Album Notes

Born in Chicago in 1944, Lou grew up listening to Arthur Godfrey’s morning variety show on the kitchen radio. In the days of the Maguire sisters and Julius La Rosa, before Tony Bennett had his first hit, Lou started to sing along with the radio. He’s been singing ever since.
In the 60’s he roamed the clubs in Chicago’s Old Town, hearing the Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds just getting off the ground, and he soaked up their styles, their approach. Bob Dylan, Bob Gibson, Tim Hardin, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Joan Baez and Gordon Lightfoot all inspired his singing style, intimate and dramatic, soulful and penetrating.
Later, the songs of Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Michael Martin Murphey were added to his repertoire, as were those of lesser-known artists: Dean DeWolfe, Terry Callier (with whom he played for two years), Ed Holstein, and Jim Post. The thread running through al these songs was that they touched him in that place that is our common experience of what it is to be human, living in a tumultuous and confusing, sometimes depressing and often exhilarating world. He made these songs his own, singing from his understanding, touching those who heard him.
His life has been a patchwork quilt of cities, jobs, relationships, always following the music and keeping body and soul together whatever way he could. Truck driver, cabbie, IRS clerk, steel worker, head-shop owner, auto mechanic, computer tech, adding machine repairman and laborer filled a wealth of experience from which he fashioned the sound that we hear today, unique, moving, knowing. Certainly he sounds like no one but himself, and himself is all he cares to be.