Mike Stinson can write songs in his sleep….no really, check out Walking Home In The Rain from his fourth album Hell And Half Of Georgia. “Well that only happened once but yeah it’s true. I woke up with that song fully formed playing in my head. No idea where it came from.” General consensus is that Mike’s blue collar songwriting ethic earned him that freebie. That kind of ‘luck’ comes from putting in the time. Here’s a glimpse at what that time has looked like. Raised in Virginia, schooled in DC, Mike moved to Los Angeles where eighteen years made him a veteran of what he calls “the trenches of beer joint warfare.” The years following found him based in Houston and barnstorming the roadhouses of Texas week in and week out.
Along the way he has written his very own version of the American songbook and developed an expansive live show that “has taken country and rock and boiled them down to their essence before injecting everything with the kind of ju-ju that Gram Parsons died for.” (Bill Bentley, The Morton Report) Critical acclaim has followed. Los Angeles Magazine named him Best Country Artist (2004), The Houston Press awarded him Song Of The Year (2010), Texas Music Magazine named him one of their Artists of The Year (2012) and one of their Records of The Year (2013), and Houston Press named him Best Country Artist two years running (2014, 2015). But perhaps the more significant mark of Mike’s creative success is the respect and admiration he’s earned from a large songwriting community. His songs have been released on albums by Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Gilkyson, Jesse Dayton, Brian Whelan, Folk Uke (featuring Willie Nelson), Austin Hanks and Larry Bagby.
Few, if any walk, away from a Mike Stinson show unaffected by his particular slant. His songs are the thrills, chills and spills of life, filled with razor sharp word play, charm, depth, poignance and musical muscle. “Mike Stinson is dangerous, the kind of songwriter who can upend the way you see the world with a single line, and whose lean, mean rock and roll machine of a band usually starts at a Chuck Berry gallop and goes from there. They can crank it so hard, in fact, it’s entirely possible to miss all the diamond-tipped rejoinders, double entendres, aphorisms and the occasional outright burn that litter Stinson’s songs, and make him one of the wickedest lyricists around today.” Houston Press
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