By TOM CARR
Special to the Record-Eagle
November 14, 2008 12:00 am TRAVERSE CITY -- Bleu Edmondson is a country rocker whose songwriting models include Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and his voice at times sounds like Mark Knopfler's. "I'm not a big fan of Top 40 country," said Edmondson, who will play a concert at Turtle Creek Casino & Hotel on Thursday, Nov. 20. "I like to write rock songs with country lyrics." The Dallas native brings to his music a country sensibility, but with the wall-of-sound approach common in power ballads and some country rock. Edmondson lives in New Braunfels, Texas, a town between Austin and San Antonio where Cross Canadian Ragweed and some other alt country artists live. You'd think it would be a natural for him to spend most of his time in Austin, the capital of his kind of music, but he rarely ventures in there. "Austin gets so crazy up there," he said. "And I'm on the road 20 days of the month, so when I'm home, I like the slow pace of the town I'm in. We very rarely play in Austin, which I guess is kind of strange." Edmondson, 30, started writing songs as a college student before he picked up a roommate's guitar and began learning how to play. He went around playing open mikes and getting to know owners of clubs. Edmondson tried four different colleges before he dropped out to join a band. "I wasn't interested at all in school, especially after I got decent on playing guitar and writing songs," he said. He realizes he's lucky in that he's been able to make a living at it. "A lot of people drop out of school to form a band and end up working at McDonald's or something," he said. One of the breaks he got was when he sent a demo tape to Lloyd Maines, a musician and technician who has produced albums for Wayne Hancock, Ray Wylie Hubbard and the Dixie Chicks. Singer Natalie Maines of the Chicks is the producer's daughter. Though Edmondson was an unknown, Lloyd Maines heard his demo and contacted him saying he'd like to work with him. He ended up producing the young artist's first two albums, which he said have a more straight-forward country sound than his recordings since then. Like his sound, his live performances are also more rock than country now. "There's a lot of hard-charging electric guitars," he said. "There's crowd reaction and jumping around and using the entire stage. You're not going to see me standing around a microphone stand for two hours." He tours around the country, though his current tour marks the first time he's venturing to Michigan and Ohio. "I think we're going to come out of these shows with some lifelong friends and some lifelong fans and it's going to be great," he said. "It's always exciting to go to a new place and see if they dig what we do." Edmondson will be at Turtle Creek's Level 3 Lounge on Thursday, Nov. 20. For more information, see turtlecreekcasino.com.
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Bleu Edmondson