Album Notes

John Hasbrouck's highly personal style of fingerstyle and bottleneck guitar playing - played on a variety of 6- and 12-string instruments - takes its inspiration from traditional, roots and contemporary American and world music. His engaging performances incorporate everything from moody bottleneck instrumentals to up-tempo ragtime vocal tunes and film music arranged for solo guitar.

His debut CD, ICE CREAM - selected as one of the "TOP CDs OF 2002" by ACOUSTIC GUITAR magazine (January, 2003) - highlights his versatility on fingerstyle and bottleneck guitar and his unique vocal style. "(On) the vocal tracks, (Hasbrouck) projects a post-modern whimsy, sounding at times like a cross between Kelly Joe Phelps and Lou Reed."* An entirely solo effort, ICE CREAM includes eight originals and a eclectic selection of covers ranging from tunes written by old friends (The Assassination of Cousin Brooks; I've Been Drinkin' All Night Long); movie soundtrack music (As Time Goes By; In Heaven Everything is Fine from David Lynch's film Eraserhead); classic country (the 19th-century murder ballad John Hardy and Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, both played on 12-string bottleneck guitar); jazz standards (Cry Me a River; Lady Be Good); and "a wonderfully loopy take on House of the Risin' Sun."* Hasbrouck achieves a wide variety of musical textures on ICE CREAM, using nine different guitars on the twenty tracks. Among these instruments are a vintage 12-string resonator guitar, a wonderful old Martin, and a handmade, micro-miniature travel guitar.

Having played everything from country to punk to reggae and ska in his early days, Hasbrouck paid his dues logging over 100,000 miles of roadwork by 1985, by which time he had completely immersed himself in the art of fingerstyle guitar. Over the next decade he met and studied with numerous master players, and by the mid 1990s, Hasbrouck was an established artist performing regularly in and around Chicago. ICE CREAM is the product of these many years of performance and study. He currently performs throughout the midwest and teaches fingerstyle guitar privately and at The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.

*ACOUSTIC GUITAR, August 2002