Tim O’Brien Will Play In-Store for a Tower Of Song Taping on Thursday April 24, at 4:00pm!

On his way to Merle Fest, our pal of many, many years and one of this generation’s most amazing and passionate songwriters, singers and multi–instrumentalists will stop here at Horizon Records to share a few songs in support of his absolutely stunning brand new CD “Chameleon”. We couldn’t be more excited and to see everyone there for this performance and CD signing.

At a point in his career where you’d think he’d be charging at full speed toward the next big thing, Tim O’Brien confounded expectations by doing something else: he took time–and plenty of it — to create the next small thing. Chameleon is an intimate project that, in its blend of virtuosity, wit and warmth, is unmistakably his. And this time around, it’s literally his alone.

Though he first won renown as a member of one of bluegrass’s premiere bands, Hot Rize, O’Brien’s been doing solo performances for a long time, and pressed for antecedents, he offers up figures like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. “The folksinger with a guitar is a sort of an unassailable icon,” he says with a laugh. “Dylan, Woody Guthrie–what can you say. And I remember that when I heard the first Doc Watson album, I thought, what does he need a band for? This guy has got it all. But what happens is that when you go into the studio, you can play with a band and get the juices flowing and maybe do things that you might not be able to do on the road. So there’s a temptation to go that way. But this time, I thought, let’s just bring it inside.”

Chameleon rambles from the autobiographical to the whimsical, and themes emerge, whether it’s the nods to tradition found in the appearance of hoary lyric phrases in “Where’s Love Come From” and the sly quotation from Bill Monroe in “Hoss Race,” or the wry political observations in a trio of songs (“This World Was Made For Everyone,” “When In Rome” and “World Of Trouble”) planted in the back half of the collection.

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