User:Invisiboy42293/Gabe Lee

Gabe Lee is an American country singer-songwriter.

Early life

Lee was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. His parents, both Taiwanese immigrants, arrived in America in the 1980s and lived in Arizona before settling in Nashville. His father played guitar while his mother was a professional pianist, and the churchgoing couple exposed him to bluegrass, classical, and church music.

Following his mother's example, Lee took piano lessons and eventually attended Belmont University for a year, where he majored in music with an emphasis in piano while bartending on the side. However, Lee soon discovered alternative rock bands like Nirvana, Franz Ferdinand, Bright Eyes, and The Shins, as well as classic rock acts like Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and Creedence Clearwater Revival through friends' record collections. This inspired Lee to take up guitar and begin writing songs, and he subsequently dropped out of Belmont to pursue music, performing at clubs around Nashville. He then attended Indiana University for a time, studying literature and journalism, before returning to Nashville.

Career

Lee's debut album, Farmland, was released in 2019. Despite being recorded in only two days, the album was well-received by critics. Lee released a second album, Honky-Tonk Hell, in 2020, which received further critical acclaim. The album track "Heartbreaker's Smile" was premiered exclusively by Billboard, and the title track was co-written with Marcus King. In 2021, he released the live EP Gabe Lee Live at Water Street Music Hall, recorded at the eponymous venue in Rochester, New York, as well as reimagined single versions of previous songs "Ol' Smokey" and "Lyra". During this time, he opened for artists including Brent Cobb, Molly Tuttle, Kip Moore, American Aquarium and Terry Allen. In December 2021, Lee opened for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Atlanta's Tabernacle venue, as part of Isbell's 2021-2022 tour.

In early 2022, Lee released the single "Common Law", a duet with singer Zoe Cummins. His third studio album, The Hometown Kid, was recorded with co-producer/keyboardist David Dorn (Jimmie Allen, Rodney Atkins, Luke Bryan, Chris Janson). The album was initially announced for summer 2022, but ultimately released in October. In August, Lee performed at Pickathon alongside acts including Valerie June, Sons of Kemet, Faye Webster, Built to Spill, and Hurray for the Riff Raff. In November, he held an album release show in Nashville, followed by a show at Rockwood Music Hall in New York and at Nashville's Pindrop Songwriter Series.

• • "Lee's earlier material, like 2020's critically-beloved "Honkytonk Hell," sounded like dusty, inspirational homages to well-curated record collections and pleasantly ear-worming East Nashville outlaw folklore. That yielded a record roundly praised as one of 2021's finest. "
  • He's a practical creator, now three albums into working alongside his manager, Alex Torrez and their small, co-founded independent label Torrez Music Group. Currently constantly touring, his time on bigger stages (he counts recent gigs with American Aquarium, Kip Moore, Jason Isbell and Molly Tuttle in the past year as particularly noteworthy) with more significant stakes has led him past being what he'd consider being something of a "John Prine-inspired imitator" to now having evolved his singing voice and playing style to add "nuances and diversity" that have polished his rising star status to shine brighter than before."
• • "On July 16, Gabe Lee will step into the Grand Ole Opry circle for the first time, just days after releasing his latest album, Drink the River, out July 14"
  • "Lee and his manager, Alex Torrez, founded the indie label Torrez Music Group, under which Lee has issued three albums (with Drink the River to be his fourth) in approximately as many years, including his breakthrough, 2020 roots-rock project Honky Tonk Hell, and last year’s The Hometown Kid. He’s kept a marathon runner’s pace — steady and relentless — as he balances studio time and writing with ever-more prominent performance slots, having shared stages with artists including Isbell, American Aquarium and Molly Tuttle. To date, Lee’s songs have registered 10.5 million official U.S. on-demand streams, according to Luminate."
  • "He is also slated to perform during the Americana Music Association’s annual AMERICANAFEST in September, and was recently added to Tidal’s “Tidal Rising” new artist program, which also includes Sunny War, Kara Jackson and Kassa Overall. "
• • "The album pulls back the instrumentals in favor of the fiddle, mandolin, and banjo, digging into the bluegrass influence that has always traced Lee’s work and showcasing some of the best string players in town including Grand Ole Opry members Jason Roller and Eamon McLaughlin. "

Artistry

Lee's music blends elements of country, heartland rock, folk, bluegrass, and Americana.

• • "A singer and songwriter whose music is steeped in honky tonk country and rough-hewn folk sounds, Gabe Lee specializes in telling stories about hard living and love that doesn't come easy. While there are also elements of heartland rock in his sound, Lee's performances put the emphasis on the rootsy side of his material."
  • "The Hometown Kid found Lee expanding his reach, adding soulful Americana undertones along with a couple of heartland rock moves."

