Brendan McCloud

Brendan McCloud is originally from Council Bluffs, Iowa but has lived in the Puget Sound area for many years. He has performed in coffee houses, nightclubs, college concerts and many other venues.

He is an original songwriter and recording artist who exclusively records his own original compositions, plays a number of instruments in a variety of styles but mostly in the country rock, alt country, alt rock, Celtic, folk and sometimes Appalachian styles. He has released his latest album alt-country “American Mythology” in a high quality digital download mp3 format. Both lyrics and song/music previews are available on this site. The CD is on the way!

Brendan McCloud from "The Making of American Mythology."

I found that with the new album I was writing songs that were more basic and that had their roots in American rock, country, folk and blues. I have always had a mixture of influences, all the way from folk to pop rock, from the Beatles to Johnny Cash and every stop in between. “Alt Country” is often a term used to describe bands and performers that don't fit into the easy categories but have a sense of authenticity and edge that spans the gap between rock ,country and and other genres.

The very first song I wrote for this album was “Wings of Darkness” a song that all but wrote itself. In this song a possibly dark character on an endless journey down the two lane, black top highways of America, who may also may be dispensing some form of justice (or is it just balance?) considers loneliness after finding a woman, who may be the queen of darkness (or is it the queen of hearts?) and asks her to accompany him on his journey.

This song was influenced by Alfred Bester’s “The Pi Man”, Damon Knight’s “What Rough Beast” and the imagery from Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” as well as the comic book/ movie anti-heroes from The Crow, The Punisher, The Renegade and even “Ghost Rider”.

In looking at the other songs I had “Blues for Prometheus” a kind of blues rocker song albeit with a classical mythological theme and “Fields of Eden” as pure a folk song as you could find about living on the land, love, purity and innocence. As I continued to write I came up with “Days of Fire,” a love ballad and reflection of growing older, “Approaching Normal” that had a sixties pop rock edge but was about the kind of love that most of us experience, hard love.

“Immortal” was an 80’s influenced rocker about, well, immortality… I also resurrected a song called "Dancing with Armageddon" from the 90’s with a Celtic rock synth violin about the two wars in Iraq which sadly was even more relevant than the second time around.

Then came the Native American influenced instrumentals that also came about from living so close to nature in Greenbank, Washington on Whidbey Island.

I was creating another mélange of an album but this time it was purely American. I had delved deep into country and rock as well as the other music that had touched my soul.

Like “On the Edge of Time,” my first CD, I also found that I was drinking deep of classical mythology but also “American Mythology.” I found that my album title which started out as “Myths and Legends” then “Electric Mythology” and finally, yes, “American Mythology.” The album title was so good I had to write a song of that name and did so as one of the last efforts for the album. Finally I added one last song, a down home slide blues tune called 'Shirt Tale Cousins." It's about my own family roots and the roots of many Americans.