Luke Torn

Maybe it was my parents handing me a birthday LP at age five, Johnny Horton's Honky-Tonk Man, that started me up. But from then on, I needed to know everything I could find out about music, about lyrics, about comradery. By the time I landed at the University of Texas at Austin as journalism major, I was seeing every punk rock/new wave/singer-songwriter and soul band imaginable in Austin, Texas – the Live Music Capital of the World.

Since the early 1980s, I've been covering music, endlessly interviewing musicians (my heroes Warren Zevon and Doug Sahm, among many), reviewing new and retro albums, and editing and publishing a music mag. I started out writing for the Daily Texan and the Austin Chronicle.

The next decades found me landing live Bob Dylan cassettes by the dozens, and covering rock, folk, country, punk, and Texas music galore for the Wall Street Journal, No Depression, Bucketfull of Brains, Sonicnet.com, and my own starter zine, Jamboree. Becoming publisher, editor, and writer for the great worldwide mag Pop Culture Press in 2001 meant covering endless new bands and historic reissues and curating CD compilations for each issue. PCP hosted some amazing live performances by exceptional artists during SXSW under the big striped tent at Austin's beloved local Dog & Duck Pub (RIP).

Since the early 2000s, I've written multiple sets of liner notes, and become a regular contributor to Uncut, covering both the brand new and the old-as-the-hill's music.

Meanwhile, we've raised a son (an accomplished percussionist!) and cared for my parents through their last years. Flipping records in dollar bins has been my escape hatch during multiple joys and traumas. The dusty bins have fed the flame of my endless curiosity about the history of singer-songwriters. Listening to dozens of no-hit wonders from the 1960s to the 1980s and beyond – the post-Dylan era, more or less – I'm still fascinated to dig through obscure songs, hunting for gems in the muck, always asking whether or not these lesser-known folks have anything to say?