MUSIC

Rudyard's presents Mando Saenz * Clark Peterson * John Egan.

Mando Saenz - (pictured, Nashville, TN) Wandering the streets of Houston, playing regular gigs at bars like the Continental Club, or settling down for drinks with the kinds of characters that populate poetry (but rarely read it), Mando Saenz wrote it all down – in melody, on little scraps of paper, or in his head. Like the gloriously disorganized life he observed in his former neighborhood, his songs usually aren’t about linear expectations or predictable n...arratives, they are flashes of emotion, snapshots of time reassembled in his songs with rhyme and melody to make uncommon, musical sense. .... He carried most of the songs from Houston to his new home in Nashville, finishing out a few of them with co-writers like Will Kimbrough, Kim Richey and R.S Field, a first for the previously lone writer. The songs on his new album Bucket, are still populated with life’s losers, soul-searchers, and dreamers - the kind songwriting that won him praise for his more acoustic-tinged debut, Watertown. But this time, he leaves the Texas imagery behind.

.... It’s this restlessness that drove him from Texas to Tennessee and that brought him to his new musical milieu, but has all the movement meant musical change? At the end of the day, Mando believes that “Songs are songs. Whether they were written in Texas, Tennessee or Idaho doesn’t really matter.” ....

Clark Peterson - (Nashville, TN) Clark Paterson is a country musician raised in the one stoplight town of Sandusky, Michigan. Growing up with good parents in a rural area introduced him to hard work, honesty, and good people… values that continue to define him today as both a person and an artist. As the youngest of four brothers, Clark was constantly exposed to good music like Lyle Lovett and Tom Petty, and those three older brothers also taught Clark how to fight without getting his butt kicked (at least 50% of the time). As a young man, Clark was trained at the The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly thereafter, he left the 9 to 5 world that never felt quite right and began to write and perform his own songs throughout the central United States. His recently released six-song EP, Songs for Another America, was produced by the great Mark Nevers (Andrew Bird, Bonnie Prince Billy). Clark now resides in Nashville, TN, but gets back to Sandusky as often as he can.

John Egan - (Houston, TX) When Egan pulls out his shiny National steel 6-string, plugs it in to high voltage, puts his right foot on an amplified wooden stomp box, and taps his effects pedals, he calls up spirits -- ghosts like Chris Whitley, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell. William Michael Smith-Houston Press