Heartbreak Sampler by Crooked Roads

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FROM CUSTOMERS:

"I think what's great about a CD, for me, is feeling like I can really hear the honest (even brutally honest) voice of the writer/singer, and that really comes through on your CD."

Laura Gomez

Phoenix, AZ

“I really liked the CD! I listened to it, like, 10 times.”

Bob Neer

New York, NY

"That is a hell of a good CD you put together. I’ve really enjoyed listening to it."

Helmut Fickenwirth

Hingham, MA

"I've thoroughly enjoyed it. My favorite tracks… are Goddam Wonderful World, Rain & New Eyes… Chris, I really like your music… I love your lyrics.”

Mike Hazen

Grayslake, IL.

“I received the CD yesterday. I think it is wonderful! I want to send one to each of my sons.”

Raleigh Buckmaster

Lansing, IA

"I've been fortunate enough to work with a few songwriters over the past year. All were talented, but I'm most proud of the project I did with you."

Gary Lamb, Heartbreak Sampler musician

MORE FROM AMERICANA-UK.COM:

"It’s rare to come across such an honest songwriter as Chris Dingman... That honesty pervades 'Heartbreak Sampler', which is a frank, painful and resigned look at the single life. But it’s an uplifting album, partly in the way that only honestly expressed pain can be, but partly because of the way Dingman has with a melody and the killer lines with which every track is filled... 'Heartbreak Sampler' doesn’t have a duff line, not an ounce of lyrical fat or filler, just honest sentiments pared down to the bone, then scraped away a little more to reveal the universal truths underneath..."

CROOKED ROADS & HEARTBREAK SAMPLER

Almost two years in the making and featuring some of the Bay Area's best country-rock musicians (including pedal steel player David Phillips who has recorded with Tom Waits, among many other notables), "Heartbreak Sampler" is Crooked Roads second CD.

Graced by pedal steel, fiddle and electric and acoustic guitars, "Heartbreak Sampler" is an earthy mix of sad and funny, melancholy and soaring.

While the songs may by turns invite comparisons to early Merle Hagard, the Stones’ "Exile on Main Street," Ryan Adams’ "Heartbreaker," or George Harrison’s "All Things Must Pass," the record still feels unified by a single personality.

What else do the songs have in common? All the lyrics are smart without sacrificing heart for cleverness. (Dingman: "I hate Cole Porter.") Every melody is catchy. (Dingman: "Most of these melodies came to me on the edges of sleep, when my chattering mind was turned off. I never lie down without a little tape recorder next to me.) And every song's subject is love. (Dingman: "The only subject.")

Dingman: "I'm not interested in telling stories, or trying to write from some other character's perspective. I write to explore and express my inner life--to acknowledge wounds and in doing that, to heal them. So in that sense my songs are personal. But a song isn't journal writing. It also has to open out to the listener and invite them in. So I want my lyrics to be accessible, not private. I want them to resonate with others."

An artist as a boy, a short story writer in college, a screenwriter and poet afterwards, Dingman has finally found in music a medium sufficient to mirror the pain, longing, sadness and beauty of his and all of our inner lives.

CHRIS DINGMAN'S CROOKED ROAD

Dingman grew up in the New Hampshire countryside, in a little town of a thousand people, where he spent his time wandering the woods, drawing and plunking out melodies on his father’s piano. With no radio and one TV station, Dingman was almost entirely isolated from mainstream culture. Almost. "My family wasn't religious and I wasn't exposed to any mystical ideas, I don't think. But when I heard my mom's Beatles' records, I remember thinking if there is a God, He's coming through these guys."

It must have spooked him, though, because he didn’t pick up a guitar until he was 21, when he first heard Dylan’s Freewheeling. “There was something ghostly in his singing. It seemed off-hand but incredibly tender. That summer I was also reading D.H. Lawrence and Nietzsche, writers that stir up your whole body, not just your mind. I was at Harvard at the time, but the summer I heard Freewheeling made school seem beside the point.”

Dingman eventually wound up in California, where he thought of himself more as a writer than a songwriter. “I think music affected me so deeply that I didn't dare approach songwriting. Not yet.” Instead, Dingman made his living as a screenwriter for a time and tried hard to keep music on the side.

It didn't work.

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