Grayson Hugh: Press
RECENT REVIEWS
I jumped at the chance to book Grayson Hugh and Polly Messer into Smokin With Chris. Grayson is an amazing songwriter, incredible singer and pianist. The harmonies that he and Polly create are truly remarkable. Their residency here (they play every few weeks, since the winter of '09) has been a bright spot in our calender. Laura & I (and the audiences here) are blessed to have them. In this world of mediocre music, Grayson and Polly are the real deal - original, soulful, meaningful. Playing a mix of Grayson's hits and newer songs from his soon-to-be-released "An American Record", his music is a national treasure.
-Chris Conlon, owner, Smokin With Chris, Southington, Ct., December 28, 2009
"Grayson Hugh and his wife, singer Polly Messer, put on a phenomenal show recently at The Cornelia Street Cafe. A critically-acclaimed singer/songwriter, Grayson wowed us with his powerful and funky piano playing, soulful voice and poetic lyrics. Polly Messer added beautiful musical backup harmonies - their voices blending together as one. It is SO good to see Grayson back on the scene, stronger than ever!"
-Valerie Ghent, founder of The Songwriter's Beat, Cornelia Street Cafe, NYC., August 2009
"Grayson is an incredibly soulful singer and amazing songwriter. I never forget an artist I love and Grayson is one of those artists. His recent performance with his wife Polly Messer at The Knickerbocker blew my socks off! I'm so glad he's back on the performance scene."
-Greg Piccolo, talent booker, The Knickerbocker Cafe, Westerly, Rhode Island, August 2009
"Grayson Hugh is the greatest singer/songwriter you've never heard."
-Leonard Pitts, Jr., Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Miami Herald.com, September 20, 2009
REVIEWS FOR "ROAD TO FREEDOM"
As impressive as Grayson Hugh's 1989 debut album "Blind To Reason" was, "Road To Freedom" represents a quantum leap beyond it. While Hugh's blue-eyed vocals and affinity for gospel-style Hammond organ remain, his music adds a welcome infusion of rock 'n roll punch. "Hideaway", "Forever Yours, Forever Mine" and "When She Comes Walking" bristle with radio-friendly hooks, while Hugh's Rod Stewart-meets-Sam-Cooke vocals on "I Can't Untie You From Me" and the ballad "Walking Through The Fire" are sublime.
-Dan Kening (four-star review), Chicago Tribune, Nov. 19, 1992
BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 1992
#7) Grayson Hugh's "Road To Freedom" - Gutsy, melodic, heartland style soul-rock that really fills a hole.
-Jim Bessman, Billboard Magazine, Nov. 29, 1992
"Newcomer's Sound Is Sheer Poetry"
Grayson Hugh's music, lyrics are stirring.
I don't want to get your hopes up about Grayson Hugh. Don't want to oversell him so you put 1988's Blind To Reason or the new Road To Freedom in the CD player and expect light to flow forth, healing cancer and removing cataracts. But ask me about him straight up and I'd have to answer you this way:
Have I heard any newcomer in the last decade who excites me more than this guy?
No.
Have I heard any newcomer in the last decade who excites me as much as this guy?
No.
Your next question is obvious as the chin on Leno's face: Well, what's the guy sound like? And therein lies a problem, because while there are a lot of obvious comparisons, none gives a complete picture.
He's the thoughtful singer-songwriter type, like James Taylor or Paul Simon, but there’s more pure soul in him than that comparison would imply.
Well then, how about Marvin Gaye, Rod Stewart or Sam Cooke? Yeah, he’s got the requisite gravel and rasp and anguish in his voice. But there’s more poetry and grace in his lyrics than theirs.
Bruce Springsteen? The introspection’s there. The fist-cranking Born To Run adrenaline rush isn’t.
So what does he sound like? Like everything you’ve heard before. And nothing you've heard before. No risk-taker or barrier-breaker like, say, Prince or R.E.M or Nirvana or Me Phi Me. But yet, a haunting sound, a rock ’n’ soul groove, greasy with Hammon organ, spangled with guitars, it’s melodies framed by understated piano accents, it’s choruses and bridges braced with harmonies as plaintive as a train whistle at midnight.
