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Rocky mountain twang
By Shannon Yoshida
syoshida@mscd.edu

Photo by Megan Carneal • mcarneal@mscd.edu Tommy Ventura plays new songs on his Old Guitar.

Just because Tommy Ventura has quit playing live in the bar scene doesn’t mean his work will suffer. His ideas seem to find him whether he picks them up on the side of the road or discovers them in foreign lands.

“People just go to bars to get drunk and hopefully get laid by the end of the night,” Ventura said. “They’re not there for the music.”

Now living in Idaho Springs, the mellow, long-haired character has discovered a different approach to the industry. Focused solely on writing and recording, he is now fully engaged in the creation of his third album, Old Guitar.

As most musicians know, inspiration can come from outlandish personal experiences. “The Ballad of Dale Maul,” a work in progress for Old Guitar, is about a hitchhiker Ventura picked up who had just finished a six-month stint in the Grand Junction jail.

“He told me a story about how his mother and his father got into a fight over a pistol one night,” Ventura said. “His father was going to go and shoot a guy that he thought his mother was screwing around on him with, which was not the case. So the gun went off, and the bullet lodged in her brain. Didn’t kill her…she lived 32 years after that with a bullet in her brain.”

With a mostly acoustic catalogue, Ventura explores the world of songwriting with a passion and style not found in most artists. Instead of quitting his musical aspirations due to lack of appreciation at his live shows, he continues to approach the industry from different angles. He rolls with a band every now and then depending on his mood, but for his first two albums, Different Than I Am and 9 New Ways To Suck, he preferred to work solo.

His talent is expressed with upbeat, authentic country licks and an aggressive charisma. His tunes are contagious as he strums his guitar and sings, his hearty voice belting out whimsical yet meaningful lyrics. Sometimes he stops to tell a story, his guitar acting as a backdrop for his narration. In the song “Anything” from 9 New Ways to Suck, Ventura expresses his loneliness: “You call me every day on the phone just to make sure I’m still all alone. Yeah, I’d do anything to get you off my mind.”

Although his style has a definite cowboy appeal, he is more focused on the lyrical aspect of the songwriting process and welcomes the eventual sound and style that comes from the lyrics. “I’m not really interested in just being a bluegrass guy or a blues guy or a jazz guy. I don’t like to limit myself,” Ventura said. “Everything now has to have some kind of category. I’m a songwriter. I’m not a virtuoso player.”

Not only has Ventura’s music put food on his table, it has also allowed him to live in Madrid, Spain. His favorite part was being able to realize things out loud and then singing his newfound vision for his friends back home. “It wasn’t so much the thing of being in Madrid, although that was certainly inspiring, but mostly being away from here and being able to step out of this and look at it from far away,” he said.