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JT Nero Trio

JT Nero is a strange and distinct songwriter - he lists Mark Twain and Sam Cooke among his biggest influences. He is a poet of the everyday and the absurd, the lonely, the hopeful and the semi-hopeful. He's got a fractured country-soul croon, full of doo-wop ghosts and old time religion.

Whether touring with his muse and frequent collaborator, Allison Russell (Po' Girl), or fronting the scintillating Chicago rock n' soul outfit, JT and the Clouds, Nero has emerged as one of the compelling new voices in American music. With the Clouds he's a rock n' roll preacher on his own, he digs deeper into darker, often fantastical nuances of his work.

You might cry in your beer listening to the new songs on Nero's Mountains/Forests - which features Russell and members of the Clouds - but you may not know exactly why you're crying. There's recognizable lonely hearts but they float through dreamscapes populated by elephant kings, electric sea horses, sentimental gang bangers and dying honeybees. The instruments are largely of the back porch variety - plugged in axes were traded for acoustics, banjo, accordion - and the album was made in 4 days, in a cabin in Door County, Wisconsin.

The Chicago Tribune recently tabbed Nero as an "artist on the verge of breaking big."

If "breaking big" allows him to broaden his collection of single batch American bourbons at his home bar in Chicago, he's all for that happening.