Michael Jerling

Born and raised in Illinois, songwriter Michael Jerling became involved with music while helping to run the campus coffeehouse at the University of Wisconsin. Now settled in Saratoga Springs, Jerling has been a noted artist on the club, college and festival circuits of North America. His butterscotch baritone voice is backed up with first-rate lyrical sense, impressive musicianship – borrowing from blues, rock, country and R&B – with consummate skill on six & twelve string guitars, harmonica and mandolin, all buoyed by his dry sense of humor.

A keen student of the good and ghastly in American life, Michael weaves themes like a novelist, evoking our shortcomings and dreams without yielding to cynicism or sentimentality. Often praised as a “songwriter’s songwriter” who composes in styles influenced by the wealth of American music, he has been characterized as an artist who performs extraordinary songs with the uncommon ability to deliver them to an audience with power and grace. The press raves: “Stronger than new rope … especially recommended to fans of Gorka, Greg Brown, Dave Alvin or any other real smart people who make real good music” (Icon, Iowa City). Request magazine writes “He’s got the literate humor and eclectic taste of Lyle Lovett … yet a skewed vision all his own.” And from The Boston Globe: “With a subtle but encyclopedic command of American styles and rhythms, a captivating melodic sense, and incisive, clever lyrics, he is as supple a song craftsman as any riding the folk boards today.” Jerling was a winner of the prestigious New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. His song “Long Black Wall” is included on the Smithsonian Folkways CD celebrating twenty years of Fast Folk. 2014’s Music Here Tonight was recorded live at Caffè Lena.

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