PORT TOWNSEND — Singer-songwriter Sperry Hunt & Friends will offer a special outdoor CD release show of “Story Songs” at 3 p.m. Saturday.
The show will be at the Rainshadow Recording Outdoor Stage at Building 315 in Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend.
Tickets are $20 each from https://sperryhunt.brownpapertickets.com or at the door.
Eleven of the tunes on “Story Songs” were recorded in Port Townsend at the Rainshadow Studio.
“The first songs were the stories of my old classmates. (Listen to The Last Light and Bueno the Roan.) I wrote a second batch later chronicling the difficulties of people I knew more recently. (Listen to Broken Not Beautiful, Door in the Dark, etc.), Hunt said in a press release.
“For sixteen months I played my songs in the clubs in and around Boise, Idaho where we (Hunt, his wife, Springer, and their son) live now.”
The album took root after Hunt returned to his hometown of Houston, Texas for a high school reunion in 2011.
He began to have vivid dreams flooded with music and the few words he needed to stitch the jumble into songs.
And not just songs, but story songs.
He had begun at an early age. When he was 16, Hunt took a date to Houston’s folk club, Sand Mountain. He discovered Townes Van Zandt, whose desolate songs about lost love and the people he had met on the rails and roads of Texas, struck a chord.
Years later, Hunt bought a guitar and tried to put a few of his stories into songs.
He and his wife wed when he was 23 and soon after he began to sing covers and a few of his own songs in intimate Austin folk clubs like the Cactus Cafe.
A year later the couple, with a new son, took off for Marin County on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge in California. There, Sperry opened a small guitar store in Mill Valley called Hunt & Son Guitars.
He also taught songwriting for a year at the former Family Light Music School in Sausalito and wrote a book called “Songwriting: How To Write Music and Lyrics” that was published in Los Angeles.
Hunt continued performing his own music in local clubs like Mill Valley’s Sweetwater and Fairfax’s Sleeping Lady Cafe. He became friends and studied with master blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield.
Springer agreed to live in Los Angeles for two years while her husband tried to become a successful songwriter.
Recording demos and performing them at small venues, he won a prize at the Len Chandler and John Braheny’s L. A. Songwriters Showcase.
“Story Songs” was recorded by Everett Moran and mixed by Conor Sisk at Rainshadow Recording and features Joe Breskin, John “Greyhound” Maxwell, Jon Parry, David “Dawg” Grisman, Bernie Reilly and Troy Ferguson.
This concert series is produced by Rainshadow Recording as part of a collaboration with Matt Miner, former producer of the Northwind Songs concert series held at Northwind Arts Center before the pandemic.
The concert is sponsored by Strait Floors. Media sponsor is KPTZ Radio.