(sources, convert to prose)

• • "2019's Farmland offers a no-frills introduction to Lee's music, while 2020's Honky Tonk Hell is a more polished and diverse effort, a path he continued on the soulful 2022 album The Hometown Kid."
  • second album, Honky-Tonk Hell, featured the song "Emmylou", the first he wrote on piano instead of guitar
• • "“The first record was very light instrumentation, a pretty sparse, intimate feel trying to showcase the storytelling,” Lee, a Nashville native of Taiwanese descent, tells Billboard. “This album I recorded with a band, which was really a joy. It was fun seeing the songs come to life from these acoustic work tapes I had. It shows we can get loud, too.”"
  • "the soulful, Van Morrison flavor of “Great Big River.”"
  • "“Heartbreaker’s Smile,” meanwhile, was written during the Farmland cycle but was held for Honky Tonk Hell. “It had a similar vibe to that first batch of songs,” Lee, a classically trained pianist, explains, “and it fit perfectly for this next record because it hearkens back to that sound from Farmland. It’s kind of like a thread back to the first record that leads into this new one.” And the title should certainly have listeners reaching for the hanky before it comes on. “It’s descriptive of a heartbreaker,” Lee notes, “anyone who everyone seems to love but who’s hard to nail down, personality wise. It’s someone who’s in everyone’s hearts but at the same time is always on the move. It’s actually a very positive song, not quite your average heartbreak, sad and lonely kind of vibe. We wanted it to be a little happier.”
  • Overall, Lee says the 11-song Honky Tonk Hell “is showcasing the variety of songwriting and the variety of musicians we have and what we can do with our little set-up in the studio. If I think about it from an outside standpoint it’s pretty impressive that we managed to string all these different sounds together on one record.”
  • "With a light touring history, Lee — who studied at Belmont University in Nashville and the University of Indiana in Bloomington — is anxious to get on the road soon to raise some Honky Tonk Hell. While he waits, however, he’s playing around Nashville and also keeping up his “side gigs” as a bartender who, by his own estimation, is pretty cool with the cocktails."
• • "However, even though he credits his parents for instilling this love for music within him, it was others who turned him onto the country and southern rock that now makes up his sound. Lee says that parents of his friends were instrumental in putting artists like John Prine, Bob Dylan and Lynyrd Skynyrd on his radar, sending him down a rabbit hole of music that would forever change his life."
  • "This led him to transfer to Indiana University to study journalism; while there he eventually found his way back to music. There he befriended several students of the school’s music program and started jamming with them, slowly rediscovering his passion and how to pair language with song."
  • "He’s also opened for some of the top acts in country, rock n roll and bluegrass such as Jason Isbell, Brent Cobb, Molly Tuttle, American Aquarium and Texas legend Terry Allen."
  • "This success comes despite being one of very few Asian Americans in mainstream country music - even though their presence in Nashville dates back almost 60 years with Japan’s Tomi Fujiyama, who in 1964 made her Grand Ole Opry debut, following up Johnny Cash with a performance of ‘Tennessee Waltz’. With organizations like the Americana Music Association and Black Opry pushing toward more inclusiveness in the industry, Lee hopes that the welcoming of more voices will include more Asian Americans such as himself. “You always want to win people over, but if you look and sound different you can run into some roadblocks,” said Lee. “As a listener, I’m going to judge an artist by their production and their songwriting before I pay any attention to what they look like, but I know that’s not the case for everyone.”"
  • "Helping Lee to pave the way is the breadth of his musical tastes, ranging from traditional country to gospel, southern rock, bluegrass and even punk rock."
  • went through a "weird" middle and high school punk rock phase, which led him to Bright Eyes, particularly the album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and the song "Luna".
  • Wilco was another teenage influence, particularly the album Sky Blue Sky.
  • John Prine's album German Afternoons and song "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness"
  • Jackson Browne's album Running on Empty and title track.
  • Fan of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, in particular the album Grievous Angel and duet song "Love Hurts".
• • "Gabe Lee's style of Americana-flavored country music...fulfill expectations in a way that delivers heavily on heartwarming goodness with no thought as to modern evolution."
  • ""The Hometown Kid," errs in the direction of a decade-long period between 1975-1985 where acts like Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Tom Petty created a seamless blend between folk-style story songs and hook-driven arena-filling rock anthems."
