Damien Jurado

Seattle based singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is reluctantly moving into the digital realm after a storied love affair with the analog world. Jurado, who once ran a cassette-only label during the ’90s called Casa Recordings that brought him to the attention of Sub Pop, recently released a track a day from his latest record, Saint Bartlett, on MySpace. That’s a pretty big step for a guy whose fascination with cassette tapes once led him to release Postcards and Audio Letters, a project from 2000 that was culled entirely from audio samples taken from old answering-machine tapes he’d found at thrift stores. Despite how his music is delivered these days, however, Jurado’s vocal style remains firmly rooted in the past, with a voice that combines the mystique of Neil Young and the vibrato of X’s John Doe.