A Few Words from Steve Messer

​

Before it became my band’s name, ‘Strange Country’ was the name of my second album. I’d been mulling over interesting things about family and friends, people and places, high hopes and broken dreams. 

 

So I wrote songs about being kind to strangers, filling a car with flair and verve, nuclear tests, feeding lions, playing cricket, sacrificial living and dying, and, the ends of things.

 

Since discovering the music of writers like Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, Charlie Daniels, Joe Ely and others, I’d been drawn to the idea of songs that tell a tale in a few verses, a chorus and maybe a bridge.

 

Songwriting for me is about noticing something interesting, mulling it over till it rhymes and then finding the melody within the words. Once that’s done it becomes a matter of sharing delivery duties with the boys in the band, the songs’ caretakers, hoping that listeners agree that what we’ve noticed is interesting, sometimes even a signpost to eternity.