Everyone who ever played at What The Heck fest:
(with lots of broken links)
Stephen Steinbrink
Stephen Steinbrink – Deny Your Creator by lehorrorrecords
“I am a pop songwriter and sculptor from Phoenix, AZ. I grew up in a small community of weirdos and punks in the vast expanse of strip malls and tract house suburbs of Arizona, where I we put on shows and booked tours together. Tempe, AZ’s Gilgongo Records has put out my last three LP’s. I have a band called French Quarter, but sometimes I perform under my own name, just depending on how I feel. Arizona is a good place, with a lot of heart and natural expansive beauty, and my recent songs have been about how to reconcile these pure, good things with the current violence, bigotry and general evil of our state leaders and their supporters, etc. I am still figuring out how to personally react to what is happening in my home, but I feel like the most productive thing I can do is write songs from my perspective. I am hesitant to call it political music though.
I recording my fourth LP live with a band at Dub Narcotic Studio this spring. Here is what some people have said about my music:
(The Self Titled French Quarter LP) is lovely straight folk-yearn (Sam Beam style) with a production sound and voice that gives the music emotional depth and width, and sounds damn purty doin’ it. – Thurston Moore & Byron Coley, Arthur Magazine
I don’t want to pit the critic against the music lover. It just doesn’t work when I’m dealing with something so emotionally vulnerable. I don’t want to just peer at the threads of sentiment through a microscope and my self-protective shell of irony, trying to think of jokes. Instead, I want to wrap it around me. I want to wear these songs. – Cokemachine Glow
He’s a great songwriter without relying on deception or style, and his best songs are instantly memorable, follow an internal logic that’s not hard to pick apart but nearly impossible to knock, and plays to his own strengths as a musician. Some people have it, and others don’t, but friendship will only carry your talents so far. This guy doesn’t need the help; he’s already there, and the plaintive sadness in his material builds upon warmly regarded traditions in the genre, from Simon & Garfunkel to Neil Young to Doug Martsch, and speaks to the universal truths about how this brand of music has always affected us. – Doug Mosurock, Dusted Magazine