PICTURES IN LYRICS
And his lyrics! If you love words, if you’re one of those people for whom heaven is a rainy day and a good book, then know this: Hugh doesn’t write words — he writes pictures.
Like "Forever Yours, Forever Mine", which speaks of “steep September daylight when the shadows fall at four” and “eyes just staring down the college street strewn with the paper of sycamore leaves.”
Like "Road To Freedom", which offers a breathtaking view — “over the tops of mountains over the western snow, watching the river wander, just a vein of silver far below” — and adds a hard observation certain to strike a chord with any Native American or African American — “They take away your money, and they take away your name, and they take the ground that you’re standing on but never, ever take the blame.”
And then there is the stark, painful ballad called "For The Innocent". Hugh wrote it for his grandfather, Dr. Frank Rawlinson, a missionary in Shanghai who wal killed during the Second World War. Hugh sings: “In trees and fields the snowflakes fell, gently on the gravestone of one I knew well. Cut down before his time on some rocky road, caught in someone else’s war for some cause of old. He was a writer and a peaceful man, never held a rifle in his hand.But upon that fateful day, a bullet from a gun sought him out as if to say, I’ll find the meekest one.”
Hugh, a thirtysomething native of Hartford, Conn., who quit school at 15, says, “I remember the English teacher said, ‘You should really consider being a poet.’ I didn’t want to hear it. [But] I read from when I was 14 on. Every poet I could get my hands on. James Joyce, Faulkner, James Agee, Dylan Thomas, Archibald MacLeish. I read voraciously. I quit high school and just kind of educated myself.
“I was lucky enough to have parents who said “That’s cool if you want to do that. You’ve just got to get a job.” One year I had something like 55 jobs — a lot of odd jobs. Then I discovered I could make money playing in bands.”
MOVING AROUND
During those years, Hugh’s family was moving around, alighting in South Carolina, Louisiana and Maine. Musically, he was moving around a lot too.
“I played organ and piano [for a black church in Hartford]… That was really my introduction to [gospel], a form of music I love to this day. I sort of got into that and combined that with my rock roots.
“Then there’s a lot of other music that I grew up with. My dad is a classical DJ in Connecticut and he always had an extensive record collection, all different kinds of music — classical, jazz, rock, folk. I grew up with a lot of different inlfuences.”
Asked to describe the sound those influences have fostered in him, he’s at a loss.
“I don’t know what you call it. My girlfriend half-seriously said “When people ask you what you play, say country gothic.”
Why not? Works about as well as anything else.
Hugh’s debut album Blind To Reason was the result of a chance meeting with producer Michael Baker in the elevator of a New York apartment building.
“I was carrying a keyboard, we started talking…I was going to my manager’s apartment; we asked him in, played him the tape, and he introduced me to the people at RCA.”
RCA sent Hugh into the studio with Baker, and the result was Blind To Reason. There are some great tracks on that disc, including the raw-dog blues of the title number and the old-school, Sam Cooke soul of Talk It Over.
Hugh says now it was a little too smooth, a little overproduced for his taste. “I felt I was being pigeonholed… I needed to branch out.”
BRANCHING OUT
Four years later, he’s branched out to MCA Records, where veteran R&B producer Bernard Edwards took the helm on Road To Freedom.
“Basically, it’s much more raw,” Hugh says of the new album. “And it’s really the way I always was. Basically, I always was a real rocker. All my bands were pretty hard-edged.
My producer, Bernard Edwards, encouraged me to just be myself in the studio. We laughed a lot. It was real easy working with him…he kept it fresh. It’s kind of the way I approach my writing.”
It’s always risky business to play fortune-teller in this game — especially when dealing with an artist eight out of 10 record-buyers have never heard of. And your humble music writer here has a great track record of proclaiming superstardom for acts that never even get out of the starting gate.
So, tempting as it is, no predictions here.
