CACTUSMAN w/BORIS McCUTCHEON
Americana/roots rock with a dirty soul and a poet's tongue: CACTUSMAN is the most resourceful, most authentic Americana band playing and touring today. Led by an off grid farmer with soulful pipes, a quirky sense of humor, literary lyrics, and down to earth charisma, embracing many US music forms.
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Boris McCutcheon’s CACTUSMAN crosses class and genre boundaries and appeals to a wide spectrum of ages, tastes, and political orientations. McCutcheon himself brings a diversity of folks together with his soulful pipes, quirky sense of humor, literary lyrics, down to earth intelligence and universal approach to American music.
Boris is an off-the-grid working class family man. He works the land, lives in rural America, and faces the daily struggles of how to make money to sustain a family, and more importantly, how to live right. These qualities and themes are literally pouring out of his songs.
When you hear a Boris McCutcheon song, there’s something familiar and scruffy about it. CACTUSMAN's work is classic, folk-based Americana music – the kind a band can play with or without electricity, on a front porch somewhere out in the vast American landscape. When you consider his five albums’ worth of work drawing from the life he has led and the high level of artistic quality he has maintained, it is not a stretch to state that McCutcheon is the most resourceful, most authentic Americana artist singing and touring today.
CACTUSMAN's Boris McCutcheon grew up on Massachusetts farmland. He started writing poetry in his early teens and later attended Marlboro College for creative writing. When he was 19, he met Ralph Rinzler, musician, ethnomusicologist, archivist and founder of Folkways Records and Smithsonian Folklife. He took Boris under his wing for a brief period and schooled him in traditional American folk roots music.
At the age of 20 Boris was employed by Rinzler to drive his personal collection of blues cylinders across the country to California. Along the way Boris passed through New Mexico and Arizona for the first time and his love affair for the Southwest began.
Boris attended the University of California, Santa Cruz specializing in sustainable farming all the while gathering materials for his songs. He has had many influences: Captain Beefheart, The Reverend Gary Davis, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Neruda, Steve Earle, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Taj Mahal, Michael Hurley. As he approached the age of thirty, Boris became more interested in perfecting his songwriting than in farming. But Boris is now a seasoned artist AND farmer, living in New Mexico but traveling the country and the world.
“Santa Rosa Plums”, a song about McCutcheon's life in California, has been a licensing success on SAVING GRACE and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and in a snowboard commercial for Tostino's. "Meet Me" has also been featured on Lifetime television.
McCutcheon and his band are stars in Holland, where he is regularly booked into large concert halls and Americana venues; in April, CACTUSMAN will play the ultimate festival devoted to Americana music in the Netherlands -- “Blue Highways”. He has proven himself overseas year after year, where he is the most hardworking sensation for Lucky Dice Music, returning seven times -- more than any other artist on their roster. He has always selected the finest musicians in Boston (Jeff Berlin, Austin Nevins) and New Mexico (Susan Hyde Holmes, Kevin Zoernig, Brett Davis) to bring with him on these prosperous tours.
His first two albums, Mother Ditch (2001) and When We Were Big (2003), were self-released and helped launch his career internationally. His third album Cactusman vs. the Blue Demon (2006) debuted at #1 on the Euro Americana charts. His music can be full of love, like “Gift Horse” (When We Were Big) or whimsical like the recent “Pony Ride” (Bad Road, Good People). It can be full of reverence in “Charles Mingus Bird” (Cactusman vs. the Blue Demon) or sexy and rocking in “Santa Rosa Plums” (When We Were Big). His current album Wheel of Life (2010) debuted on the Euro Americana charts at #1, and at present is still in the top ten.
McCutcheon won the Boston Music Awards for best male vocalist in 2004. Boris was the winner of the Mountain Stage New Song Contest Southwest Regionals in 2008. He has won the New Mexico State Fair’s 2007 Best Singer/Songwriter contest, and was featured in a book by music critic Steve Almond from Random House in 2010 called ROCK AND ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE.
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