Damien Jurado

Damien Jurado is a prolific singer-songwriter who has been releasing albums roughly at the rate of one a year since 1997. His songs often approach storytelling from a dark angle, and they generally come in two stylistically distinct threads: most of them are folk oriented songs played on an acoustic guitar, and the others are his forays into the electric world that started out with alt-rock and gradually moved towards folk rock over the years. He moves between these forms with the level of ease one sees with artists like Neil Young. The comparison makes sense not necessarily in terms of his sound but in the consistent quality of his work, although the high pitch nasal drawl that pops up in his voice every so often may beg to differ. Overall, he is a remarkable songwriter with an impressive body of work who perhaps should have become a household name long ago but never quite got there for whatever reason.