Jonny Burke
Jonny Burke Jonny Burke does not want you to think he’s an eternal optimist… but don’t let him fool you. “I think everyone goes through times in their life where it seems like the world is pushing you down, and the only way to continue is to find the best way to push back.” And pushing back is definitely what you will hear in songs like “Lost in the Forest”. Despite the dark title, it is an extremely hopeful, melodic and dare I say happy song? “I wrote that tune during one of the toughest times in my life, and to be able to get up and face the day I had to write something to cheer on others who are struggling with some aspect of their lives, whatever it may be.” I’m looking at someone whos’s seen only twenty-three years on this planet, but Jonny’s songs might make you think otherwise. Jonny was born and raised in New Braunfels, Texas which has a long history of friendliness towards those of the singer-songwriter bend. But his first musical recollections are of hogging the microphone in family sing-a-longs to Chuck Berry records. “Naturally “Johnny B. Goode” was my favorite. My parents have a recording stashed away somewhere of me belting that song out when I was two years old… it’s still one of my favorites!” Around the age of fifteen, he discovered Townes Van Zandt and was forever changed. “Townes’ work has so much depth and soul, it set new boundaries for what a song could be in my mind. I’d already started playing guitar as a little boy from chords my dad had taught me, but up until that point I’d just been learning all my favorite old rock and roll tunes. I wasn’t in the starting line-up on the football team, so I figured that was a better approach to get girls to like me,” Jonny laughs. “But when I discovered Townes Van Zandt, I really started writing my own stuff and setting a high standard for anything that I did musically.” Discovering a musical companion in childhood friend Sean Faires led to the formation of the Dedringers, a musical partnership that would last nearly seven years. “Sean and I started playing as an acoustic duo in local bars in New Braunfels when we were sixteen. I’m talking real drunk bars… at sixteen… and that didn’t seem weird to us at all at the time!” he laughs. “We’d come into class our senior year of high school still reeking of booze from a show the night before, and we’d have two-hundred bucks in tip money. We thought it was the greatest thing in the world like, “well we found what we’re gonna do the rest of our lives!” After high school, the Dedringers began to take their new venture more seriously, adding a rythym section and forming a musical vision of what they wanted to sound like while working odd jobs and sleeping on couches. “That was a great time musically for me,” he explains. “Sean and I just completely immersed ourselves in it. A lot of people talked later on about how much we sounded like early Stones’ stuff. At that time we would sit around and play those records over and over and over. It would’ve been impossible to sound like anything different, not that we would have wanted to!” The Dedringers slowly became somewhat of a word-of-mouth sensation, playing around Austin’s thriving local music scene and recording “Sweetheart of the Neighborhood” in 2007 with producer R.S. Field. After releasing it the following year, they received widespread critical acclaim and spent all of 2008 on the road opening national tours for James McMurtry and Hayes Carll. At the end of 2008, they decided to separate. “I see the Dedringers as somewhat of a learning experience for both me and Sean. We decided to put an “indefinite hiatus” on the Dedringers as a band. That just means we want to go in different directions. When word got around that we split up, everybody who was calling me about it figured we had probably gotten in a knife fight or something. The truth is I love Sean like a brother and we are on better terms now that we can continue on with our vision of what we want our music to sound like. It’s not so much a failure of what we worked on as much as a new beginning of what’s to come.” Jonny looks up from his coffee and cig and smiles ,”I’ve been happier in this New Year than in longer than I can remember. I’ve always tried to write every morning that I’m home, just to see if anything will come out, and lately I’ve been writing more than ever.” Many of these new songs have melodies and choruses that are infectious and melodic, but also reveal much depth in character and subject matter. On songs like “Holed up in El Paso”, a wandering drug addict wonders whether he’ll find redemption in the woman he loves or the woman on the side of the road, in a bag of cocaine or a Bible in a motel. “In it for the Long Haul”, co-written with Son Volt guitarist Chris Masterson, is actually a catchy pop tune that is clearly a nod to Tom Petty’s “Full Moon Fever”. And in “Lost in the Forest”, a song which Jonny describes as “a tribute to all humans afflicted with the human condition”, he gives a rousing call for endurance in one’s daily life. Make no bones about it, he really does ”hope you find your way, lost in the forest”, he “hope(s) you catch a break, instead of breaking”. And it’s in these subtle hints into his world that one sees clearly, Jonny Burke really is an optimist…so don’t let him fool you into thinking he’s not.