Shane Bartell

Shane Bartell’s voice – easy, impossibly infectious and thick with focus – can drift from vague and otherworldly to intimate and realized within a single breath, flitting effortlessly from throaty to smooth, mellow to scrappy, confident to crestfallen. Ultimately, all that somersaulting makes perfect sense: Bartell's, “Too Soon To Say”, takes you through the exhilaration, trials and tribulations of a budding relationship. Curiously well suited to early morning (or face-on-the-floor brooding), it is the ideal soundtrack to post-bar comedowns: Bartell’s voice blankets your most sensitive states. These are seamless sounds, the aural equivalents of deep-stomach butterflies, mystery and promise intertwined.

Shane Bartell grew up in the Texas Hill Country, surrounded by cowboy boots and snuff -cultural references seemingly erased by his turning-point discovery of The Smiths and The Pixies. Moving to music-mecca Austin in the 90’s, he spent several years as the guitarist for the female-fronted band Cling and enjoyed sharing stages with the likes of Oasis and Liz Phair. Soon, Bartell decided to focus on songwriting, so he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he holed up with the famous Pacific Northwest rain as his backdrop. The results were magical. After a return returned to Austin in 2000, he quickly recruited a band and developed a famously loyal following that surprised club owners by singing along even before he had released a CD. The media took notice, and Bartell experienced lavish praise both on radio and in print.

Shane Bartell, now 29, is ready for national recognition. His numerous appearances at the South By Southwest conference have sparked considerable outside interest. In 2001, Marco Werman of Public Radio International’s “The World” named him one of the festival’s three best showcases. After self-releasing an EP in 2001 (the perennially impressive “Reference”), Bartell was snatched up by local imprint Lilywhite Records, and recorded “Too Soon To Say” with producer Lars Goransson (The Cardigans , Blondie). Seattle’s Sarathan Records is now proud to release this full-length debut nationally.

While Shane Bartell clearly feeds off the same earnest, emotive tendencies as contemporary peers Coldplay and Morrissey, he’s careful to avoid ever drifting into dangerously precious territory, consistently eschewing rote sentimentality in favor of sharp, unaffected, pockets-out honesty. As Details Magazine applauds, “Shane Bartell mixes the sophisticated, turtle-necked, too-suave-for-irony pop-smarts of Burt Bacharach with the high-octane unpretentiousness of a Burt Reynolds movie. Or even the first new wave of U.K. punk.”

With his trademark blend of tense guitar, spiraling keyboards, and twittering drums, Bartell’s songs are decidedly difficult to pin down, twisting and squirming into new, dynamic shapes, re-inventing themselves with each subsequent listen. Citing a bevy of eclectic influences (from the aforementioned Smiths to Brazilian bossa nova), Shane Bartell is concerned primarily with provocative, descriptive storytelling. A song cycle that loosely traces the rise and fall of an epic relationship – from its ponderous, eager origins through an excruciatingly anticlimactic end – “Too Soon To Say” details all the longing, nostalgia, regret, anger, and acceptance inevitably chained to meeting and then losing a lover. It’s a universal sequence, familiar and exhilarating – and, remarkably, just spinning “Too Soon to Say” is enough to make it all feel real again.

Surrounding the release of “Too Soon To Say” Shane Bartell and band will be touring extensively around the country, bringing the beauty of melody and the poetry of his lyrics to listeners from the concrete jungles of cities to the rural landscapes of small towns and everywhere in-between. With Bartell bringing his music to the masses, it is only a matter of time before he is recognized as one of America’s great songwriters.