~ Bio ~

The label "singer-songwriter" now conjures an image of the artist supposedly unencumbered by tradition, where "tradition" means "convention" or, worse, "cliche."

Simon Flory brings a pedigree to his music that defies such convenient assumptions. Born in rural Indiana shortly after his family moved "west" from southern Virginia to start a livestock feed store, Flory's music is suffused with the elements of his childhood – days spent in the fields, church sings, gravel roads, and genuine mule drawn molasses. It takes a perceptive ear to translate these icons of a mythical red-state "Americana" into the daily textures of real human lives, and Flory does it with, among his many contradictions, an urbane sensibility that invokes the sincerity of early country music (alt-alt-country?). His compositions are as much short-story sketches as they are songs, each populated – like the locales that inspire them – with those among us who have few choices. A waif from the Ozarks finds an odd comfort on the streets of an alien urban landscape ("Unholy Town"). A drunkard wakes to find more than the car that almost got him home is a wreck ("Crazy With The Heart"). Lovers patch their wounds and carry on in spite of themselves. Some find remorse; fewer find redemption.

Flory's sound evokes voices not much heard on radio airwaves, a stew of early country, gospel, and the best of classic Nashville. But rather than spectral museum pieces, these are the visceral, resonant, living voices of traditional idioms that are far too often caricatured and rarely venerated and furthered as they are under Flory's watch. Even his guitar playing captures the rhythmic tumble of clawhammer banjo and Appalachian fiddle (on both of which he's adept), and his vocal phrasing carries inflections from the Carter Family to Eddie Cochran to Hank Williams (I and III, not II).

After school, Flory briefly hit the road living and performing in California and Virginia before returning to the Midwest – Chicago to be exact – in 2004 and founded Merle The Mule, a country rock outfit. Now a working multi-instrumentalist and an employee at the Old Town School of Folk Music, as well as solo performer, Flory is keeping busy in and around the Chicago region.