Stephen Sebastian

Steve Sebastian isn't going mad. Seriously. Granted, musical comparisons to eccentric influences like Ryan Adams, Tom Petty, and Elliott Smith abound. But Steve Sebastian is a young college graduate from Cleveland, Ohio who drives to work, eats home-cooked meals, walks his dog, attends church, and tries to call his parents every couple of weeks. Still, he's not strictly typical, either. His music might best fit into a cozy but lonesome middle ground between the mundane and the unorthodox, between the old and the new, tradition and rebellion. It's like the blues as seen in a funhouse mirror, or all of rock and roll history thrown into a blender and played in reverse, a twisting kaleidoscope of five decades worth of guitar-based pop music. Riffs and solos give way to twang and shuffle in a tag-team match of alt-country haze and classic rock immediacy, accented all the while by lyrics equally forceful and vulnerable, both visceral and broken. Rightly enough, his voice actually keeps up with the shape-shifting act. He growls like Tom Waits, croons like Ryan Adams, whispers like Thom Yorke, and bellows like The Boss. Equipped as such, he follows the blues around to just about anywhere it's made it's home in the past, from the delta to the honky tonk to the arena and all in between. Yet his vagabond sound is rooted firmly in the bright, not-too-distant future. Call him an observant scholar of the past or a bold poet of years to come, or maybe just a cool guy who might as well be your next door neighbor, but it's worth the trouble to listen to the evidence and decide for yourself. -Chris Leonard
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