Martin Sexton

americana · folk · roots

Martin Sexton is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, born March 2, 1966 in Syracuse, New York, the tenth of twelve children in a working-class Irish-American family in the city's Strathmore neighborhood. He got his first acoustic guitar at fourteen and moved to Boston in 1988, building a following on street corners in Harvard Square and at open mics around the city. A self-produced cassette of demos, In the Journey (1991), sold roughly 15,000 copies hand-to-hand, and in 1994 he was named Artist of the Year by the National Academy of Songwriters. Black Sheep, his first record for the Boston independent Eastern Front, appeared in 1996 and brought a deal with Atlantic Records, which released The American (1998) and Wonder Bar (2000). He left the major label and founded his own imprint, Kitchen Table Records, in 2001, and has stayed independent since, issuing albums including Live Wide Open (2002), Seeds (2007), the acoustic concert set Solo (2008), Sugarcoating (2010), Mixtape of the Open Road (2015) and 2020 Vision (2021). His writing sits at the meeting point of folk, gospel, soul and blues, but the draw is the voice: Sexton uses scatting, whistling, falsetto leaps and vocal percussion to imitate horns and guitars, often performing alone with an acoustic guitar and filling out the arrangement himself. His songs have turned up on television, including Scrubs, and he has been cited as an influence by John Mayer among others. He tours steadily, largely on the theater and listening-room circuit, and his live records outnumber his studio albums in the catalog for a reason.

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