Mark Erelli  
American Dreamer
by Richard Cuccaro


"Things move so fast these days. We do things because we can, before 
we know whether we should do them. That kind of technological capability 
is so outpacing our moral or ethical compass. Things happen that we don't 
know if we want to happen or not." 
I didn't say that. Mark Erelli said that.
The unwanted things that happen are the casualties that Mark refers to in 
the title of his latest, most remarkable CD, Hope and Other Casualties.
Last spring, Mark stood on the stage at Makor and sang "Seeds of peace" 
from that CD. They contain these words: 

He stood on the deck and he said we'd accomplished our mission
He twisted the facts 'til he knew it would pass for the truth 
Vengeance can fill any fool with conviction
But he can't wash the blood of the fallen from his cowboy boots

It was then that I knew I needed to pay homage to his musicality and song 
craftsmanship with a feature article. Over the past few years, I'd watched 
with increasing interest as he kept writing and producing one album after 
another and providing skilled guitar backup to other songwriters of note. 
The foundation and evolution of this singer/songwriter is a story of 
bravado and brilliance.

Beginnings
Mark Erelli grew up in Reading, Massachusetts. Today, he lives in Portland, Maine. 
When he was a child, he would stand in front of the TV and emulate the bands 
he saw on MTV. "I was just, really into music," he says. This evolved into performing 
in musical productions in both junior high school and high school. As soon as he 
got older, he dug back into the roots of the music that he liked, particularly The 
Allman Brothers Band. This led to discovering people like T-Bone Walker. In the 
days before the internet, it took time to research these folks.
He also played drums and sang in a couple of rock cover bands in high school. 
He fooled around with the guitar a little, playing the same chords over and over, 
"really badly," until one of his friends would say, "Stop that!" He'd say, "Well, show 
me how to do it." So, he learned a few chords that way. This was in addition to a 
couple of months of ill-fated guitar lessons he took, "on a rented guitar," during 
8th grade. He found practice difficult, and wound up giving the guitar back. However, 
the lure of guitar was  irresistible, and he'd continue noodling around on it whenever 
he got the chance.

The Undergraduate Blossoms
In college, he found more time to practice, especially on weekends and began writing 
as well. In a "big four-flight dorm, the back stairwell echoed." He played simple things 
that he said, "probably sounded better than they actually were. Reverb helps." He 
learned songs in the folk/pop singer/songwriter and classic rock genre, such as material 
from Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, James Taylor and the Eagles, among others. Friends 
would sit in on the stairwell performances. As Mark inserted some of his own songs in 
his repertoire, he'd take note of which ones were well-received and add them to later gigs.
In high school he had discovered Chris Smither, who provided the link between the grit 
of the blues and the insight of singer/songwriters. He went to see him at every opportunity
 -- "Couldn't get enough," he says. He refers to him in his song, "Troubador Blues:" 

When I was a boy I went to hear this picker play
I still recall his blue guitar / Like it was yesterday
I was a powder keg a-waitin' / For someone to light the fuse
He struck a match and I did catch / The troubadour blues

Mark played tennis in high school and his tennis instructor was a big country fan and he 
got exposed to "a lot of that stuff." He devoured everything from Travis Tritt to Greg Brown, 
Willie Nelson, and Robert Johnson. He'd been going to folk performances since high school
and would watch the players' hands. He took this with him to college.  
At Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, there were a lot of coffeehouses where he would 
soon begin to apply his quickly-evolving craft. He went to every open mic that he could, 
along with other student players and continued to grow amidst the upper classmen 
"that were really good." 
"I kept playing non-stop," he told me.
His intense interest in folk led to a position on the concert committee group on campus 
and he booked people like Chris Smither, Greg Brown and John Gorka to play shows 
at Bates.
Mark's quiet, low-key demeanor belies an amazing reservoir of strength and intelligence. 
In his sophomore year, after playing guitar steadily for only a year, he was able to open 
for John Gorka. This is all the more astonishing in that his major was Biology, which 
requires an enormous amount of studying. I asked how he managed it and he remarked, 
laughing, "I was pretty busy!"  He had sent a tape to John's manager and after some 
months, just before Gorka's appearance, got a call from the manager to say it would be 
OK to open the show. That was the first time I played before a large, 300-person, audience," 
he told  me. "I was nervous, but it was a blast. I had started early on with the dream of 
playing in front of a lot of people."
A day he recalls as one of the most memorable, in music and in his life, happened at 
the end of his college career when he opened for both Dar Williams and Arlo Guthrie 
practically moments apart. An arts group at a middle school across the street from Bates 
had brought in Dar for a performance the same night that Arlo was to perform at Bates 
as part of "Parents" weekend. "So I opened up for Dar, then, literally ran across the street 
and opened up for Arlo. I then ran back across the street and joined Dar for a couple 
of songs in her set," he said.
His first trip to Boston as a player was in 1995, around the end of his junior year and 
the beginning of his senior year in college. He performed at open mics at Club Passim, 
Old Vienna Coffeehouse and other coffeehouses. "It was very tentative and, although 
I was from around there, I wasn't comfortable in the city. It felt very big -- there were 
a lot of people doing it." he says. However, someone, perhaps Matt Smith, manager 
at Passim, remembered Mark from one of the open mics, and gave him one of his first 
gigs in Boston. He'd be brought in for "Open Artist" bills, free shows comprised of 
several performers. In December of 1996, about 6 months after graduating from Bates, 
he opened for Martin Sexton at Passim. He remembers standing onstage at Passim's 
thinking, "OK, I did it! Now what?"

