Tom Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and now makes his home on the border of El Paso-Juarez. He graduated from the University of California with a Master’s Degree in Criminology, taught school in Nigeria during the Biafran War, and then re located to Vancouver, Canada. He began his music career in the bars of Vancouver’s skid row. He has since lived in Austin, San Francisco, New York and, finally, on a badlands farm in the desert of West Texas.

Tom is a master storyteller and Mesabi, his latest release, corrals some of the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s most compelling tales to date. A thread runs through its songs, a zigzagging but determinedly solid line that connects the perilous border town of Juarez, Mexico to the real and faux glitz of L.A. and the bleak iron range of Minnesota – the Mesabi of the album’s title. The broad landscapes created by Tom Russell for Mesabi are inhabited by characters we all know – Bob Dylan, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor – and some we may not: the now-obscure, once well-known singer Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, the tragic Disney child star Jimmy Driscoll and the character actor Sterling Hayden. It’s a logical progression from Russell’s last album, 2009’s Blood And Candle Smoke, yet it’s like no other album Russell has made in his nearly four decades as a recording artist.

More information at www.empty-rooms.com/trussell13.html