The best singer-songwriter you've never heard!

By Jim Motavalli

And from that very first note I knew I was in the presence of a major artist. With Dan Bonis of Redding filling out the sound on dobro and mandolin, and New Canaan's Cadence Carroll on backup vocals, Martin played "Folding Chairs" and "Augustine Creek," both master works. Before he laid his guitar down, I knew he was not just another singer-songwriter, meriting polite applause and little more. Instead, here was a fully mature artist, whose songs were the product not only of unique talent, but also of long life experience and devotion to his craft. Bob Dylan was great when he was 21, Joni Mitchell and Jesse Winchester, too, but they got even better after colliding with some of life's curve balls.

In a song about partings, "Folding Chairs," from his second album, Waterproof, Martin sings of "A U.S. map on the seat/Folded one too many times/You lose a town in every crease/They take a toll at the state line," then he nails it by segueing into a brilliant chorus, "All your friends will miss you/Your best girl will kiss you/It's just scar tissue anyway/A heart that breaks like crystal/These are the things you put away."

When talking about Terence Martin, it's often the poetry of his vivid lyrics people mention first. He is, after all, an English teacher (at the French American School of New York) and he does, after all, have a master's degree in poetry from the University of California at Northridge. John Platt of WFUV calls him "a vivid wordsmith whose darkly fluid songs seep into your head and heart."

On a song called "Seventh Day" from Martin's first album, Division Street, he sings of a restless Eve who became convinced that "there was something more outside these walls." Then: "When God was resting she took flight/Leaving Adam with an ache in his side/Now he chases horizons to retrieve her/Crossing her path like a true believer." What makes the song so memorable are the next lines, "That's how roads were invented/It happened just that way/That's how roads were invented/When no one was looking, on the seventh day."

But Martin is far more than just a good lyricist. As his longtime friend and co-writer Gregory Hicks puts it, "There's no weakness in his music at all. He writes memorable melodies that you can't get out of your head, is a wonderful singer and a very good guitar player. I don't know anyone who can touch him." New York-based singer-songwriter Christine Lavin adds that Martin is "a deep and thoughtful writer, composes finely crafted songs, has a beautiful voice, plays a mean guitar...and it doesn't hurt that he looks like Harrison Ford!"

The 50-ish Martin looks like a craggy cross between Harrison Ford and Tom Berenger. OK, OK, you've got the idea that I like his music, and him, and that many other people, some of whom you may even have heard of, agree with me. But how can I convince you that this guy is the real deal, and that you shouldn't go another day without hearing his music? I'll do my best, but these are only words on paper.

A LONG APPRENTICESHIP

Terence Martin was born in London to working-class British parents who moved the family to Los Angeles, following the aerospace industry. He grew up listening to rock and roll and doo-wop on stations like KRLA and KFWB and old Kingston Trio and Limeliters albums from his parents' collection. His first instrument was the accordion because drums and the trumpet were too loud for his parents. He also acquired a harmonica, which he still plays, after hearing one early on in the David Amram score for the 1961 Burt Lancaster film Young Savages.

Martin was a solitary kid, new to America, into bird watching and the trains that rattled past his house. Music became an escape and an obsession. It was the early '60s so it was inevitable that he would join a rock band, and the first was Morning Blues, "playing our version of Muddy Waters and Rolling Stones covers," with some high school buddies in Van Nuys.

It was a heady time, and Martin wasn't ready for college, flunking out after a few semesters. Three of the four band members also lacked scholarly ambitions and so got drafted, with two going to Vietnam and another, Martin, to Germany. He wasn't quite Elvis, but he did buy a guitar at the PX and worked on his poetry and music in between stints as an ambulance driver and medic.

Back in the States, he was reunited with his buddies and began playing bass in local bands with names like Surface Tension, White Noise and Homegrown. One memorable night he even sat in with Ike and Tina Turner. "The bands got less and less electric," Hicks recounts. "He parted company with White Noise because they didn't like the unplugged direction he was going in."

Martin was still writing poetry and going to poetry readings. He went back to school as a music major on the GI Bill, but took an English class and "fell in love with it," he says. "I decided I wanted to be an English teacher and got very serious." Music was shoved in the background, except for gigs playing double bass in the Burbank Symphony.

Martin met Hicks in the mid-1980s during the stint with Surface Tension. "He was already a good bass player and a good arranger," Hicks says. "He arranged my songs, then realized he could write, too." Martin says that working on Hicks' songs honed his own craft and revived his interest in music. "I wrote my first decent song back then," he says.

One night at the LA club that later became famous as the Viper Room (a celebrity hangout where River Phoenix OD'ed), Martin was playing his show-stopper, "Our Lady of Darkness," when all the lights in the club blew out, leaving the room lit up by amp lights as the band finished the song.

At a songwriting workshop around 1992, Martin had a fortuitous meeting with legendary Capitol Records producer Nik Venet (The Beach Boys and Linda Ronstadt's A Different Drum, among more than 300 albums) who, he says, "helped me find my true voice. He heard something in what I was doing, and he showed me that I was singing an octave and a half too high." Now that he was somewhere between a baritone and a high bass, he was on the path trodden by Gordon Lightfoot, Greg Brown, Bruce Cockburn and countless other deep-voiced troubadours with guitars. A singer-songwriter was born. "I was getting too old to play rock and roll," says Martin. "It started to feel silly."

