This is the first new CD of studio recordings in five years by John Stewart, one of the overlooked founders of the "Americana" genre, whose musical career encompasses more than 40 years and 40 albums.
"Havana" features 14 memorable Stewart originals that ponder modern life and materialism ("Davey on the Internet," "Who Stole the Soul of Johnny Dreams"), mortality and existentialism ("Dogs in the Bed," "Starman"), personal and public heroes ("I Want to Be Elvis," "Turn of the Century [Diana]"), love ("Miracle Girl," "Cowboy in the Distance"), and life's cosmic mysteries ("Star in the Black Sky Shining," "Rally Down the Night"). John tackles these issues with unquenched wonder and hard-won experience, a wry cynicism forged by reality but tempered with an optimism based on faith in the individual. The title song expresses John's frustration at his inability to visit the forbidden Cuba. The CD's one borrowed composition is John's version of the standard "Lucky Old Sun," a 1949 hit for Frankie Laine also recorded by Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis and many others.
The CD was produced and mixed by John, who also plays most of the instruments (guitars, banjo, bass, harmonica, keyboards, percussion). His accompanists include wife Buffy Ford Stewart on harmonies and percussion (her backing vocals on "Turn of the Century" make one hunger for the song's chorus) and longtime sideman John Hoke on drums and percussion. Rich, bright layers of ringing guitars, propulsive rhythms, dollops of banjo, lyrics ranging from thoughtful to playful, and John's weathered voice of experience add up to a mature, haunting (but still rocking) high water mark in his lengthy career.
About the Artist:
To the baby-boomers of the Fifties, John Stewart's name is synonymous with the Kingston Trio, whose early Sixties hits "Tom Dooley" and "Greenback Dollar" brought folk music out of the coffeehouses and onto campuses, concert halls and radio
playlists. To mid-Sixties teenyboppers, John Stewart was the pen behind the Monkees' #1 hit, "Daydream Believer." To rock fans in the Seventies, John was that friend of Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham who scored a hit single ("Gold") co-produced by Buckingham, and a Top 10 album that featured Buckingham and Stevie Nicks as guest musicians. To country fans in the Eighties, John is the author of Rosanne Cash's version Number One hit, "Runaway Train." Most enduringly, to fans of the singer-songwriter movement that began at the end of the Sixties and has expanded into the Americana and alt.country genres, Stewart is a figure of uncompromising talent and integrity.
Born in Southern California in 1939, Stewart wrote his first song at age 10. After outgrowing his high school rock band, Stewart turned his songwriting and performing skills to folk while he was in college, and two of his compositions were recorded by the Kingston Trio, riding high on their pop-folk hits. At the urging of the Trio's manager, Stewart moved to San Francisco and formed the Cumberland Three, a Trio-styled group that recorded an album for Roulette. When founding member Dave Guard left the Trio in 1961, John was his logical replacement, providing banjo, guitar, on-stage humor and, most importantly, original material. The Trio recorded more than two dozen Stewart compositions during his seven-year tenure with them, including "One More Town," pegged by Paul Simon as the inspiration for his own "Feelin' Groovy." During his final days with the group, he wrote "Daydream Believer," which became a worldwide hit for The Monkees and, years later, for Anne Murray.
With folk music as the soundtrack to activism in the Sixties, John took part in the March for Freedom in Selma, Alabama, and also joined his friend Robert Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. In 1968, Stewart again stumped for Kennedy, this time in the latter's tragically curtailed run for the U.S. presidency. That same year, Stewart left the Trio after a 16-album stint and recorded "Signals Through the Glass" with his wife-to-be, Buffy Ford Stewart. The following year, Stewart went to Nashville to record his first solo album, "California Bloodlines," later chosen as one of the 200 Best Albums of All Time by a Rolling Stone critics' poll. More solo albums and more cover versions of Stewart songs followed; John's songs have been recorded by everyone from Harry Belafonte and Pat Boone to Joan Baez and Nanci Griffith, from the Four Tops and the Lovin' Spoonful to the Violent Femmes and the Beat Farmers.
In 1979, John returned to the charts himself with "Gold," a Top 5 single from his Top 10 album "Bombs Away Dream Babies," co-produced and played on by longtime Stewart fan and Fleetwood Mac leader Buckingham. The album spun off two more Top 20 songs, but the lack of sales for its successor led to a parting of the ways between John and his record label.
Since the start of the Eighties, John has been releasing live and archival tracks on a variety of labels. In 1999 he briefly formed his first group since leaving the Trio, John Stewart & Darwin's Army, for an album of mostly folk-oriented classics on Appleseed,
which continues to issue new Stewart material.
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