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“Our stories are where we meet. They are the crossroads of human experience,” journeyman singer songwriter Doug Levitt says describing part of what he’s learned since setting out more than 12 years back with nothing but an initial six-week Greyhound pass, a beat up Gibson J-100, a copy of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, a country to cross and an American story to tell — one about life from the margins in. “But more important, I see now,” he says, “we share our stories to know we’re not alone.”
More than 120,000 Greyhound miles on from that first tour — with stops along the way playing in everything from prisons, VAs, and shelters to the Kennedy Center and Woody Guthrie Center, and Martin Luther King’s church — the result is the lush, expansive and moving opus that is Edge of Everywhere, produced by legendary multi-Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker.
Shoemaker, whose work producing and recording artists ranging from Brandi Carlile and Emmylou Harris to Sheryl Crow and Josh Ritter, seems a cosmically-fitting partner for this project shaping the early Springsteen-like instrumentation and vocals into songscapes that sound like moving murals, the kind you’d see through expansive windows on a bus.
“More than just a record,” Shoemaker says from Mobile, Alabama where sessions were recorded, “these songs capture the essence of the broader project, which is telling the story of America through the eyes of people who don't usually get a chance to tell their stories. And certainly not with poetry and grace, with respect and beauty and somehow Doug really was able to. He is one of the best singer-songwriters I’ve heard in the last decade or more. But it’s also that Doug suffered a great tragedy as a young person, and that made him more permeable to the stories of others.”
Raised in the Washington D.C. public schools, he was on his way to gospel choir one morning weeks after his 16th birthday when he walked outside and found his father dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. For years, Levitt says, he “Couldn't really cry and so music became my crying.”
His first career after graduating from Cornell, where he studied Critical Thinking with Carl Sagan, was as a London-based foreign correspondent for CNN and ABC filing dispatches from such places as Iran, Rwanda, Bosnia and Gaza. “At some point, in the midst of a breakdown, I realized if I didn't commit fully to music now, I wasn't going to do it. And I was afraid that if I didn't, if I didn't follow my instincts, that I would end up suffering a familiar fate.”
Not long after moving to Nashville, Levitt set out on his first Greyhound tour resulting in the album Edge of Everywhere. There are songs like “Turning Myself In” about a man turning himself into federal prison having been on the run for a parole violation — because he and his wife are now very Christian and wanted to show their daughters how to live up to one’s mistakes. “40 West” is the story of woman who joined the Air Force “to see the world / I got ‘bout an hour away.” She became military police before raising her son and now drives long-haul 18 wheelers. “Back in Okemah” is about a woman who returns home to the tiny Oklahoma hometown that she shares in common with Woody Guthrie, a dust bowl still, and opens a coffee shop, a way of communing with her late-mother whose dream it was.
The title track “Edge of Everywhere”is an anthem from the edge, a place where people “pray to the bills [they’re] spared. / I’m out here living on the edge of everywhere.” With a bourbon-rich baritone and a range that reaches the resonant heights of a Cat Stevens-like falsetto, Levitt brings the listener along on a transient and transcendental trip in which we are all travelers on a bus writ large. It’s an archetypal venture in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, but also way back to the bards who traveled between fires in the desert, singing stories to scare away the night and help define our common human journey.