critical acclaim and cult status. His 2000 album The Hill - his first for Chicago-based indie label Overcoat Recordings - features poems from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), which Buckner set to music. The album plays as a single track, nearly thirty-five minutes long. He returned in 2002, first with the "teaser" EP Impasse-ette, then a full-length entitled Impasse one month later. In early 2003, his self-released, self-titled album was reissued by Overcoat, and was his final release for the label. In 2004, an edited version of Richard Buckner's song "Ariel Ramirez", from the album Since (1998) was featured in one of the television ads for Volkswagen's Touareg. The song, in its original form, would be featured prominently in the 2008 horror film, The Strangers.

He is currently aligned with North Carolina-based indie label Merge Records, who have released two of his albums so far: 2004's Dents and Shells and 2006's Meadow. Between the two, he released an album with Jon Langford (most notably of The Mekons) called Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord (2005, originally recorded in Sally Timms's house in 2002) on Buried Treasure Records. Merge Records released Buckner's long awaited new album "Our Blood" on August 2, 2011. The album was licensed in Europe and Oceania to Decor records.