Brokus / Patton Plans Gang Aft Agley CD

Jim Patton & Sherry Brokus combine wall of sound vocal interplay with Jim Patton’s heartfelt, character driven songs. Originally from Baltimore, they now live in Austin, Texas, have CDs produced by Lloyd Maines and Bradley Kopp, and have just recorded an acoustic album with Ron Flynt for release later this year. In Patton’s recent songs, a man discovers alternate definitions of success; a daughter waits in a bar for the father who walked out on her years ago; a father tells his child not to make the same mistakes he did; a brave woman breaks free of an abusive past; people fall in love; relationships end; relationships endure.Patton cites 20th century American fiction (“from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner to Kerouac and Salinger and Raymond Chandler”) and the various lives of the friends he grew up with in Maryland (“I knew doctors and lawyers and waitresses and teachers and water rats and gravediggers and the guy who drove the truck that emptied the port-o-pots all over the state”) as the main source of his lyrical inspiration. Patton and Brokus have sung together for over twenty five years, and confess to listening to a lot of “Richard & Linda Thompson, the Byrds, the Airplane, the Everly Brothers, and Emmy Lou Harris singing with Bob Dylan” when they started, before they took off in a direction “that’s pretty much our own”. Patton and Brokus’ new CD steps away from the full band sound of their previous CDs to make an album that reflects the kind of sound they make as a duo or trio when they play in acoustic settings like the Cactus in Austin, Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta, Anderson Fair in Houston, the Bluebird in Nashville, Uncommon Ground in Chicago, or house concerts from Bar Harbor to Baltimore.