Album Notes

Greg Bartlett grew up in a working class neighborhood of Minneapolis, cutting his musical teeth playing Elmore James songs while still in high school. Those early influential nights were often spent playing guitar in his parent's dark basement, along with used albums by Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynrd, and Crosby Stills & Nash. These southern rock & blues years gave way to college experimentation with electronic music in Boston at M.I.T.'s legendary Media Lab.

Greg has been writing original songs since puberty first taught him the motivational power of frustration, and continues to write about his life in America. Since fleeing the Minnesota winters at age 17, Greg moved from Boston to San Diego, to Chicago and then Los Angeles, from there to Philadelphia. Today, he lives alone with his espresso machine in a noisy loft in Seattle's Pioneer Square.

Greg's songs expose the trials of life in gritty urban landscapes, in the tradition of John Updike and Thomas Pynchon, as well as the great songwriters Steve Earle, JJ Cale, and Lucinda Williams. With the raw yet sincere vocal styling of a young Neil Young, Greg's lyrics are part poetry, part graffiti, invoking the same unfocused images of artists like Chris Whitley.

The full-length Living In Mexico CD features Greg on acoustic guitars and vocals, Sheldon Radford (electric guitars), Rebecca Young (bass), and Branden Harper (drums).

Often witty, course as gravel, Greg's beat up road songs bring us all closer to a richer life, spent but never compromised. Dust never sleeps.