Except one. You’ll enjoy Grayson Hugh.- Leonard Pitts, Jr., The Miami Herald, Oct. 19, 1992
Here's a CD I'm having trouble keeping out of my player. The long-delayed follow-up to "Blind To Reason", Hugh's killer 1989 blue-eyed soul release, "Road To Freedom", is well worth the wait. Led by Hugh on a Hammond B-3 organ, "Hideaway" sets a swirling tone for the project. His soulful vocals, from the reflective "Soul Cat Girl" to an anti-war masterpiece titled "For The Innocent" are heartfelt, to say the least. The grand finale is a gospel assault on Bob Dylan's "I'll Remember You" that could raise the dead. Any year with a Grayson Hugh release in it can't be all bad.
-Peanuts, The Cincinatti Independent, Dec. 1992
REVIEWS FOR "BLIND TO REASON"
"Grayson Hugh's Hit"
One of the summer’s most engaging hits is Grayson Hugh’s recording of Talk It Over. Without sounding like too much of an imitation, the 30-year-old’s performance echoes the style and timbre of Sam Cooke with its winning warmth and sweetness. The song is included on his debut album, Blind To Reason(RCA).
“To be honest, Sam Cooke was before my time; I didn’t know about him until a few years ago,” said Mr. Hugh, who was reared in West Hartford, Conn., and who now lives in New York. Growing up, he said, the singer he was most aware of was Marvin Gaye.
Unlike the vast majority of pop singers and songwriters, Mr. Hugh has had extensive musical training. At the age of 11, he said, he wanted to be Gustav Mahler. Later he studied with the avan-garde composer Ran Blake and was part of a trio called the Wild Goose, which tried to incorporate ideas from Stavinsky, Stockhausen and Lukas Foss. But rock-and-roll, which he had discovered at 14, also attracted him.
The most crucial experience leading up to his recording career, however, was a yearlong stint playing the piano in a black gospel church in Hartford 11 years ago.
“My dad, who was a friend of the minister, heard that their pianist had quit,” he said. “I auditioned for the job and got it. In that year I learned more than in all my years of formal training.”- Steven Holden, The New York Times, Aug. 30, 1989
"New On The Charts"
The beginning of newcomer Grayson Hugh’s recording career took place in an apartment elevator on Manhattan, New York’s Upper East Side. That is where he met Michael Baker, co-producer of Blind To Reason, his debut album on RCA records.
A self-taught piano player, Hugh grew up listening to and admiring great black singers of his age like Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding. He spent a year playing piano in a black gospel church and later founded several Connecticut bands.
The chance encounter with Baker, one-time producer of Wet, Wet, Wet and the Blow Monkeys, eventually led to a recording contract with RCA. Baker noticed Hugh playing a synthesizer in an elevator and found himself listening to his demo tape 15 minutes later. Of that meeting, he says, “I was immediately struck by the dichotomy – here’s this quiet, sort of shy white guy with a leather jacket and long hair, who sounds like all the greatest black singers in the world rolled together.”
“Talk It Over, the first single from Blind To Reason, has entered the hot 100 singles chart is already a ttop 10 hit on the Hot Adult Contemporary charts.- Jim Richliano, Billboard Magazine, Jul. 8, 1989
"Have You Met Grayson Hugh?"
You turn to page fifteen of this week’s Billboard Magazine, the music industry’s most prestigious publication, and you see the listing of Talk It Over, the single from Grayson Hugh’s newly-relased RCA album Blind To Reason on the Adult Contemporary Top Twenty Chart. This is impressive for several important reasons. First of all, getting signed ot a major record company these days is an extremely difficult task. Secondly, reaching national chart recognition with a first release is almost never accomplished. And then you listen to the album and you’re the most surprised of all. Is it possible that this white young man can sound so much like Sam Cooke on one track, like Otis Redding on another, reminisecent of Marvin Gaye on another and of Wilson Pickett on another still? You send away for his press material to find out what is really behind all of this.
Grayson Hugh and I are sitting at a picnic table on the large rear lawn surrounding his rented South Hampton cottage. This is his first weekend back after a performing tour with Phoebe Snow and he’s happy to be relaxing. The building appears to have been a stable, perhaps twenty or so years ago, and it is lined with barn doors carrying names of famous horses: Native Dancer Man of War. He offers freshly-made home-brewed French roasted coffee and tells me his story.
