Tom Brosseau
Gig Seeker Pro

Tom Brosseau

Los Angeles, California, United States | INDIE

Los Angeles, California, United States | INDIE
Band Folk World

Calendar

This band has not uploaded any videos
This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

Press


"TOM BROSSEAU + MIKE STINSON @ MCCABE'S GUITAR SHOP"

On the dark stage behind McCabe’s guitar shop: Tom Brosseau’s shirt collar was yanked down on one side by his guitar strap. He wore khaki pants and a bolo tie pulled over his green button-up shirt and he looked like he snuck into a cowboy bar after school. He has an innocence about him—blond short hair, a complexion clear as baby’s bum and a shy smile, even when he opens his mouth and raincloud verses float out. Opener Mike Stinson is instead somebody’s cool uncle, gently pushing wisdom to you over a beer… while wearing a full dark blue cowboy suit made from material that’s silky but hard as polyester (I don’t know fabrics.).

Between them, the two covered change, sorrow, love, being, moonlight (Brosseau: “The night was a chalkboard with a fingernail moon…”), and women’s bodies. Basically, the singer-songwriter’s why and wherefore. (That too-thick term: 5 syllables, includes hyphen.) .... the singer had better be sincere and wise in whatever clothes he wears. —As Brosseau and Uncle Mike proved at McCabe’s.

Brosseau has a song called “Here Comes The Water Now” that’s about change, in a general sense. With a precious lisp, he warns of the oncoming river, suggests taking stock of what ‘baggage’ to pack on your boat, then removing your clothes before sinking in the flood… perhaps emerging from the water in your new form. There’s as much to unload in the song as in a great poem. A sentence description can’t do much justice, but the point of interest is there for the taking. And it’s nice to go somewhere like this in your thoughts through the hands of an entertainer.

Also of note—Brosseau can throw down a sexy lyric without blushing too much: “That sweater that you’re wearing is starting to peel / I could scrape it all off if you’d just sit still” (from “You Don’t Know My Friends”). Pretty hot.

—Daiana Feuer - LA Record


"Pop CD of the Week"

Pop CD of the week
by Mark Edwards

TOM BROSSEAU
Cavalier
Fat Cat FATCD62

If you reckon Devendra Banhart’s got something, but you sometimes think he might have too much of it for your liking, then Tom Brosseau might well be worth checking out. His angelic voice may suggest a certain tweeness, but his songs are far more rooted in reality than Banhart’s. On Cavalier, the frequent PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish provides the musical backdrop, which is restrained to the point of disappearing altogether on occasion. Yet the well-chosen slivers of guitar on Committed to Memory and the plinky-plonky piano on I Want to Make This Moment Last fit the mood perfectly, and are really all that is required to frame Brosseau’s singing. On My Peggy Dear, Brosseau starts to sound oddly like a young Loudon Wainwright III, but the rest of this rather engaging album is firmly in nu-folk territory. - The London Sunday Times


"The One Take New York team took Tom Brosseau in the hip Manhattan"

The One Take New York team took Tom Brosseau in the hip Manhattan.
One of the things we like best about Tom and his music is how sincerely a throwback he is. He dresses and acts the part of a guy from a small town and a bygone age but he’s not winking at it or us. He means it.

That’s why we loved the idea of plunking him down Joe Buck-like in the middle of mod Manhattan amid all its aggressive cacophony and hipster posing to see how his gentle, very unhip presence would fare. We took him around the corner from Joe’s Pub where he’d be playing the headlining gig later in the evening to two venerable hotspots of New York attitude: Astor Place Hair and St. Mark’s Place. We liked the potential tension between the reverently retro Brosseau and the irreverent and trendy East Village. - Le Blogotheque


"Tom Brosseau Breaks Out"

“It’s like that scene in Network with Peter Finch,” Tom Brosseau says with a grin: “‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” The singer is discussing his approach to making his third album, the optimistically titled Posthumous Success—the things that drove a performer described by Pitchfork as “a last bastion of old-timey Americana” to make a kick-ass, loud-drums-and-distorted-guitar-filled record—and one that also happens to be his best yet. Fans of Brosseau’s earlier work—a group that includes Bono, PJ Harvey and Natalie Portman—needn’t worry, though: There are also moments of spindly, ethereal beauty on the record. But in short, a transformation has occurred. “I feel good,” Brosseau says, “like I’ve got up out of bed, and I’m awake now.”

Read more: Tom Brosseau breaks out - Music - Time Out New York http://newyork.timeout.com/music-nightlife/music/41187/tom-brosseau-breaks-out#ixzz1Eujk28Pu
- Time Out New York


Discography

Discography:

2010: Les Shelleys, FatCat Records, with Angela Correa, recorded by Tom Brosseau in his LA bungalow & produced by Les Shelleys

2009: Posthumous Success, FatCat Records produced by Ethan Rose and Adam Pierce

2008: Tour CD EP, digital release, Fatcat Records

2007: Cavalier, Fatcat Records produced by John Parish

2007: Grand Forks, Loveless Records, produced by Gregory Page and John Doe (X,The Knitters). Duet with John Doe, Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn is featured on 2 tracks.

2006: Empty Houses Are Lonely, Fatcat Records

2006: Tom Brosseau, Loveless Records, re-mastered, re-issue of 1st recording with 5 bonus tracks

2005: What I Mean To Say Is Goodbye, Loveless Records, on the Chicago Tribune's Best Recordings of 2005 list, along with LCD Soundsystem, MIA and Kanye West.

Photos

Bio

Tom Brosseau, an LA-based progressive folk artist and Grand Forks North Dakota native, has a voice that has been called "totally earthbound and at the same time sorta out there in the ether." (NPR's All Things Considered).

Tom Brosseau's most recent full length Posthumous Success, marked a stylistic shift away from the spare, acoustic arrangements of his previous releases. During spring, summer and fall of 2008, Brosseau worked with producers Ethan Rose (Small Sails) and Adam Pierce (Mice Parade, Gregory and the Hawk), and a handful of guest musicians, to flesh and clothe new songs' sturdy skeletons, lending them breath, presence, and limb-stretching immediacy.

Posthumous Success (named after a chapter from a biography of Albert Camus), is a buoyant, well-crafted, and sprawlingly lovely album. The cover photograph is by Autumn de Wilde.

His earlier album Cavalier, the 2007 travelling companion to Grand Forks was produced by John Parish & recorded in one week in Bristol England. Sunday Times (UK) gives Cavalier 4 stars and Pop CD of the Week honors. Cavalier cover art is inspired by the Black Sparrow Press book covers for John Fante, William Bukowski.

Tom was invited by the Los Angeles Times to be a guest contributor to the Times new music blog, Soundboard, to record his SXSW 2008 experiences.

You can see Tom Brosseau, along with many other amazing performers, in the documentary about the famed LA club Largo.

Tom has performed in UK and Europe with PJ Harvey and John Parish and in Japan with Mice Parade. He has taken the stages at the Fatcat Records 18th anniversary show, the Brighton Festival, End of the Road, and Bestival - all in the UK - as well as 2 Claques in Lausanne Switzerland, the Crossing Border festival in Den Haag NL. He tours US as a headliner and with Müm, Nickel Creek, Mice Parade and Amiina.