THE MOVE EAST

Los Angeles is not really a folk town. The big acts play the west coast branch of New York's Knitting Factory, the Roxy in Hollywood or McCabe's in Santa Monica, and everyone else scrambles for work in the intermittent coffeehouses like Sacred Grounds in San Pedro or various folk series. The glory days when internationally known homegrown groups like The Byrds (with their folk roots showing) played the Whiskey A Go Go to sold-out houses are long gone.

Martin, despite his English degrees, was scuffling in LA and at the same time hearing wonderful things about the scene back east, where songwriters like Christine Lavin and Jack Hardy were pushing the New York-based Fast Folk Musical Magazine records and organizing their own events. The musicians he read about in Performing Songwriter magazine all seemed to live in Massachusetts or Connecticut. New England was and is an especially fertile place for songwriters, with its vast coffeehouse network and clubs like the Acoustic Café in Bridgeport and the Iron Horse in Northampton. The Boston area alone has 22 coffeehouses, plus the acclaimed Boston Folk Festival.

In 1994, after the Los Angeles earthquake, Martin left his job as head of the English department at Valley College and moved to Fairfield, Conn., where he knew exactly nobody. "It took a while," he says. "I spent two years just writing songs and recording a demo tape, which cost me a fortune." But then he met multi-instrumentalist Jim Allen of Newtown and his fortunes began to turn around.

"Jim has a lot to do with my sound," Martin says. "My first album was basically just the two of us. It's been a very productive partnership." Allen plays guitar and mandolin on all of Martin's album, and fits in brilliantly, plugging the gaps with rich hooks and fills.

"We met at a session six years ago," says Allen, who teaches guitar, piano and mandolin when he's not playing out or in the studio. They quickly evolved a working relationship: Allen would improvise on the new songs, and Martin would say, "Let's keep what you just played," and it would be locked in as a theme or melodic hook

Allen is effusive about Martin's latest songs, soon to appear on his third album, Sleeper. "They're both very tangible and transcendent," Allen says. "The lyrics will surprise you, because they have a way of getting to the kernel of truth about things. He uses ordinary images to convey thoughts and feelings that are out of reach to most people. They're tangible images to express intangible qualities."

The momentum built slowly. Performing, often as the opening act, at places like the Good Folk Coffeehouse in Rowayton, the Rich Forum in Stamford or the Turning Point and the Town Crier, showcase clubs in New York, Martin, now living in Larchmont, N.Y., began to be known as a reliable draw.

I've seen the same thing happen. At this year's Tressler picnic, when Martin finally got to play inside the barn, his late set backed by Dan Bonis stopped the chatter. I saw Will Tressler, genial leader of the Jackson Pike Skifflers, lean over to his wife, Kate, and say, "Hey, this guy is good!"

One of the things people notice is craft. Some great songs are written in five minutes on the back of a napkin, but others are carefully shaped and burnished over time until they shine all the way through. Lisa Grey, whose Ossining-based Grey Communications does work for Martin, says she loves the way he develops his songs. "Just when I think a song is nearly finished, I realize he has only just begun it. For example, the first version of 'All the Bricks in Baltimore' had at one time a completely different melody, which, by the way, I thought was wonderful. A year later, he had totally rewritten the song, and it sounded even better. I admire Terence's dedication to finding just the right word, image or metaphor, and his courage to let go of something very good to aspire for something great."

Dennis Hrbek, a Connecticut recording veteran whose Fairfield studio is home base for Martin, says the same thing. "I gained respect for him because of his ability to write and rewrite his songs," Hrbek says. "He really listens to what people say about his music, and he'll respond by coming up with a new melody or chord structure that will just blow me away. You can really bounce your ideas off him."

It's telling that the people Martin impresses most are his peers, fellow songwriters. Danny Schmidt, a Virginia performer with two albums out including the recent Enjoying the Fall, heard Martin at a recent Folk Alliance conference. "He was one of two people there whose music I really liked," says Schmidt, now a personal friend who sits up all night writing songs with Martin. "His stuff really grabbed me and I was struck by its literary quality. The best things you hear can just sneak up on you."

Jim Allen rarely plays on the road with Martin. That role mainly falls to the quiet Dan Bonis, who plays dobro, lap steel and mandolin. "I met him through Jim Allen and first saw him opening for Martin Simpson at the Town Crier," says Bonis, who toils in a Redding arboretum during the day. "I loved it and saw the opportunity for real chemistry between us. I took his first CD home, quickly learned the songs and we started playing together very soon after that." Bonis and Martin often play as a duo, and have developed a surprisingly full sound, complete with chiming harmonies.

Martin does play solo, but you're blessed if you see him with the whole band, which includes Bonis on multiple instruments, Cadence Carroll on background vocals and djembe drums and Gordon Roehrer on bass. Carroll's vocals and delicate drumbeats are a particularly worthy addition. Martin has always been fond of female backup singing, and Carroll's ethereal choruses are a nice complement to his gruff baritone.