He is first-generation Welsh and was raised in Hartford, Connecticut. His father is a classical deejay from Britain; his mother, the daughter of missionaries, is from Shanghai. “I grew up with music around me from as far back as I can remember,” he says. “I can recall walking around the living room conducting an imaginary Peer Gynt suite by Grieg. There was always a piano around, I just taught myself.” His father was also Director of Communications for the Connecticut Council of Churches. In this capacity he was always meeting people of different countries – African musicologists, people from India, etc. The household record collection was filled with albums by artists like Harry Belafonte and Olatunji as well as early folk music of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
One day when he was still in elementary school, some musicians came to visit through a cultural exchange program and demonstrated the saxophone. “I was about nine,” he says, “and I was instantly sold.” He started taking formal lessons on alto sax and also learned to read music and to orchestrate. By the time he was fifteen he had his own band; at eighteen he was supporting himself full-time as a musician, songwriter and performer.
The big break came during the winter of 1987 in New York City. He calls it his “elevator story” and acknowledges that it’s hard to believe, but assures me it’s true. While riding in an elevator in an apartment building on the Upper East Side, heading for a business meeting with his manager, he met a man whose appearance was as distinctive as Grayson’s own. Each knew immediately that the other was a musician. They started a conversation and by the time they had reached the fifth floor, there was a professional relationship in the works. The other man was record producer Michael Baker who interrupted his day’s schedule to hear Grayson’s demo tape. His response was, “I’m immediately struck by the dichotomy: here’s this quiet sort of shy white guy with a leather jacket and long hair who sounds like all the greatest black singers in the world rolled together. It was fascinating, this image with this voice. I immediately called my girlfriend and said, ‘I just found the next Buddy Holly!’”. Next, he introduced Grayson Hugh to RCA Records and the rest, as they say, is chart-making history.
I ask why he responds so strongly to black music and he says, “I have no idea. Why do people like the color green? It’s pretty arbitrary. I have two brothers – we grew up playing music together. One brother was in an African drumming group and my other brother just went on a Fullbright with Yale to study music over there this summer. We like it, rhythm has always been an important part. I guess I like passion, if you really want to analyze it. But I also love great bluegrass and I love all sorts of music from different parts of the world.”
There’s been a sense in the Hamptons for some time now that an important music scene is developing here. It’s been known as the second home for major artists such as Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney. But over the last few years the area has also been home to emerging artists. It seems very likely that eastern Long Island is going to be as well-known for its music community as for its artists and writers.
Grayson Hugh is the first one on the charts. Stop by Long Island Sound today and hear how unusual and entertaining he is.- Candace Leigh, Dan’s Papers, May 12, 1989
"Grayson Hugh - Soul In The Suburbs"
Irony fans, please note: The soul man is a dinosaur in delcline, right? Al Green went and got religion, Dennis Edwards is in exile from The Temptations again and, let's face it, Luther Vandross is way too cool to sweat.
So who's left to save the genre? Some down-and-dirty black powerhouse who grew up in a suburb of Hell, singing in the local church? Not quite. He's a white guy from a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. And the first time he was ever in a black church and saw somebody whip out a tambourine, he jumped a mile. Meet Grayson Hugh and the music he likes to call "poetry with an attitude".
"That's sort of a phrase I've come up with that seems to describe my music", he says. "It's loud and it's a little audacious and it's moody and it's in the setting of a band playing live. It's not just a beat with empty words."
Nothing empty about Hugh's brilliant debut album, "Blind To Reason". The single "Talk It Over" is a smooth, deftly executed Sam Cooke reprise; the album's title track is brutal, raw dog blues. Nothing empty about his resume, either. The gravel-voiced 31-year-old grew up with the prerequisite love for black music. Unlike so many other "blue-eyed" soul men, though, he followed the music to its spawning ground, walking in "audaciously" to apply for a job as pianist at a little black church.
"Y'know", he says, "the first few times I played people were a little amazed to see me, being the only white and really young. But after two or three Sundays I remember this woman, the mother of one of the singers, got up and just said, in the middle of the service, 'I know this boy is doing something a little different, but he sound okay to me'".