  • "Lee's earlier material, like 2020's critically-beloved "Honkytonk Hell," sounded like dusty, inspirational homages to well-curated record collections and pleasantly ear-worming East Nashville outlaw folklore. That yielded a record roundly praised as one of 2021's finest. "
  • He's a practical creator, now three albums into working alongside his manager, Alex Torrez and their small, co-founded independent label Torrez Music Group. Currently constantly touring, his time on bigger stages (he counts recent gigs with American Aquarium, Kip Moore, Jason Isbell and Molly Tuttle in the past year as particularly noteworthy) with more significant stakes has led him past being what he'd consider being something of a "John Prine-inspired imitator" to now having evolved his singing voice and playing style to add "nuances and diversity" that have polished his rising star status to shine brighter than before."
  • "Guys like Prine, Hayes Carll, Chris Stapleton? They were plugging away for quite a while, patiently improving while putting butts in seats and selling tickets," says Lee.
  • "Highlighting his new album, the previously-mentioned "chased" sound is best defined by Billy Joel-style piano ballad "Buffalo Road," which reflects a "Iive" sound built around a vocal-led soulful groove that was "easy for the band to play," with deep harmonies. Also, more expanded sensibilities come to the forefront via "Wide Open," which, with its "interesting" drums and synthesizers, highlights Lee's growing desire to experiment with his formula for success."
  • "I'm showcasing a rougher, more soulful music, like the kind of stuff that Brent Cobb, Shooter Jennings and Nikki Lane are into, [on "The Hometown Kid"], says Lee.
  • "Instead, a growing comfort and friendship working in an intimate studio set-up and Farmland Studios with session musicians with a half-century of experience and producers like well-respected keyboardist David Dorn (Jimmie Allen, Rodney Atkins, Luke Bryan, Chris Janson) lead to him being able to call out needing "Jeff Tweedy and Wilco," or "Ryan Adams" vibes to evolve a recording. Then, because of their experience, they can impart those vibes on a track."
  • "Unfortunately, sustained Asian-American roots in country music are difficult to locate. However, Lee's songwriting talents were influenced by a life that's seen him spend summers in places like country music's ancestral home of Bristol, Tennessee, in the wake of relationships gone awry."
  • He describes a summer there working for Johnson City, Tennessee's Axis Security, at festivals and motocross rallies while living in a double-wide trailer by the Tennessee River as a "spiritual crossroads" where he "reset" his career aspirations as a singer-songwriter."
  • "The bittersweetness of that summer has forged his root inspirations as a singer of distinctly evocative love songs like 2020's "Emmylou," in which Lee sings, "I can see the tattoo on your shoulder, every night that mockingbird still haunts my dreams. He gets to chirpin' and a callin' whenever I'm not around, raggin' on me every time he sings." On "The Hometown Kid," "Over You" parallels a Tennessee Titans National Football League playoff game loss in 2021 with his own underwhelming experiences in faith and love ("I've gone and done it again, run my emotion razor thin"). It's a three-quarter-time waltz that showcases how well he's advanced his sound between his second and third albums."
  • "Lee notes that he's excited to break past Nashville's growing desire -- be it in Americana or country -- to make "homogenous" music bearing similar, folk-styled sonics and sensibilities. Instead, he describes an ideal scenario in the future where he's making "casual" songs that are best played live, "with a little [John Prine-style] rambling about the stories behind them between playing.""
  • "I've got some miles under my belt -- I'm now visiting venues in the Carolinas and Texas for the third time sometimes -- but I'm just getting started," says Lee. Advancing his storytelling past towards creating more easily accessible emotional avenues to his work, is "The Hometown Kid's" most significant victory. He notes that as much as he wanted "every line to be a hook," he instead erred toward longer-form storytelling -- "I'm like a carpenter, and the work takes a long time. You have to build hundreds of chairs to perfect the craft," he says."
• • "The Hometown Kid is a very fine collection of country, folk, and rock, all fueled by Gabe’s expert storytelling"
  • influenced by Nikki Lane's All or Nothin'
  • John Hiatt's "Have a Little Faith in Me"
  • Justin Townes Earle's Kids in the Street
  • Will Hoge
  • John Prine
  • Touring and living in Nashville
  • Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
  • Jason Isbell
  • Houndmouth's From The City Below The Hills
• • "Lee’s own distinctive blend of country, rock, bluegrass and Americana."
  • "The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Lee grew up immersed in classical and church music, as his mother played piano and his father played guitar. “They sacrificed so much, just working hard and saving and believing in me and my music,” he recalls. Absorbing their work ethic and learning in proximity to the ever-heightening stakes of the music industry also gave Lee a clear-eyed perspective on the truths of a music career."
