Larry Good won the Telluride Bluegrass Festival songwriting contest, performing on the festival’s main stage two years in a row. Still, he’s not really a bluegrass guy. He has opened for artists like John Prine, Jimmy Cliff, Little Feat, David Wilcox, John Hiatt, Warren Zevon and Steel Pulse, but he is not a folkie, or a reggae man. He earned a BA in musical composition from Stanford University, and although he produces orchestral film scores he’s not really a classical guy either. He doesn’t characterize himself as either a guitarist or a pianist, though he plays both professionally. Larry just never could make up his mind, wouldn’t commit!

As you may hear in the wide stylistic range in his albums and film score work, Larry is an homage guy, casting the music to best serve the song, or the scene, or the characters.  This leads him into some interesting and obscure territories. Retro-cool space-age bachelor-pad lounge music, anyone?

In the winter of 2009 Larry had the the opportunity to spend time (and money) in Great Divide Studios where he recorded the basic tracks for three new albums. This musical carpet-bombing approach allowed him to be all things at once – hints of Les McCann on the instrumental Five Points, Les Baxter on Cheeze Party (“Les is more“), raw blues in the intimate Blue Flame, the Floydian Falling Out, truck-stop wisdom in the country-to-the-bone Buffalo Nickels, Broken Down Cars and Cowboys Don’t Cry. The three albums available here are so different from each other, it is hard to imagine they came from one artist,  but you might like them all!