Bart Budwig & Maita
Bart Budwig grew up on the Idaho Palouse, with a pawn shop trumpet and a heart as big as a skyscraper – if skyscrapers knew how to be humble. Bart learned melody from classic jazz charts, and learned that fault-lines in big hearts create drifting continents, cut new oceans and forge new mountains. Everyone close to him disappeared, whether to death or Texas, and from Texas he got a letter from Waylon Jennings entreating him to pick up a guitar and a pen.
Bart Budwig doesn’t write the big songs. He writes the songs about the places between the hills, in the draws and hidden canyons where truth is a little more in focus, stories can take their time gettin’ told, heartbreak is a place of deep reflection, and melodies don’t have to wear rhinestone suits or drive new, shiny, cars to be beautiful. Bart’s also not afraid of working out of the spotlight- he engineered not only his own full-length Whiskey Girl (2012), but also albums and tours with Radiation City, Holiday Friends, Girlfriends, Misé, John Craigie, Edmund Wayne, and Mama Doll. He also made the rare (for songwriters these days) move of covering both a Waylon tune and a friend’s (An American Forrest) tune on Whiskey Girl. His second full-length, The Moon & Other Things, is due out in late 2015. In the meantime he’s busy regularly updating Jalapeno Business, a covers and duets record available for free on Soundcloud, featuring Joseph, Craigie, Forrest, Luke Ydtsie (of Blind Pilot), Janis Carper, and a whole slew of other northwest musicians. Bart will be touring the Northwest from his home of Enterprise, Oregon, when not locked away in the studio producing his friends’ records.