  • "“A lot of my friends who grew up with musician parents got the hell outta dodge,” he recalls with a chuckle. “They were like, ‘The last thing we wanna be is in music.’ And it’s a joke among players and music people in music, like, ‘If my kids want to play music, I’d let them but I wouldn’t wish it on ‘em,’ because it is a gamble…folks get their dreams made and their dreams broken every day.”
  • "His previous album, 2022’s The Hometown Kid, embodied Lee’s own relentless tugs of both adventure and familiar comforts."
  • "Lee draws more from cult favorite touchstones such as John Prine and Jason Isbell. Lee is the sole writer on many of his songs, and like his musical heroes, he excels in excavating from everyday moments the raw materials from which he crafts his vivid musical narratives. Drink the River showcases Lee as a troubadour filling his songs with keen observations gleaned from other people’s stories."
  • "The album’s folk-country, acoustic flavor takes cues from Old Crow Medicine Show’s first record, while songs like “Property Line” tip the hat to Prine’s clear-eyed, light-hearted style. “It’s a bit of how John [Prine] was always a master at infusing humor in his songs. A little bit of humor goes a long way,” Lee says."
  • "“Even Jesus Got the Blues,” which Lee began writing nearly four years ago, revels in an early SteelDrivers, blues-meets-bluegrass feel, and was inspired by a friend who succumbed to addiction. The two-year-old “Lidocaine” stems from an Uber ride, as a driver confided in Lee his story of being diagnosed with dementia at 40 years old. He also revisits “Eveline,” from his 2019 debut project farmland."
  • "Meanwhile, the lyrics and instrumentation of album closer “Property Line” evoke the feel of the popular series Yellowstone; the song is an ode to Lee’s girlfriend’s father Jason, who owns a large plot of land in Alabama.“I started hanging out down there and what I quickly realized is I may be from the South, but those guys are country,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve learned a lot from them and I really admire their sensibilities and the way they look at the world.”"
  • "Lee and his manager, Alex Torrez, founded the indie label Torrez Music Group, under which Lee has issued three albums (with Drink the River to be his fourth) in approximately as many years, including his breakthrough, 2020 roots-rock project Honky Tonk Hell, and last year’s The Hometown Kid. He’s kept a marathon runner’s pace — steady and relentless — as he balances studio time and writing with ever-more prominent performance slots, having shared stages with artists including Isbell, American Aquarium and Molly Tuttle. To date, Lee’s songs have registered 10.5 million official U.S. on-demand streams, according to Luminate."
  • "He is also slated to perform during the Americana Music Association’s annual AMERICANAFEST in September, and was recently added to Tidal’s “Tidal Rising” new artist program, which also includes Sunny War, Kara Jackson and Kassa Overall. "
• • "GABE LEE HAS managed to package a prayer, a truth, and a dream in one album. Drink the River, his fourth studio album, delivers this trifecta through each of its nine songs, doling them out in a way that feels like both a fever and a fairytale. "
  • "The album pulls back the instrumentals in favor of the fiddle, mandolin, and banjo, digging into the bluegrass influence that has always traced Lee’s work and showcasing some of the best string players in town including Grand Ole Opry members Jason Roller and Eamon McLaughlin. "
  • "“I wanted to refine the stories. I wanted to get really gritty, I wanted people to hear these words, and really feel something… And that’s why we stripped it,” Lee tells Rolling Stone. “We scaled it all the way back to just acoustic instruments for the most part and it’s beautiful… I think we succeeded in capturing that respect for language, respect for storytelling, in this record.”"
  • "The ballad winds into “Even Jesus Got the Blues,” telling a woman’s story of addiction on the “dark side of the road” as she prays, “Make me an angel lord, find me a way.” While the song, which narrates the country’s opioid epidemic, could lean into the tragic, Lee is careful to portray her story with hope and beauty, setting it against a sanguine velocity that feels cathartic."
  • "Lee dips back into the beautiful and the somber with “Merigold,” tracing the story of a man in Mississippi losing someone to cancer, who pleads, “Lord, please pick up the phone, I want you to know, you can take me when she goes” and when he delivers the line, you can feel him aching to follow her into the delta."
  • "The record bids goodbye with tongue-in-cheek “Property Line,” a song that paints a landscape of “a hundred acres outside of Birmingham” and a man’s relentless, stubborn protection of his land and values. Like in “All I Can Do Is Write About It” earlier in the album, Lee once again simultaneously takes on Americana while also paying homage to it."
