Album Notes

Channeling influences as diverse as Woody Guthrie, Kurt Cobain, Hank Williams, and Raymond Carver, Seven Harkey’s “singable short stories” tell tales of longing, love, drugs, death, and other earthly delights. His music has been called “edgy & compelling”, “infectious” and “delightfully disturbing”, with performances compared to Grant Lee Buffalo, early Wilco, and even Gram Parsons backed by Pageant-era R.E.M.

Growing up in rural North Carolina, Seven swished with country music, gargled with pop, and spit southern rock. On the cusp of the Alt-Country surge of the early nineties, Seven greyhounded to San Francisco, where he explored “garage country” with Farmgirl, and “powerfolk” with the Lomaxes. But after seven years in a seven-by-seven-mile town, his hunger for a change of atmosphere drove him east to Chicago. After a series of musical incarnations, he got back to his country-tinged roots with the Dogwoods, a poppy group of porchrockers that take his unique brand of guitar-playing and word-singing to new levels of strum and bash.

Seven was hand-picked by legendary writer Ben Fong-Torres to perform on his Fog City Radio NPR show. In the studio, Seven has lent his talents to recordings by John Wesley Harding and E (of Eels). Live, he has played with Jeff Buckley, Peter Himmelman, Leon Russell, Southern Culture on the Skids, Chris Isaak, and more.