Biology or Ballads?
Mark graduated from Bates with a degree in Biology. In the latter days of college, he 
had worked as a lab instructor in then biology department and was gigging around at 
the same time. Torn, he loved science (and still does) but really wanted to do music. 
He made a decision to move to the singer/songwriter haven of Northampton, Massachusetts 
and just do music. One of his science professors heard of his plans and said, "you're going 
to need a job in the daytime." He hooked Mark up with someone (who wound up being his 
Masters advisor) at UMass where he would get paid to do research. During the next two years,
Mark got his Masters degree in Molecular Biology, doing research, teaching classes and 
writing his thesis in between gigs.  "Every weekend, or every other weekend, I would cut off 
classes as early as I could to drive to Boston, New York or Pennsylvania to do a gig. I remember 
going to Boston for a gig in the middle of the week, getting back at 1am  and getting up in 
the morning and going to the lab. It was a short, but very long two years, because it seemed 
at times that I was going 24 hours a day." It was here that the two careers overlapped.
In Northampton, he met other artists who were on the Signature Sounds label, like Brooks 
Williams and Salamander Crossing and formed a kind of "pie-in-the-sky" dream of 
getting signed to that label. In 1997, at the Northeastern Regional Folk Alliance Conference, 
an artist pulled Mark into a Signature Sounds open jam. He played a song and left. Mark Thayer, 
Signature's studio director, liked it and called him at school to come in to the studio to do a 
demo. He passed the demo on to Jim Olson, the label president  who went to a few gigs to 
watch Mark perform. After a gig, Jim approached him and said to call him the next day, about 
"doing something" together. So, about a month before presenting his thesis, he released his 
first CD with Signature Sounds.
Armed with his new Masters Degree, Mark marched off down to Texas for the Kerrville 
Folk Festival and entered into the "New Folk" competition with an eye on also selling his 
new CD. So, the time frame, between Mark's first starting to play the guitar seriously and 
getting signed to Signature Sounds spanned was seven years. Considering everything else 
going on in his life, this happened pretty fast. From here on in, Mark primarily wrote songs 
and gigged. He occasionally did some lab work or odd jobs, but nothing that took him away 
from music for very long.

How Bad Do You Want It?
Even with a prodigious amount of talent and intelligence in Mark's favor, his career was not 
without crisis. In 2000-2001, his lungs collapsed three times, twice when he was on the road. 
He experienced exhaustion, pain and coughing and at first, thought he just needed to rest more. 
However, it got so bad he couldn't get through a song line without coughing and got himself 
to a hospital. He received oxygen and got some rest the first time. The second occurrence 
resulted in getting a tube inserted to re-inflate it. The third time it happened, he finally underwent 
corrective surgery which involved incisions in five places on his torso. He's fine today, but has 
some residual effects -- numbness in some spots where the incisions crossed nerves.
He had made his second record, and the effects of the physical problems made him wonder 
if he was meant to quit or was fate asking, "How bad do you want to do this?" He decided 
that it was the latter, that he was going to attack his musical career his own way, even 
"if no one gets it."

A Solitary Vision
His love for country music led to his 2004 release, Hillbilly Pilgrim. This seemed like an 
odd choice for a serious singer/songwriter, but to Mark it made perfect sense.
Both Hillbilly Pilgrim and its follow-up, Hope and Other Casualties attack the same subject 
from different angles. Each looks for hope and finds positive reasons to keep working for 
change. He states: "Hillbilly Pilgrim was released right after we had gone to war. Western 
swing was originally intended as a way to give people a little bit of a rest from the burden 
of their everyday lives between the two World Wars and also 
during the depression. The joyous sound of the album in itself was an act of defiance."
I particularly enjoyed the reference to the president in "Troubador Blues:" 

So let me thank you Mr. President / To me you've been so kind 
For the well of inspiration / Can dry up from time to time 
Each time you open up your mouth / You give me something I can use 
Every day another reason / For the troubadour blues

