Official Biography

Have you read The Carnival Papers lately? There’s great news for fans of Steve Reynolds, the well traveled singer/songwriter who’s made modern rock a safe haven and powerful outlet for storytelling troubadours these past few years. After numerous tours of the U.S. and Europe, where he’s charmed and intrigued crowds of up to 2,000 fans everywhere from Norway and The Netherlands to France, Ireland and England, Reynolds is also back from Exile, his critically acclaimed 2006 debut on 429 Records.

While The Carnival Papers is slightly less personal and cathartic than his first album, it still boasts the key trademarks Reynolds is now famous for: characters who are worldly, wise and searching, who weave compelling, hypnotic tales of love and life with colorful sonic backgrounds that range from sparsely acoustic (a vibe he carries over from Exile) to transcendently electric. He tops this off with symphonic and electronic touches, or what he dubs “quirky noises” swirling around at just the right moments. “While that album focused on leaving things behind,” he says, “the new one explores the current state of being. I did more observing, and was not afraid to say things more obviously.”

Recorded at Blackbox Studios in the rural French town of Le Bourg d’Ire, the project was helmed by David Odlum (former guitarist of the Dublin based alt-pop band The Frames) and features a stellar lineup of musicians including former Frames drummer David Hingerty, Ian Walker (upright bass), Joshua Grange (guitars), Jim Bianco (piano), Joel Shearer (guitar), Karl Odlum (bass), Oliver Krause (strings) and Cisco De Luna (banjo, harmonium). Adding their harmonic vocal grace to the mix are Cary Brothers, Gemma Hayes and British singer/songwriter Tom McRae, who has been on the bill with Reynolds on past Hotel Café tours throughout Europe.

History reveals that as music became increasingly central to his life, Reynolds took to the road and traveled across continents collecting stories, which became easier (and better funded!) once Nic Harcourt, music director of Santa Monica, California based KCRW and host of its iconic “Morning Becomes Eclectic” show, embraced and began playing his music in the early 2000s.
Two of the songs that Harcourt played extensively, “Painter and Son” and “Miner’s Lamp,” later became set pieces on Exile.

The new collection has 11 such bursts of musical narrative inspiration that speak to the power of adventure, in addition to Reynolds’ widely celebrated version of The Band’s “Stage Fright,” which originally appeared on the 429 Records all-star project Endless Highway: The Music of The Band. No Depression raved of this thoughtful, easy rolling version: “If the music is worth revisiting, it’s worth revisiting from a different angle…Respect to Steve Reynolds for his ballsy, austere cut.” The track was also acclaimed everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone, Performing Songwriter and Stylus.

“Overall,” he says, “I feel like I’m just a bit more in my skin on this record and less afraid of everything. The overall vibe is more optimistic than Exile, because I’m confident and not afraid to just say what’s on my mind, like on ‘Save Your Best,’ which is about learning what’s really going on in a relationship that on the surface is something else. Even though I wrote and recorded it far away from my adopted home of Los Angeles, it feels closer to where I really am in my life. The first album took a rootsy approach, but here, working with David Odlum, I think I was recalling some of the rock and punk sounds that were a staple in my earlier years. If a song needed to be loud, it was loud, if it required softness, it was soft. There were no sonic limitations and I was ridiculously fortunate to have the cream of the crop of musicians, including an Irish rhythm section, backing me. A lot of the more intriguing ambient sounds came from Dave and me sitting in a room once we had finished the basic tracks, being kooky like kids in a lab, having fun and making this the best record it could be.”

Before jetting off to France to record the tracks that evolved into The Carnival Papers, the Vancouver born and raised Reynolds sought inspiration in a place far removed from the bustling reality of life in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles—Gabriola Island, one of the Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia in his native British Columbia, located three miles east of Nanaimo (Vancouver Island). Locking himself in a little cabin on his uncle’s expansive property, he freed himself from the phone and internet, used a wood burning stove, communed with the local deer and fired up his laptop to record the songs he came up with singing along with his acoustic guitar. This idyllic Eden was a far cry from the cheap one bedroom apartment in the Koreatown section of L.A. where he composed the tunes for Exile—yet even in the wild of the Canadian woods, he wasn’t immune to the onset of a brief but challenging bout with writer’s block.

