Bukka Allen – Keys to the doors
It’s really no surprise that Bukka Allen grew up to become a musician. The eldest son of revered Texas songwriter/artist Terry Allen and multitalented playwright/songstress Jo Harvey Allen, he was raised in a very creative atmosphere. “There was always music in the house,” he says. “There was always people around doing things all the time when I was a kid.”
Although Allen began playing piano at an early age, he remembers that he was never pushed to sit and play. “Music was always something that was natural rather than something that you worked toward,” he says. “So in that sense it was definitely encouraging. The encouragement was always there, but there was never any pressure. All the decisions that were made were my own.”
Allen attended college at the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston in the mid 1980s and moved to Austin after he graduated. When he arrived in Texas, he immediately became a fixture as a sideman and bandmate to several Austin artists, including Will Sexton, Kris McKay, Alejandro Escovedo and Beaver Nelson. The real turning point was when he played a few shows with Joe Ely, whose lead guitarist at the time was Ian Moore. When Moore left Ely to pursue his own interests, Allen joined his band and has stayed with Moore for the last five years.
During that time, though, Allen was writing his own songs and preparing to make his own record. The result, Sweet Valentine, which Allen recently released independently, is a song cycle of sorts — a remarkably fresh, deeply spiritual collection of mood pieces that combine his distinctive piano work, haunting vocals and simple yet perceptive lyrics.
“When I went about making this record,” he says, “I was thinking more in terms of a whole, rather than fragmented pieces. I really wanted to make a record that would pull in the listener and take them on a continuous journey, where everything was intertwined. A lot it is loosely based on what has happened to me personally as well as some friends of mine. It was inspired by things that were real in my life at the time. Once it was finished, it put a certain amount of closure to certain ideas and things that I had been going through. Certain doors closed and certain doors opened up.”
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