Andrew Calhoun
Website:
http://www.andrewcalhoun.com
Discography:
2008 - Bound to Go
2005 - Staring at the Sun
2004 - Telfer's Cows
2004 - Shadow of a Wing
2003 - Tiger Tattoo
1999 - Where Blue Meets Blue
1996 - Phoenix Envy
1992 - Hope
1987 - Walk Me to the War
1984 - The Gates of Love
1982 - Water Street
| I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, November 30, 1957. I have two older sisters and a brother. As a child I had some trouble learning to tie my shoes, causing my father considerable frustration. He worked at Bell Labs and most of the rest of the time on a system of philosophy expressed in mathematics. He read us the Bible for two hours every Sunday, although we preferred horsing around with him. My mother liked to cook and made jars of oatmeal cookies. She read us wonderful books and poems, including the Iliad - 5 times – walked fast and yelled a lot. She paid me a nickel to memorize Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Aengus.” My brother memorized all of “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay. “Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, barrel-house kings with feet unstable, sagged and reeled and pounded on the table”
My songs prove useful for certain people at certain times. A man in California wrote to me: "I like your always surprising poem-songs, all of which demand from a listener a certain kind of attention. I always come away from listening to one of your recordings looking at everything with fresh eyes; thank you for that, for it helps me get back to a place when I once met the world everyday as if I were going into it for the first time. It's hard some days to remember what the world looked like before you had a word for anything."
And so one keeps on. And mainly because, well, it's fun. I've performed at coffeehouses, cafes, coffee bars, bars, clubs, pubs, corn roasts, festivals, nursing homes, reformatories, prep schools, high schools, colleges, house concerts, Renaissance fairs, Highland games, poetry slams, and on a float, sitting between the legs of a giant frog. It was to save "frog hollow," an undeveloped part of Palatine, IL, and the float won first prize. I received $50 and a sunburn. A few other performances stand out in my memory.
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Upcoming Performances:
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