“Because I had enjoyed success with Exile and had a growing fan base from the touring I had done in the U.S. and especially throughout Europe,” he says, “I definitely felt everybody was expecting me to up my game a little. For the most part, the writing process was fun and effortless, but then for six days, I couldn’t get anything. I basically had enough material for a full album, but I wanted to go to France with a total of 18 songs or so to choose from. So I wanted to write six extra tracks. After a few days of worrying about it, with my trip and studio time in the little town all booked, I had this really crazy dream and woke up at 4 a.m. one night. I felt messed up, but I walked down and sat on the front porch in the dark, smoking Camel Lights and drinking epic amounts of tea. I walked back inside and picked up my guitar and in ten minutes I wrote ‘Winter Stores,’ which I recorded in about an hour and a half. After sleeping for a while, I woke up and wrote four more songs just like that.”

The result of what Reynold’s jokingly refers to as his “cigarettes and tea” project is a beautiful collection of songs that will take longtime and new fans alike to the heart of the acoustic guitar and soar to the heights of distortion. His stream of consciousness, track by track commentary is insightful: “Winter Stores’ is seriously the first time I ever consciously wrote a story song. It speaks to frontier life, and the image in my head was an old run down town with a dirt road and wagon wheels. ‘Set Your Sights’ is a straightforward tune that I had been kicking around for a long time. For me the first line says it all: ‘She came at noon but never really cared for the taste of food.’ It’s about asking someone out and they show up even though they don’t want to be there. It’s like a restless engine trying to make something work that won’t. ‘Once In Your Life’ is about people I’ve met in L.A., where everyone is on the hunt for something, usually a big career. It’s optimistic, because the city is a place where people can and do have it all. ‘For The Last Time’ has me thinking about things like the war, and aging, the idea that we’re all in such a hurry to get somewhere, and maybe we should take the time to pay attention to this minute.”

Reynolds continues: “Coming In Too Low is, along with We Will Pay one of my favorite songs on The Carnival Papers. It’s just a metaphoric image for life, coming in too low, trying to make something work but exhausting it to the point where you crash and burn. ‘We Will Pay’ is an ode to bad parents, cautioning them not to project their own toxic issues onto their kids. ‘Cover Of Night’? It’s a secret, a story song about what I call ‘clandestine nocturnal behavior. ‘House I Built’ has been a big song for me when I play live. I think it’s because it’s a theme we can all relate to about not skipping steps in building a strong foundation for whatever is important in your life, career, relationship, love, whatever. It’s about not putting too much water in the cement. ‘It’s Too Late’ was inspired by the film Garden State. The movie got me reminiscing about my early 20s and a house I lived in with some cool folks and lovely women. And ‘Mistaken Identity’ was written in about 20 minutes after I finished one of my tours in Europe. It’s just about being at a crossroads and trying to figure out my future.”

That future seems brighter now, say, than back in the days when he lived in his van for two years while traipsing around the West Coast. Or taking truly Canadian jobs during his formative years, gigs like being a tugboat hand and sawman. Reynolds, who likes to say he was raised on “beer and Neil Diamond,” has always believed that the more he messed up, the better the music became. The family consensus was that since he spent so much time confined to his room for various misdeeds, he ought to occupy his time with something constructive. He sounds Lincolnesque when he talks about walking through a ravine to elementary school, and he was ambitious from the get go, driving his ’69 Chevy Newport to New York City immediately after graduating high school.

Everything changed when Nic Harcourt started playing his demos on KCRW and booked him to play a concert series at the Getty Center in 2001. While building a local following at clubs like The Mint and Temple Bar, Reynolds also joined Gary Jules, Lexie Murdoch, East Mountain South and Jim Bianco as the regular up and coming performers who put Hotel Café in Hollywood on the indie artist map. As Reynolds has enjoyed the global popularity of the venue’s vibe on European and national tours these past few years, the original location has thrived as one of the industry’s true hotbeds of rising talent.