Of course, after nine months they fired him, Hugh says, because "they really wanted an all-black church."
He survived. And roughly a decade later Hugh is back with a debut album that serves notice: Of the currently active soul men, he is, arguably, the best in class. It's hard to improve on what the woman said: Yeah, he's doing something a little different, but he sounds okay to me.
- Leonard Pitts, Jr., Musician Magazine, Nov. 1989
REVIEWS OF GRAYSON LIVE ON TOUR
"A Natural Soul Man"
Music fans had their choice Sunday night between down-home gritty Delta blues or contemporary blue-eyed soul as venerably legend John Lee Hooker and rising pop star Grayson Hugh performed at the Omni/New Daisy Theater and Peabody Alley (at The Peabody Hotel) respectively.
While there were some pronounced differences in approach, technique and sound between Hooker and Hugh, a firm foundation in the black music tradition was the underlying theme linking both performers.
While the Hooker set attracted casually dressed blues lovers,the more sophisticated classy bunch filled Peabody Alley for Grayson Hugh.
Hugh displayed the complete range of his influences. He played a string of rolling chords and flashy phrases on electric keyboard that reflected his gospel and jazz background, while his deliver and singing method were straight out of the R & B/Soul school. Hugh's a natural soul man, right down to his stage mannerisms, which included playing on his knees and behind his back. He did two stinging cover songs, one a sizzling "Bring It On Home To Me".
While the packed house of over 450 people at first seemed more interested in hearing Hugh than reacting to him, by the middle of his set the dance floor was also packed.
- Ron Wynn, The Memphis Daily News, Oct. 12, 1989
"A QUIET GIANT"
The first time THE STREET ran into Grayson Hugh: November 1rst, 1988. The scene: The Dickie Betts Record Party at The Lone Star Roadhouse in New York. It's wall-to-wall people inside. Loyal Allman Brothers fans who did manage to get into the sold-out show have been waiting in line for hours. There are lights, cameras, cables everywhere. Technicians working video/audio hookups for MTV and TV broadcast coverage. The SRO show includes many musicians and industry VIPs. "No Shows" - despite rumors to the contrary - are Jimmy Page and Gregg Allman. But nobody cares. that's because on stage, it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime lineups of the legends of rock n' roll.
Dickie Betts - former ace guitarist of The Allman Brothers - is center stage playing with his current sidemen. There's Jack Bruce, bassist extraordinaire of the legendary group Cream. There's also Rolling Stones ex-guitarist Mick Taylor, and still yet another world-class axeman - Rick Derringer.
No one on keyboards yet. But a buzz goes through the crowd as a tall, long-haired musician wearing a cowboy hat emerges from stage left to sit at the piano, joining the others for a scorching set of southern rock 'n roll. The all-star jam rocks out the crowd and when it's all over, a lot of folks are asking "Who was that hot keyboardist?"
None other than Grayson Hugh, THE STREET finally learns from the mystery man himself during a recent phone interview. Hugh and his seven-piece had opened for Dickie on a tour through the South and the Midwest, so Betts invited him to sit in for the show at The Roadhouse.
That memorable jam was just for starters in the unusual career of Grayson Hugh. Hugh is getting his share of notice currently, due to the release of his RCA debut album "Blind To Reason". The blue-eyed singer of Welsh ancestry penned all the songs on this powerful record and he is an authentic and authentic soul singer - reminiscent of such artists as Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. But he is quick to point out that his roots are also very much rock 'n roll.
These days, Grayson is busy working on new material and getting ready for some concert dates in the U.K. and another upcoming U.S. tour.
- Carol Tormey, The Street, October 1989
"AMAZING GRAYSON"
Grayson Hugh is an American music original.
Hugh brought his diverse souffle of rock, gospel, balladry and poetry to a slow simmer last night at the Lyric Theatre in sleepy little downtown Stuart, Florida. The building threatened to rise from its foundations, but the trembling rafters weren't caused by passing trains. It was just Hugh's voice soaring for the stratosphere, strong and emotional, sweet and assured.
