BIOGRAPHY

Rusted Cadillac tailfins groan in the dust-peppered wind as graffiti cans scatter before your feet. Shielding your face against the harsh horizon, you reach down and pick up a battered CD jewel-case reflecting sunlight from the shadow’s edge of Cadillac Ranch.

“Stayton Bonner,” you mumble, wiping dust off to read the name. “Cadillac Road. Huh.” As the rumblings of an electric storm on the distant prairie blow a hard wind against your face, you turn and run back for the car, slamming your door against the dust and putting the CD on play. With the storm billowing in your rearview mirror, you find yourself tapping your fingers on the steering wheel to the music, nodding along with the beat as the dust falls from your clothes.

Born and raised in the rural outskirts of Henderson, Texas, Bonner grew up in a household that placed an importance on the arts.

“My earliest memory is reading a book in my Mom’s lap,” Bonner recounts. “Growing up in a rural area, my brothers and I didn’t have any neighborhood kids to play with, so it was important to be good at amusing ourselves from pretty early on. Besides reading, music offered a low-maintenance means of preoccupation.”

After high school, Bonner moved to Austin where he studied English at the University of Texas. While attending school, he began writing songs and even recorded an early album. But upon graduating, Bonner found himself with the same questions that most kids ask fresh out of school- What the hell do I do now?

“All my friends seemed to be either entering law school or going into the real estate business,” Bonner says. “About the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want to do either one of those.”

Stuck in a stalemate, Bonner made an unusual move. Getting a work visa for Ireland, he left Texas with his backpack and guitar, and moved to the Irish west coast. Working odd jobs during the day, he played music in the pubs at night while starting to hone his stage abilities.

“Ireland had a really strong impact on me. I lived in Dunfanaghey, a small town on the northwest coast where there was a grocery/post office/hardware store and 8 pubs strung along one street,” Bonner recounts. “There wasn’t much to do, so music was a real release and social glue for the locals there. I gave my best efforts at strumming along to their traditional music, and then played them Hank or Kristofferson songs in return.”

After a year of living abroad, Bonner moved back to Austin in January 2004. A demo song he recorded placed 2nd in the 2004 Merlefest songwriting contest, whose past winners included Gillian Welch and Tift Merritt. Prompted by the event, Bonner recorded Think I'm Gonna' Move to Australia. The record was a critical success and Bonner hit the road for a couple years. In 2007, he went back into the studio to make a new album.
“Playing songs for complete strangers in a foreign country really forced me to learn a lot more about myself,” Bonner says about the experience. “I came back a much better singer and writer, with a lot of new songs and the confidence to give the music career a real shot.”

Resurrected from the graveyard of popular American music, Cadillac Road is a wild ride to the crossroads of where rock and country first began. As evidenced by the album’s title track, a chronicle of his roadtrip to Stanley Marsh’s Cadillac Ranch on the outskirts of Amarillo, TX, Bonner is intent on finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places, shadowed regions dusted over in the wake of current top forty acts. Whether singing about the merits of Black Bush whiskey in an Irish pub, strolling the lanes of a second-hand bookshop, or enjoying a seventies easy listening song with his wife, Bonner relates his own experiences and passions into art with melodic and honest writing.

Besides producing Cadillac Road, Hunter Perrin and Paul Beebe also played as Bonner’s band on the CD. “Stayton and I met during college,” Perrin relates. “We both had a common interest in bluegrass music and facial hair.” Living in LA years later, (his day-job as touring and recording guitarist for John Fogerty keeps him busy,) Perrin heard about Bonner’s songwriting award at North Carolina’s Merlefest and gave him a call. Several short tours later, they decided to make a record, enlisting Perrin’s old friend and Houston Renaissance man Paul Beebe as a co-producer.

Cadillac Road traverses the musical landscape from ballads to pub sing-alongs, while rocking in a way the Rolling Stones circa 1976 may have sounded if they’d been making their living touring Texas roadhouses. Listening to the songs, you may be moved to find yourself looking at the seemingly mundane aspects of life in a whole new way. As Bonner sings about living in the desert on Cadillac Road, “Here your outside world’s got to come from inside.”

When not playing music, Bonner can be found writing journalism, prose, or whatever else he can muster. In November 2006, Three Dog Books released "The Bookman", Bonner's biography on author Larry McMurtry.