Music makes a deep connection when it strikes that delicate nerve separating the personal from the universal. If the listener can use the songs as mirrors, then the musician has succeeded in communicating their art. Chicago-based singer-songwriter Michael McDermott has spent decades riding that artistic balance, and he does it again with fresh potency on St. Paul’s Boulevard, on Pauper Sky Records.
McDermott knows a thing or two about heartbreak and arrested development. Back in the early ‘90s, McDermott was the new toast of the major label recording industry with his debut album, 620 W. Surf. But in typical chew-them-up and spit-them-out style, McDermott had seemingly been tossed in the never-been bin by the end of that decade. He persevered, though, and built a career fortified by more than a dozen studio albums and critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post, to name a few. Even Stephen King, the master of the best-selling horror novel genre, called McDermott “possibly the greatest undiscovered rock and roll talent of the last 20 years.”