An acoustic guitar doesn't necessarily make one a folk singer -- or at least that's what Blake Thomas tried to tell us.
"The funny thing is, I never really listened to straight folk music -- like the Joan Baez school never really appealed to me," he said in a phone interview from his adopted hometown of Madison earlier this week. "It's always kind of funny talking about writing folk music because I always listened to more blues and country-blues and country. But you put an acoustic guitar in somebody's hands and [apparently] it's folk music."
It's been something this Chaska-raised songwriter has struggled with for some time. Although he's joked that at one point in his life he wanted to be the next Bob Dylan, he only stumbled upon Duluth's most famous native son because of a chance printing error.
"I picked up the guitar when I was about 15," explained Thomas, who played the saxophone for much of his educational career. "At the time, I was listening to electric blues stuff, like Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield and whatnot. I went into the record store to find more Mike Bloomfield albums, and I found this one in this big book that was 'Highway 61 Revisited' -- which, of course, turned out to be the Bob Dylan album that he played on.
"I brought that home having no idea what I was getting into. I thought it was going to be a blues record when I put it on. But that's when I decided I wanted to be a songwriter."
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Life course forever changed, Thomas headed east.
"I spent the next four or five years just kind of moving about the country, expecting that [Laughs] a record label would just come and hand me large wads of money," he joked.
After stints in Chicago and Boston -- and, for that matter, a summer in Duluth working as a housekeeper at the Buena Vista Motel -- the blues-rock aficionado settled on Wisconsin's capital city.
"A lot of people I'd met over the years who had been great players happened to be living here," Thomas said. "The great thing about Madison is that it's still kind of a small town -- which is also part of the downside. But for me, having lived in Chicago and Boston ... I love playing the cities, but I really don't love living in a city that big.
"I think that's why a lot of folks tend to gravitate here."
One such similarly minded citizen is Josh Harty, a North Dakota-raised musician with whom he often tours and performs.
"At this point, we don't play downtown a whole lot anymore, as far as around the campus area," Thomas responded when asked what the scene in Madison, a notorious party town, is like for the singer/songwriter set. "In the last few years, it's really changed; there just aren't venues downtown to play.
"We've found with some of the areas that are just a mile or two outside of that downtown area, there are some -- I don't know what you'd call them -- artsy neighborhoods that are cropping up with bars and coffee shops, things that do support what we do."
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Going back to Madison or Mad Town's feel-good-all-the-time demeanor, he and Harty have found one way to work the system: by playing in a cover band.
"It's a good way to make some money without, you know, working at a gas station," Thomas joked.
As the Classic Tawnies, they perform everything from Merle Haggard tunes to more mainstream stuff, by artists such as Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. While it's a far cry from his traditional, lone-troubadour fare, Thomas has been known to let loose on occasion. One prime example is his decidedly soaked-in-gin gem "I Don't Want Your Heart, I Want Your Liver."
"I usually get a pretty good reaction to that one," Thomas said with a laugh.
On the flipside, another staple of his solo sets, "Seahorses," is about as romantic as they come.
"It's funny; I get asked to play that at weddings quite a bit -- which is great, but to me that tune is about ... it actually came from a short story by Oscar Wilde where he was talking about the idea of Shakespeare's muse," he explained. "... It's more about these people who aren't necessarily part of your life anymore but are still there because you're playing songs about them.
"... I've always had trouble writing straight fiction."
NEWS TO USE
Blake Thomas will perform with fellow Madison songwriters Josh Harty and John Statz at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, at Beaner's Central. Cost is $5. Listen to song samples at
www.blakethomasonline.com
.
