Brian McDermott
Berwyn, Illinois, United States
Music
Press
While making Deep I passed out about a dozen early demo copies. From these I was fortunate enough to get two songs played on a big Chicago radio station and an invitation to play on a small stage at the biggest music fest around.
This is Richard Milne of WXRT radio in Chicago introducing the song ‘The Things I Wouldn’t Do For You’:
“This tune flows by at a pretty quick pace so I want you to gear up for it. The first time I heard it was only yesterday morning. I let out a genuine guffaw when I heard the lyrics about fifty bucks and a pickup truck and getting out of jail. It all sucked me right into the music of songwriter Brian McDermott. He’s got a good voice, interesting arrangements and musicianship. Like I said I just got a copy of this and I’m looking forward to hearing more of this disc called Deep.”
This is an email from J Wolf who plays in the band Poor J and books the Refugee Stage at Milwaukee’s Summerfest:
“Man, have I had a time trying to find you! Last year at Summerfest you gave one of my stagehands a copy of your cd with your email on it. Well, regardless your cd became one of my “heavy-ratation-listening” discs that helped me get through an East coast road trip last July. I put your music on my computer and ipod and I passed along the cd to someone else…which means I lost your contact info.
Either way, now that I’ve tracked you down, I’d like to offer an invitation for you to come out and play this year’s Refugee Stage with us. I’m making the schedule this week so the sooner you can get back to me, the better so I can get you a slot or two.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Cheers,
–J Wolf
- WXRT
Discography
I have released one LP called Deep. Two of the songs have gotten air play on WXRT radio in Chicago
Photos
Bio
I make my living as a carpenter and have spent the last 20 years playing drums with various bands on the fringes of the Chicago music scene. It was about seven years ago when I bought my then wife a guitar for her birthday or Christmas or something. Anyway she never really played it but I started playing it every chance I got; I think I knew when I bought it that it was really for me and it was going to change my life.
The guitar made sense to me and I continued teaching myself to play. It wasn’t long before I started playing and singing songs that I liked and then writing my own. I really felt that my whole life had been leading up to this. In fact the first song that I wrote -The Things I Wouldn’t Do For You- had been swimming around in my head for years before I ever picked up a guitar.
I’ve never been accused of being prolific but I wrote steadily through my divorce and recovery from it and at some point I realized that I had written some really good songs.
Tapping into the studio engineering classes I took in college, I started building up a home studio and recording some of these songs. At this time I also started playing in front of people, which was very hard to do at first but I kept at it until I started feeling comfortable.
Initially I played everything myself but later on I invited in a guitarist named David Nekola, that I knew from an old band, to handle some of the more difficult guitar parts. David really added a new dimension to the songs on which he played. We recently added Mitch Straffer on bass.
My cd called Deep is out now and I am working on backing it up with some live gigs here in Chicago.
Links