"With Hope and Other Casualties we had been at war 3 or 4 years. The grim realities of the 
headlines were impossible to escape. The topics would creep into my songs when I was 
sitting down in the morning to write my music. I wound up collecting a group of songs that 
dealt with how you hold on to hope and I react when I find that my hope is about to become 
a casualty. The reason that the songs have a positive spin on them is that they look the troubles 
in the eye and don't try to pretend that they don't exist. 
The idea is to confront the issues that we're facing with a song. That robs them of their power 
to make us feel helpless and hopeless."
He taps into Woody Guthrie's style, especially on "Passing Through:" 

We been watching this world from our living rooms /
It's been near 40 years since we walked on the moon 
This big blue ball is shrinking / and I don't know if that's good 
But for better or for worse now this whole world's our neighborhood… 
Passing through / Passing through / We are only passing through

He says of Woody: "You think of someone who has addressed social issues, political issues 
in song… Those songs by and large… probably 75 percent of Woody Guthrie's songs that 
we know of are still relevant in some way. That was a real guidepost in terms of how to 
write topically or how to let the topics of the day influence the songs were dealing with."  
This author believes that Mark's songs are a great way to bring Woody's life's work into 
the present.

The Personal as Political
Mark says that he does not see himself as a "political songwriter." He states: "The distinction 
between the personal and political is a false distinction. I'm not interested in my music serving 
as a vehicle for political change. I get to vote and I can do it in that way. The songs are written 
about things that move me on an intensely personal level, whether it's sadness, 
frustration or outrage." Nevertheless, he finds the reaction to his social statements gratifying. 
"It's great to hear from my end to know that I'm not alone. I write these songs thinking, 'I can't 
be the only person who feels this way.' Maybe if someone hears it, they won't feel so alone. In 
that way, maybe art serves as a way to build a little bit of community in a day and age where 
it's hard to find, at times."
When I remarked about the way his lyrics are simply stated, but effective, he replied: "There are 
songwriters that work more consistently in a metaphoric and poetic kind of voice. (he mentions 
his friends Jeffrey Focault and Peter Mulvey here). Speaking for myself, I'm occasionally poetic, 
but most of the time I'm singing what I'm thinking. The songs are meant to communicate. They 
can do that a lot more directly and more clearly than I can by talking. They're more eloquent than 
my speaking."
Certain songs resonate with greater numbers of people. One is "Imaginary Wars," which deals 
with encroaching real estate development and the loss of the forest behind his childhood home. 
He sings: 

Now what's become of the old pine woods
It's all gone and there's a brand new neighborhood 
All for a buck they cut down all those trees
They subdivided all of my fondest memories

He says, "It surprised me that it struck such a deep chord in so many people. On a deeper level, 
it's about the loss of mystery and the loss of places where you can kind of lose yourself, so to speak, 
in little slices of wilderness. We've really lost a sense of wonder that comes with our connection 
with nature."
Outside of people doing medical and missionary work, our troubadors represent the best of us. 
They travel this earth, bringing the truth to the media-battered masses. In this brotherhood, 
Mark Erelli stands tall. Welcome him every chance you get.
For those living in or around New York City, that chance will come on October 17 at Joe's Pub, 
where he opens for and accompanies Catie Curtis. That's a great bill. We hope to be there. 
For other opportunities, see below and check his web site: www.markerelli.com

Upcoming gigs include:
Oct 4    8pm Westside Cafe  Frederick, MD
            301-418-6886    www.westside-cafe.com

5         7pm Supporting Chris Smither 
           Club Cafe   56-58 South 12th St.
           Pittsburgh, PA    412-431-4950 
           www.clubcafelive.com

6         7:30 pm  Supporting Chris Smither
           World Cafe Live  3025 Walnut St.
           Philadelphia, PA  215-222-1400
           www.worldcafelive.com

7        7pm  Home Town Music - house concert open to general public   
          Cedar Run, NJ   609-597-2991
   
17      7pm Opening for and accompanying Catie Curtis 
          Joe's Pub  425 Lafayette St.   New York, NY 
          212-239-6200  www.publictheater.org

20       8pm Opening for and accompanying Catie Curtis 
           Somerville Theatre  55 Davis Square
           Somerville, MA  617-931-2000 
           www.massconcerts.com

21      7 & 10pm  Opening for and accompanying Catie Curtis  
         Tin Angel  20 So. 2nd St.  
         Philadelphia, PA 215-928-0978   
         www.tinangel.com  

22     8pm Opening for and accompanying Catie Curtis 
         Midtown Scholar  1519 No. 3rd St.  Harrisburg, PA     
         717-236-BOOK   www.midtownscholar.com