Jennifer the Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog is so excited about her featured artist today that she’s not even waiting until she has pictures to tell you all about him.
Michael Runion is an artist I discovered entirely due to Twitter. According to his MySpace, his genre is “Visual/Folk/Pop”. (Tangentially, I really do love MySpace genre descriptions; some of them are generic things like “rock/pop” and some of them are more interesting things like “2-step/experimental/country” and finding out who is accurate with their self-labeling is always a good time.) But getting back to the subject at hand: left to my own devices, I think I’d tell you that Runion specializes in beautiful, delicate melodies wrapped around razor-sharp lyrics. The result is songs that are good company for filing as well as long train rides to the beach. (I’ll let you know how they do with the car stereo test after this summer.) I’m particularly fond of Drunk as I’ve Ever Been and Don’t Let Her Hold You Down, the latter of which would be the perfect tune for dancing a barefoot two-step with a cowboy before sending him back out on the rodeo circuit. If that sounds like something you’d be into, you should check him out.
I don’t have any pictures of him (yet; I’m hoping if he tours this summer he’ll swing through New York), so I’m bringing some videos (that are not mine) to share instead. The first one is him singing The Daylight, with Z Berg of The Like (genreless, for now, but: ’60s glamour/fierce ladies/pop, their songs WILL get stuck in your head). There’s a whole story for this song written in her facial expressions and the set of her shoulders:
Next up: another duet/battle, this time doing Don’t Look Back with Dave Rawlings, who sang with Gillian Welch for many years but has recently reconfigured himself as the Dave Rawlings Machine (genre: alternative/acoustic/industrial)(?!) and struck out on his own:
And here he is by himself (kind of; the people lounging on the beanbag chair in the background are his friends) on public access tv, with Soft Hands:
And then my favorite video, Our Time Will Come, which, fair warning, contains shirtlessness and shaving:
Michael Runion Official Website – WARNING: PLAYS MUSIC!
Michael Runion Twitter
