By Sydney Baker-Brown
I once read that; “Truly great songwriters are madmen who just chose to take a more creative route than serial killing.” And if you look at the track record of America’s most revered songwriters, you do see a pattern: Most of them are either addicts or reformed addicts. Most of them had, to say the least, strange childhoods. Most of them have a history of depression or some other psychological disorder. Most of them are loud, selfish, aggressive, brash people who crave attention, but pretend they don’t. This is probably (some of it definitely) all true about Bullard as well, but if you want to know what James Scott Bullard is without a comparison, here is my conclusion; He’s the bravado of rock and roll, he’s the pain of blues, he’s the beautiful heartache of country, and there’s nothing fake about it. He is quite simply the real deal. I’ve become very disillusioned with music journalists who compare every new up and coming artist to an established artist; whether it’s living or dead, flattering or not, it’s still become a tired staple in reviews and critique’s. Case in point; 1.) He’s a great and prolific songwriter who has taken exactly the right parts from both rock (the sloppy complexity) and country (the simplistic poetry) to build a catalog of alt.country genius for which he has received awards, accolades and nods from some pretty heavy hitters in the business. 2.) He has a shaky past, that if read into, is almost unbelievable and makes Bullard seem unbreakable. 3.) If you’ve ever seen him live you probably get the following quote from one of my peers: “Bullard has a walk, a swagger that is not unlike a wolf circling its prey. He's hungry. When he is on the stage, he is a demon, and by the time the show ended I’m pretty sure every woman in the room would follow that walk anywhere.