Releasing only two albums in five years, 1989's "Blind To Reason" and "Road To Freedom" in 1992, Hugh is still considered an artist on the rise. After last night's experience, however, the audience must have wondered why this man is not recognized as one of the country's most enduring talents.
- Gary Shipes, The Stuart News, May 6, 1994
REVIEW FOR "GRAYSON HUGH"
"A Jazzy Rock-and-Blues Homebrew"
Ever wish someone would come along who could sing like a fusion of Al Green and Steve Winwood, write music that blended influences as diverse as Yes and Ray Charles, and hammer the keyboards with Emersonian adroitness and Wonderous soul?
Enter the prodigious Grayson Hugh, grown in Hartford’s back yard soil. Hugh spent a year recording his first album at the Nineteen Studios in Glastonbury, and the result is a sprawling, ambitious product that just drips with talent.
Strange things happen within the circular borders of Grayson Hugh, an album with happy ties to some of the musical brilliance of the 1960s. The album’s most magical interludes evoke some of the excitement of the early attempts to blend jazz, rock and blues – Winwood’s gutsy Traffic jams and Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby’s earliest dabblings in Blood, Sweat and Tears. The guts of the album, though, are sheer rhythm and blues, as practiced by Charles.
None of the above, however, fully prepares the listeners for tours de force like There’s No Such Thing As Those Walls, which matches a growly Charlseian vocal against a Hancocked funk-fusion piano-bass groove and gradually adds overlays of sax, honking in an almost Colemanish counterpoint. Before he has exhausted these possibilities, Hugh abruptly rips the seams out of the composition and erupts into a phosphorescent keyboard solo reminiscent of Keith Emerson’s careening attacks, pumped along by a juggernaut-like cymbals-to-bass rhythm track supplied by drummer Rob Gottfried and bassist Dave Stolz (whose relationship has its roots in the Chris Squire/Bill Bruford tandem of Yes’s middle period – all of which scarcely warns us of Tom Majesky’s whirring guitar solo to come.
Well, let me tell you, it quickens the pulse to think they’re laying this stuff down just an infield fly away, in little old Glastonbury. (For those who worry about the quality of a “local product,” it should be noted that producer Ron Scalise has meticulously recorded, mixed and mastered the music. The sound qualities are far superior to 95 percent of the pop music released by major labels, and the high-grade vinyl is a welcome respite from the snap, crackle and pop garbage that the big labels mass-produce.)
For all the brilliance of the material, Grayson Hugh does not necessarily herald great commercial success for its author. Although Hugh occasionally writes attractive pop hooks, as in the country and western-inflected Just When I Was Dancing, he is never content to let the matter rest there. Just When I Was Dancing begins as a fairly sraightforward pop song, but Hugh pushes it into unpredictable regions, and the song expounds at least four separate musical themes – a lot for a casual radio listener to digest in five and one half minutes.
A song like the epic City Dawn – which takes off from its initial rhythm-and-blues premise like a trout on a long line, twisting and diving through a daring musical territory – will never appear on the narrow horizons of album-oriented rock radio. Hugh’s music is marvelous, but it may prove too sophisticated for its marketplace – haute cuisine fare in the junk food world of contemporary pop. The adventurous musical palates of the 1960s are harder to find these days.
The most commercially accessible tune on the album is When You’re Young and in the Picture, which Hugh, for better or worse, pegged to Majesky’s Motwonish guitar lick, giving the cut a gently rocking Isley Brothers feel. (I have heard Hugh perform the piece more effectively as a driving jazz-inspired number, reminiscent of Traffic’s Glad). Madness of the Heart, an impressionistic jazz ballad is also within the grasp of most pop listeners.
It remains to be seen, however, if the “adult contemporary” patrons of Ambrosia and Eddie Rabbitt are ready for the eerie naturalism and exquisite counterpoint of In The Hour of the Loon.
Regardless of whether or not the album succeeds, Grayson Hughmatches up in excitement, diversity and sophistication to the best rock music recorded in 1981. Hugh and his band have achieved a meritorious level of musicianship, and his music is the kind that yields new delights and insights with each new listening.
Hartford ought to be proud.- Colin McEnroe – The Hartford Courant,
May 3, 1981
