Armadillo Man
Armadillo Man is poet laureate for a new emerging generation, a generation raised on stark realism. Armadillo Man’s not so gentle treatment of the turbulent realism that is life for many, many more than we care to acknowledge, has been sharpened by over a decade of work among those living on the edge of society.Your musical influences
Today's influences; generic shaved heads, cookie cutter goatees, and tattoos brought to you by MTV's stale ideas of what's hip.
Yesterday's influences; telling the blonde women in the corner with the fresh scar across her cheek from him, that at least her husband didn't give her HIV, to go with the other painful reminders of their time together....
Now the day before was an unexpected pleasure. The moment of Zen was all too clear as I stood giving the options of life through detox and sobriety to a man the spitting image of my father. Another strange twist of fate on a full moon morning, still groggy from the insomnia that that moon can bring.
While the influences of the week before were encompassed by paradise. An area that my co-workers have so named for the "camping in Yosemite" like bliss that the house-less embrace as home. That is until the self-righteous purveyors of peace shatter the morning silence with three bullets into a John's best friend, his white lab. A passive spirit I had the pleasure of playing with just a few weeks before. Even though the papers swung the pendulum of propaganda away from the truth, "Fearing for Their Lives, Police Kill Charging Pitbull". He will never forget the brutality of the morning, leaving him as empty as he was when his wife died years before, spiraling him into the these bushes and the depression that he has called home for years....
Every once in a while I am asked what influences my music, where does the style (or lack there of) flow from. What fuels my passions and my need to write? The straightest answer I can give is therapy. I have chosen a life's work of crusading for the underdog, trying to make some semblance of a difference to the disenfranchised, social castaways some people call homeless or mentally ill or drug addicts or criminals. Those human beings that have some how become less-than in a world that zooms by in air conditioned BMWs blaring the books on tape version of "Valley of the Dolls" into cosmetically altered perfect ears.... My therapy is simple, remove my day from my head and put it on paper, in the computer or into a tape deck. And even though I feel the need to apologize for what may seem to be a marketing of drama, I assure you that this is not. My "art" is for me first, a need that helps bring me clarity on days when there is not enough to go around, and if someone somewhere connects to it, then that is an extraordinary bonus....