Catch Steve Poltz On His World Travels
When Steve Poltz arrives in our area on August 9th to play the Simcoe Street Theatre in Collingwood, he will be coming directly from Alaska where he is now, playing there for the rest of this week. Although he lives in Nashville, and he played there just last week, he wasn’t home long. Just a few days before he’d been in California, and the day after he played at home he was in Georgia, , then back to California, up to Oregon and on up to Alaska. Whew! And with all that travelling around he still manages to come and visit us a few times a year.
“Something keeps calling me back,” he says, making his way here with just “stories, songs and friendly Canadian arms.”
Although it’s a short hop to Owen Sound, where he’ll be playing Heartwood Concert Hall on the 10th, before the end of the month he’ll have travelled through Nova Scotia to join up with his friend Shawn Majumder to play eight shows in Newfoundland. And by September he’ll be in Ireland.
“I just got back from the Woodford Folk Festival in Australia,” he says, “It was quite an event.”
Aside from his relentless touring schedule, Steve Poltz is a very prolific and successful songwriter. His songs have been among the longest running ever on the Billboard Top 100 and they regularly appear in movie soundtracks, television shows, and even the odd commercial.
“I’ve been writing a lot of songs lately,” he says, “I’ve been doing co-writes with Molly Tuttle and Anthony de Costa.” Molly Tuttle is a multi-instrumentalist whose guitar style ranges between Bluegrass and Chet Atkins and who has graced the covers of magazines for guitar aficionados. Anthony de Costa is a respected sideman, also based in Nashville, who has always been a songwriter most of his life.
While his songs are in a class of their own, what really sets Steve Poltz apart from the crowd and keeps people coming back every time he visits our area is his on-stage storytelling. As reported in the San Diego Reader, “A broken hand proved that last year in Canada. Rather than cancel, the promoter asked Poltz to talk to the sold-out house for 20 minutes. He did, and the show ended up lasting 90 minutes, during which he played two songs with a slide affixed to his pinkie, producing music that he says ‘sounded like a dead cat.’” It seems nothing slows him down.
Two of his more famous stories involve a Mexican drug bust while travelling with Jewel, with whom he wrote the hit song, “You Were Meant For Me” and the one about how he suffered a stroke in the middle of a performance and he just kept going, even trying to sign autographs afterward despite being blinded by the stroke.
Steve Poltz brings a special connection to his audiences with his songs and his stories, ranging from heart-wrenching to bizarre. Having been everywhere and seen just about everything, he has a lot to share with an audience.
Folks around here call him Poltzy and think of him like a brother who drops in a couple of times a year to share stories from his travels and adventures. It’s probably the same all over the world, wherever he goes. Join him for “An Evening With Steve Poltz” next week and you’ll probably feel that way too.
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To check out Steve’s songs, click on the album cover:
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