  • "When asked who he writes these songs for, Lee says, “I’m doing it for the kid version of me who wanted to be noticed that I was different, but was trying so hard to assimilate into the culture that I grew up around. But also, I didn’t want to lose my roots, my origin. I’m so proud of being in Tennessee and being in Nashville, and I’m equally maybe even more proud of my parents being immigrants from Taiwan. So, if I’m doing it for anything, it’s definitely, the spirit of that… bridging those gaps.”
  • "As Drink the River sways from the “beauty of the hills of Carolina to the sweetness of the grass in Tennessee,” each line Lee pens offers a roadmap of the American story, one that stretches, spins, and continues to unfold somewhere between the darkness and the dawn."
• • "Gabe Lee's most significant power as a singer-songwriter traveling through modern America isn't as the writer of 42 critically acclaimed songs released over the past five years. Instead, as experienced on his new album "Drink the River," it's his work as a sensitive empath who excels at repairing the ties that bind in a nation torn asunder in many ways."
  • ""I'm a son of the South and immigrants who loves reading Southern folklore," says the Nashville-raised Taiwanese-American performer"
  • "(Because of my background), I'm aware that the unique authenticity of my music, perspective and voice can bridge gaps between people. Music is a life-defining force for many. So these songs examine how my music can fundamentally and emotionally connect us as people to the hope to survive the despair of difficult times."
  • "What he describes as the "art" of "crafting songs that organically bring about hope" on "Drink the River" evolves into the story of a cancer-stricken wife, an OxyContin addict, people equating hard times to being a ditch-digger and more, as he notes, "difficult times.""
  • "These are stories from places far more demonstrably American than the 50-yard-line of Nashville's Nissan Stadium, where Lee's 2022 album "The Hometown Kid" finds the soul-crushing gravitas of a Titans home playoff loss being equated to falling out of love."
  • "Lee's album track "Merigold" (alluding to Merigold, Mississippi, population 379) — which tells the story of a cancer-stricken wife whom Lee knew — is perhaps the most authentically American song in his catalog. It also reflects where he's grown the strongest as a storyteller. He's more competent than ever at spinning comforting, connective songs from harrowing tales."
  • "In the case of "Merigold," he spins the tale that spawned the song. He met a widowed husband who along with his wife were longtime online fans of Lee at Merigold's Otherfest, held at an outpost of Hey Joe's, a Mississippi dive bar chain, in October 2022. Lee's appearance at the event created a communal point of togetherness after the wife had passed. The song pays tribute to the moment, and when Lee sings about how kudzu grows wild in the South and analogizes it to how cancer grew wild in the man's wife and swiftly took her life, it's a moment for Lee where humanizing tragedy also serves to reduce the discomfort felt by people he feels need to recreate rural to urban and overall, interpersonal connectivity."
  • "Even deeper, a song like "Even Jesus Got the Blues" dives into demystifying the power of the steadfast country and Americana-related singer-songwriter tropes connected to those genres' hyper-religious roots."
  • "Lee grew up a churchgoing bluegrass listener but uses religion in the song to describe how profoundly unknown the amount of love required to fill the depths of someone's sadness can ultimately be."
  • ""At times, life can be a gamble," he says. "Even prayers and thoughts from the strongest people supported by the most powerful ideologies can't overcome life.""
  • "He name-checks inspirations like John Prine ("He used his incredible mastery of language to communicate a wide gamut of emotions to his listeners") and current Americana superstar Jason Isbell ("He decompartmentalizes his emotions really well") when asked what more than the oft-maligned "thoughts and prayers" can come from music to help overcome modern American life's crushing impact."
  • "We need to discover new forms of authentic truth that cut to the (metaphorical) bones of real people," he says. "Beyond living lives defined by sharing Facebook threads, praying about people and hoping things get better, (real-time) communities are developed around people we know, who exist without fabrication, often in despair and pain."
  • "I'm figuring out how to paint pictures with basic human emotions to help get us to be inspired to open our hearts."

Discography

Albums

Year	Title	Label
2019	Farmland	Torrez Music Group
2020	Honky-Tonk Hell
2022	The Hometown Kid
2023	Drink the River

EPs

• Gabe Lee Live at Water Street Music Hall (2021)

Singles

Year	Title	Album
2019	"Christmas Day"	Non-album single
2020	"Talk to You" (ft. Jessica Roadcap)
2021	"Ol' Smokey (Reimagined)" (ft. King Margo)
	"Lyrra (Reimagined)"
2022	"Common Law"
	"Run Run Rudolph"
2023	"Eveline"	Drink the River
	"Even Jesus Got the Blues"
	"Drink the River"
	"Property Line"
	"Merigold"

Music videos

Year	Title	Director
2022	"Rusty"	Brooke Stevens
2023	"Buffalo Road"	Adam Dobkins
	"Eveline"	Ryan Hamblin
	"Drink the River"

External links

• Official website