Carroll, who has a thriving solo career and can often be seen playing with the Kennedys, obviously loves working with Terence Martin: she lights up the performing spaces with her smiles. "Terence Martin is one of the most wonderfully understated songwriters I've ever met," Carroll says. "He is a joy to be around, a poet at heart and his proficient use of the English language shows through in the emotionally charged lines of his songs. The happiness that making music brings him is infectious and shines through whenever he is on stage." The same is true of Carroll herself.

MAKING IT

As good as he is, can Terence Martin break through the clutter, the glut of singer-songwriters who clog the Americana scene? The fact that he's better than most of them, even better than most of the people he opens for, may unfortunately be beside the point.

Meg Griffin is a perceptive observer and, in fact, used to book Martin on some dates. "There's an awful lot to work with when you're talking about Terence Martin," she says. "But record companies are often looking for younger performers, people in their 20s. They rarely take the time to develop an artist, even when they're obviously talented. We're in a very cosmetic, very superficial time. But all that said, I certainly think there should be room for a person like Terence. His audience is probably his peers, people who've lived long enough to appreciate that he has something profound to say. That's what labels like Red House and Signature Sounds offer, marketing to an audience that is clearly in his demographic. Something needs to happen for him now, so he can get beyond being an opening act and reach a wider audience. It's not the easiest thing to do, and it takes tenacity."

Tenacity is clearly something Martin has. Like the lesson-planned English teacher he is, Martin conducts rehearsals and sessions so they're totally organized and start on time. "He's very professional to work with," says Bonis. "When I arrive at the studio, the charts are written out for me."

Griffin says that when she played Terence Martin songs on WFUV or WNEW in sets with people like Steve Earle and Bob Dylan, the phone would ring off the hook. "He belongs in that sandwich," she says. "Now I'm playing him on the Sirius Radio eclectic channel, alongside Moby and B.B. King."

Dan Bonis thinks that maybe Martin's timing is slightly off. "If he'd made his first CD 15 or 20 years ago, when Richard Shindell, Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega and people like that were first coming out, he'd be a household name by now," Bonis says. "It's much harder now because everyone can make a record and there's so much competition. But the fact is that Sleeper is Terence's best material yet, so things may happen."

Record companies were recently amazed to discover that James Taylor's latest album, October Road, was a runaway hit, proving that even performers in their 50s can connect to large audiences. Not every performer has to hit the stage with a bare navel!

There's no doubt that the soon-to-be-released Sleeper is a wonderful album. On the opener, "The Way It Didn't Go," he sings about the relationships that we just miss, and all that follows from that: the kisses that weren't kissed, the memories that weren't made, the children that didn't have our eyes. "I can't forget the love we didn't make," he sings. "23rd Street Runs into Heaven" borrows a title from a mentor, poet Kenneth Patchen. "Evening Sky" is a tender love song. "Bethlehem" is kind of a Christmas song, but it's about Bethlehem, Pa. The CD is full of wise lines and evocative scenes, and it has more hooks than a tackle box. Bonis, Carroll and Allen all shine.

A MUSICIANS' MUSICIAN

Just as the late novelist Richard Yates was a "writer's writer," frequently cited as an influence by other scribes but rarely encountered by the general public, so Terence Martin is a musicians' musician on many folkies' "Ten Best" lists. He won an honorable mention at the Fast Folk Songwriters' Contest in 1997, played the Falcon Ridge New Artists' Showcase in 1999, won the New Jersey Folk Festival New Folk Showcase in 2001 and is anthologized in the book Four Valley Poets. His song, "Familiar Mysteries," from Waterproof was selected by Paul McCartney's Garland Appeal for a CD benefiting breast cancer research.

But none of these honors push Martin to the next level, where musicians can quit their day jobs. I had lunch with Martin in a Norwalk diner to research this story and, when I asked him what he hoped to achieve, his answer was disarmingly modest. "I'd like to be able to support myself playing music," he said. If Martin lived in Europe or Canada, where songwriters are treated like national treasures and supported with stipends and grants, that would already have happened. But in America, great music is made on a shoestring while the landlord hovers outside the door. There's no guarantee for even modest dreams.

Back at the diner, I had fun talking to Martin, because all his stories are full of interesting digressions and pauses to express various enthusiasms for books, music and philosophy. He's funny, quick, a fount of literary references and not guarded at all. In all ways that matter, he's comfortable to be around. After our meeting, I went home and listened to a test-pressing of Sleeper and, once again, I just knew. Terence Martin is the real thing.

Terence Martin's website is at www.martinsongs.com, and it offers gig itineraries and the chance to buy any of his three CDs. Upcoming dates include the Vanilla Bean coffeehouse in Pomfret, Conn., on Saturday, Nov. 16, (860) 928-1562; and a double bill with Martin fans Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams at Bodles Opera House in Chester, N.Y., on Saturday, Nov. 23, (845) 469-4595. A record release party for Sleeper will be held at the Turning Point, 468 Piermont Ave. in Piermont, N.Y., Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m., hosted by WFDU's Jerry Treacy. Call (845) 359-1089 for more information.

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