Album Notes

Buddy Nutt is a singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist who sings songs about picnics, suicide, super markets, dead girlfriends, ping pong, sledding, and so on. Relying heavily on ukulele, kazoos, duck call, and slide whistle, he also occasionally whips out the musical saw, cornet, spoons, didgeridoo, tambourine, and bass drum.


CD Review from Pittsburgh City Paper Nov. 8 2007
"One-Man-Band Buddy Nutt weilds his musical saw"
by Manny Theiner
Buddy Nutt and His Musical Saw
RUSTY BLADE

Pittsburgh hasn't seen many one-man bands in recent years, but it has seen a surge of interest in various forms of "pre-rock" -- artists incorporating bluegrass, ragtime, old-time, cabaret, protest folk and other popular styles that preceded Little Richard. Our latest entry, Buddy Nutt, isn't based solely on the weird-cabaret Brechtian model of Ditty Bops or Dresden Dolls. Nor is he a whiz bluegrass picker or a barbershop-styled balladeer of ukes and banjos, such as local singer Elliott Sussman.

Instead, he's all of these things, plus an excellent musical saw player and an ardent experimentalist. He's got a streak of drones in him, as evidenced by the use of didgeridoo, a loop pedal and the ethereal instrumental track "The Necklace." True to the anarcho-leftist folk-punk scene, he can write a mean critique of global capitalism on songs such as the "Big Box Song," which references the ticky-tacky 1962 Pete Seeger tune but with an update for today's version of suburbanite conformism.

Despite Buddy's quirky instruments -- duck calls, musical glasses and kazoos to occasional sousaphone and trumpet -- the most appealing songs on this debut CD are those with evocative and humorous lyrics. First on that list is "Wilmerding," a love ditty about the joys of living in a SWPA small town, followed by the epic "Saw Playin' Band," a plausible myth about a saw orchestra that met an untimely end.

Though he's obviously still working out his persona (a combo of Tiny Tim and Carrot Top with a bit of Tom Waits and Tom Lehrer), Buddy Nutt's expanding bag of musical tricks is going to entertain anyone with an informed sense of whimsy and the nostalgia for a simpler life, away from cell phones and the Internet. He's the kind of performer whom public radio was intended for -- is anybody listening?