Bow Thayer

Bow Thayer got his first guitar when he was 12 as a Christmas gift from his grandmother. He wrote his first song that same year, inspired byGordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald."

Bow's subsequent musical career spans two decades and a half-dozen or so genres, from punk rock to bluegrass. He has been the focal point of several highly acclaimed bands, including 7 League Boots, Still Home, Elbow, Jethro, and Bow Thayer and The Euphorians, whose CD entitled Somewhereville was nominated for "Best Roots Rock Act" by the Boston Music Awards.

His latest recognition has come from fronting The Benders, featured in No Depression Magazinefor their "bending of genres, mixing old time string-band and bluegrass sounds with their rock background.

In the Spring of April 2003, Bow's hands strumming a banjo graced the cover of the Boston Globe's Sunday magazine, as the centerpiece for a story on "Southern Sounds Find Their Way North." This is a bit of a misnomer --Bow considers his music neither bluegrass, country or Southern rock. In the tradition of his many influences, like The Grateful Dead, Gillian Welsh, JohnPrine, Lowell George, the Beatles and The Band, it is timeless, and as he explains: "just what comes out."

Bow lives in Vermont with his son Rye and his girlfriend Lori. He has just released a new CD, entitled The Driftwood Periodicals Volume 1, which was inspired by life in the Green Mountains. "The Driftwood Periodicalsare like a musical portrait of Vermont," Bow said of the upcoming release, "I've always been very influenced by my environment, and in the same way Still Home was a musical rendering of the desert in which I was living." Bow has another CD, Maintenance For Mood Swings,ready for release and a third project, Spend It All, which he recorded with Levon Helm, still in production. Maintenance For Mood Swings and The Driftwood Periodicals Volume 1, are on the the Stockbridge, Vermont indie label, Crooked Root Records.